The Glass Bead Game

by Hermann Hesse

  Knecht could easily have grasped all this. To be sure, the responsibilities of the moment involved his laying aside all private, personal affairs for a while, including this friendship. But, as he later admitted to his friend, he did not actually do this wittingly and willingly, but quite simply because he had forgotten Fritz. He had so thoroughly converted himself into an instrument that such personal matters as friendship vanished into the realm of the impossible. If on occasion, as for example in that seminar he held for the five foremost Glass Bead Game players, Fritz's face and figure appeared before him, he did not see Tegularius as a friend or personality, but as a member of the elite, a student, candidate, and tutor, a part of his work, a soldier in the regiment whom he had to train so that he could march on to victory with it. A shudder had gone through Fritz when the Magister for the first time addressed him in that way. From Knecht's look, it was clear that this remoteness and objectivity were not pretense, but uncannily genuine, and that the man before him who treated him with this matter-of-fact courtesy, accompanied by intense intellectual alertness, was no longer his friend Joseph, was entirely a teacher and examiner, entirely Master of the Glass Bead Game, enveloped and isolated by the gravity and austerity of his office as if by a shining glaze which had been poured over him in the heat of the fire, and had cooled and hardened.

  During these hectic weeks a minor incident connected with Tegularius occurred. Sleepless and under severe psychological strain, he was guilty during the seminar of a discourtesy, a minor outburst, not toward the Magister but toward a colleague whose mocking tone had grated on his nerves. Knecht noticed, noticed also the delinquent's overwrought state. He reproved him wordlessly, merely by a gesture of his finger, but afterward sent his meditation master to him to calm the troubled soul. Tegularius, after weeks of deprivation, took this concern as a first sign of reviving friendship, for he assumed that it was an attention directed toward himself as a person, and willingly submitted to the cure. In reality Knecht had scarcely been aware of the object of his solicitude. He had acted solely as the Magister, had observed irritability and a lack of self-control in one of his tutors, and had reacted to it as an educator, without for a moment regarding this tutor as a person or relating him to himself. When, months later, his friend reminded him of this scene and testified how overjoyed and comforted he had been by this sign of good will, Joseph Knecht said nothing. He had completely forgotten the affair, but did not disabuse his friend.

  At last he attained his goal. The battle was won. It had been a great labor to subdue this elite, to drill them until they were weary, to tame the ambitious, win over the undecided, impress the arrogant. But now the work was done; the candidates at the Game Village had acknowledged him their Master and submitted to him. Suddenly everything went smoothly, as if only a drop of oil had been needed. The coach drew up a last agenda with Knecht, expressed the Board's appreciation, and vanished. Alexander, the meditation master, likewise departed. Instead of a morning massage, Knecht resumed his customary walks. As yet he could not even begin to think of anything like studying or even reading; but now he was able to play a little music some days, in the evening before going to sleep.

  The next time he attended a meeting of the Board, Knecht distinctly sensed, although the matter was never so much as mentioned, that he was now regarded by his colleagues as tested and proved. He was their equal. After the intensity of the struggle to prove himself, he was now overcome once more by a sense of awakening, of cooling and sobering. He saw himself in the innermost heart of Castalia, sat in the highest rank of the hierarchy, and discovered with strange sobriety and almost with disappointment that even this very thin air was breathable, but that he who now breathed it as though he had never known anything different was altogether changed. That was the consequence of this harsh period of trial. It had burned him out as no other service, no other effort, had previously done.

  The elite's acknowledgment of him as their sovereign was marked this time by a special gesture. When Knecht sensed the end of their resistance, the confidence and consent of the tutors, and knew that he had successfully put the hardest task behind him, he realized that the moment had come for him to choose a "Shadow." In point of fact he would never more sorely need someone to relieve him of burdens than right now, after the victory was won, when he found himself suddenly released into relative freedom after an almost superhuman trial of strength. Many a Magister in the past had collapsed just at this point in his path. Knecht now renounced his right to choose among the candidates and asked the tutors as a body to select a Shadow for him. Still under the impact of Bertram's fate, the elite took this conciliatory gesture very seriously, and after several meetings and secret polls, made their choice, providing the Magister with one of their best men, a deputy who until Knecht's appointment had been regarded as one of the most promising candidates for the office of Magister.

  He had survived the worst. Now there was time for walks and music again. After a while he could once more think of reading. Friendship with Tegularius, occasional correspondence with Ferromonte, would be possible. Now and then he would be able to take half a day off, perhaps sometimes permit himself to go away for a short vacation. But all these amenities would benefit another man, not the previous Joseph who had thought himself a keen Glass Bead Game player and a tolerably good Castalian, but who had nevertheless had no inkling of the innermost nature of the Castalian system. Hitherto he had lived in so innocuously selfish, so puerilely playful, so inconceivably private and irresponsible a way. Once he recalled the tart reproof he had incurred from Master Thomas after he had expressed the desire to go on studying freely for a while longer: "You say a while, but how long is that? You are still speaking the language of students, Joseph Knecht." That had been only a few years ago. He had listened with admiration, with profound reverence, along with a mild horror of this man's impersonal perfection and discipline, and he had felt Castalia reaching out for himself as well, seeking to draw him close in order, perhaps, to make of him just such a Thomas some day, a Master, a sovereign and servant, a perfect instrument. And now he stood on the spot where Master Thomas had stood, and when he spoke with one of his tutors, one of those clever, sophisticated players and scholars, one of those diligent and arrogant princes, he looked across to him into a different world of alien beauty, a strange world that had once been his, exactly as Magister Thomas had gazed into his own strange student world.

  SEVEN

  In Office

  At first, assumption of the Magister's office seemed to have brought more loss than gain. It had almost devoured his strength and his personal life, had crushed all his habits and hobbies, had left a cool stillness in his heart, and in his head something resembling the giddiness after overexertion. But the period that now followed brought recovery, reflection, and habituation. It also yielded new observations and experiences.

  The greatest of these, now that the battle was won, was his collaboration with the elite on the basis of mutual trust and friendliness. He conferred with his Shadow. He worked with Fritz Tegularius, whom he tried out as an assistant on his correspondence. He gradually studied, checked over, and supplemented the reports and other notes on students and associates which his predecessor had left. And in the course of this work Knecht familiarized himself, with increasing affection, with this elite whom he had imagined he knew so well. Now its true nature, and the whole special quality of the Game Village as well as its role in Castalian life, were revealed to him in their full reality for the first time.

  Of course he had belonged to this artistic and ambitious elite and to the Players' Village in Waldzell for many years. He had felt completely a part of it. But now he was no longer just a part. Not only did he intimately share the life of this community, but he also felt himself to be something like its brain, its consciousness, and its conscience as well, not only participating in its impulses and destinies, but guiding them and being responsible for them.

  In an exalted moment, at the end of a training c
ourse for teachers of beginners in the Game, he once declared: "Castalia is a small state in itself, and our Vicus Lusorum a miniature state within the state, a small, but ancient and proud republic, equal in rights and dignities to its sisters, but with its sense of mission lifted and strengthened by the special artistic and virtually sacramental function it performs. For our distinction is to cherish the true sanctuary of Castalia, its unique mystery and symbol, the Glass Bead Game. Castalia rears pre-eminent musicians and art historians, philologists, mathematicians, and other scholars. Every Castalian institute and every Castalian should hold to only two goals and ideals: to attain to the utmost command of his subject, and to keep himself and his subject vital and flexible by forever recognizing its ties with all other disciplines and by maintaining amicable relations with all. This second ideal, the conception of the inner unity of all man's cultural efforts, the idea of universality, has found perfect expression in our illustrious Game. It may be that the physicist, the musicologist, or other scholar will at times have to steep himself entirely in his own discipline, that renouncing the idea of universal culture will further some momentary maximum performance in a special field. But we, at any rate, we Glass Bead Game players, must never allow ourselves such specialization. We must neither approve nor practice it, for our own special mission, as you know, is the idea of the Universitas Litterarum. Ours to foster its supreme expression, the noble Game, and repeatedly to save the various disciplines from their tendency to self-sufficiency. But how can we save anything that does not have the desire to be saved? And how can we make the archaeologists, the pedagogues, the astronomers, and so forth, eschew self-sufficient specialization and throw open their windows to all the other disciplines? We cannot do it by compulsory means, say by making the Glass Bead Game an official subject in the lower schools, nor can we do it by invoking what our predecessors meant this Game to be. We can prove only that our Game and we ourselves are indispensable by keeping the Game ever at the summit of our entire cultural life, by incorporating into it each new achievement, each new approach, and each new complex of problems from the scholarly disciplines. We must shape and cultivate our universality, our noble and perilous sport with the idea of unity, endowing it with such perennial freshness and loveliness, such persuasiveness and charm, that even the soberest researcher and most diligent specialist will ever and again feel its message, its temptation and allure.

  "Let us imagine for the moment that we players were to slacken in our zeal for a time, that the Game courses for beginners became dull and superficial, that in the Games for advanced players specialists of other disciplines looked in vain for vital, pulsating life, for intellectual contemporaneity and interest. Suppose that two or three times in a row our great annual Game were to strike the guests as an empty ceremony, a lifeless, old-fashioned, formalistic relic of the past. How quickly, then, the Game and we ourselves would be done for. Already we are no longer on those shining heights where the Glass Bead Game stood a generation ago, when the annual Game lasted not one or two but three or four weeks, and was the climax of the year not only for Castalia but for the entire country. Today a representative of the government still attends this annual Game, but all too often as a somewhat bored guest, and a few cities and professions still send envoys. Toward the end of the Game days these representatives of the secular powers occasionally deign to suggest that the length of the festival deters many other cities from sending envoys, and that perhaps it would be more in keeping with the contemporary world either to shorten the festival considerably or else to hold it only every other year, or every third year.

  "Well now, we cannot check this development, or if you will, decadence. It may well be that before long our Game will meet with no understanding at all out in the world. Perhaps we shall no longer be able to celebrate it. But what we must and can prevent is the discrediting and devaluation of the Game in its own home, in our Province. Here our struggle is hopeful, and has repeatedly led to victory. Every day we witness the phenomenon: young elite pupils who have signed up for their Game course without any special ardor, and who have completed it dutifully, but without enthusiasm, are suddenly seized by the spirit of the Game, by its intellectual potentialities, its venerable tradition, its soul-stirring forces, and become our passionate adherents and partisans. And every year at the Ludus sollemnis we can see scholars of distinction who rather looked down on us Glass Bead Game players during their work-filled year, and who have not always wished our institution well. In the course of the great Game we see them falling more and more under the spell of our art; we see them growing eased and exalted, rejuvenated and fired, until at last, their hearts strengthened and deeply stirred, they bid good-by with words of almost abashed gratitude.

  "Let us consider for a moment the means at our command for carrying out our mission. We see a rich, fine, well-ordered apparatus whose heart and core is the Game Archive, which we gratefully make use of every hour of the day and which all of us serve, from Magister and Archivist down to the humblest errand boy. The best and the most vital aspect of our institution is the old Castalian principle of selection of the best, the elite. The schools of Castalia collect the best pupils from the entire country and educate them. Similarly, we in the Players' Village try to select the best among those endowed by nature with a love for the Game. We train them to an ever-higher standard of perfection. Our courses and seminars take in hundreds, who then go their ways again; but we go on training the best until they become genuine players, artists of the Game. You all know that in ours as in every art there is no end to development, that each of us, once he belongs to the elite, will work away all his life at the further development, refinement, and deepening of himself and our art, whether or not he belongs to our corps of officials.

  "The existence of our elite has sometimes been denounced as a luxury. It has been argued that we ought to train no more elite players than are required to fill the ranks of our officialdom. But in the first place, our corps of officials is not an institution sufficient unto itself, and in the second place not everyone is suited for an official post, any more than every good philologist is suited for teaching. We officials, at any rate, feel certain that the tutors are more than a reservoir of talented and experienced players from which we fill our vacancies and draw our successors. I am almost tempted to say that this is only a subsidiary function of the players' elite, even though we greatly stress it to the uninitiated as soon as the meaning and justification of our institute is brought up.

  "No, the tutors are not primarily future Masters, course directors, Archive officials. They are an end in themselves; their little band is the real home and future of the Glass Bead Game. Here, in these few dozen hearts and heads the developments, modifications, advances, and confrontations of our Game with the spirit of the age and with the various disciplines take place. Only here is our Game played properly and correctly, to its hilt, and with full commitment. Only within our elite is it an end in itself and a sacred mission, shorn of all dilettantism, cultural vanity, self-importance, or superstition. The future of the Game lies with you, the Waldzell tutors. And since it is the heart and soul of Castalia, and you are the soul and vital spark of Waldzell, you are truly the salt of the Province, its spirit, its dynamism. There is no danger that your numbers could grow too large, your zeal too hot, your passion for the glorious Game too great. Increase it, increase it! For you, as for all Castalians, there is at bottom only a single peril, which we all must guard against every single day. The spirit of our Province and our Order is founded on two principles: on objectivity and love of truth in study, and on the cultivation of meditative wisdom and harmony. Keeping these two principles in balance means for us being wise and worthy of our Order. We love the sciences and scholarly disciplines, each his own, and yet we know that devotion to a discipline does not necessarily preserve a man from selfishness, vice, and absurdity. History is full of examples of that, and folklore has given us the figure of Doctor Faust to represent this danger.

&n
bsp; "Other centuries sought safety in the union of reason and religion, research and asceticism. In their Universitas Litterarum, theology ruled. Among us we use meditation, the fine gradations of yoga technique, in our efforts to exorcise the beast within us and the diabolus dwelling in every branch of knowledge. Now you know as well as I that the Glass Bead Game also has its hidden diabolus, that it can lead to empty virtuosity, to artistic vanity, to self-advancement, to the seeking of power over others and then to the abuse of that power. This is why we need another kind of education beside the intellectual and submit ourselves to the morality of the Order, not in order to reshape our mentally active life into a psychically vegetative dream-life, but on the contrary to make ourselves fit for the summit of intellectual achievement. We do not intend to flee from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, nor vice versa, but to keep moving forward while alternating between the two, being at home in both, partaking of both."

  We have cited Knecht's words--and many similar statements recorded by his students have been preserved--because they throw so clear a light upon his conception of his office, at least during the first few years of his magistracy. He was an excellent teacher; the profusion of copies of his lectures which have come down to us would alone provide evidence for that. Among the surprises that his high office brought him right at the start was his discovery that teaching gave him so much pleasure, and that he did so well at it. He would not have expected that, for hitherto he had never really felt a desire for teaching. Of course, like every member of the elite, he had occasionally been given teaching assignments for short periods even while he was merely an advanced student. He had substituted for other teachers in Glass Bead Game courses at various levels, even more frequently had helped the participants in such with reviews and drill; but in those days his freedom to study and his solitary concentration had been so dear and important to him that he had regarded these assignments as nuisances, despite the fact that he was even then skillful and popular as a teacher. He had, after all, also given courses in the Benedictine abbey, but they had been of minor importance in themselves, and equally minor for him. There, his studies and association with Father Jacobus had made all other work secondary. At the time, his greatest ambition had been to be a good pupil, to learn, receive, form himself. Now the pupil had become a teacher, and as such he had mastered the major task of his first period in office: the struggle to win authority and forge an identity of person and office. In the course of this he made two discoveries. The first was the pleasure it gives to transplant the achievements of the mind into other minds and see them being transformed into entirely new shapes and emanations--in other words, the joy of teaching. The second was grappling with the personalities of the students, the attainment and practice of authority and leadership--in other words, the joy of educating. He never separated the two, and during his magistracy he not only trained a large number of good and some superb Glass Bead Game players, but also by example, by admonition, by his austere sort of patience, and by the force of his personality and character, elicited from a great many of his students the very best they were capable of.