The Glass Bead Game

by Hermann Hesse

  "I need not say much about those days; you knew me better than anyone else, after all. I was almost a Castalian, a little gayer, coarser, and more superficial, perhaps, but happy and enthusiastic, full of high spirits. That was the happiest period in my life, although of course at the time I never suspected that this would be so, for during those years in Waldzell I expected that happiness and the crowning experiences of my life would come after I returned home from your schools and used the superiority I had acquired in them to conquer the outside world. Instead, after my departure from you a conflict began which has lasted to this day, and I have not been the victor in this struggle. For the place I returned to no longer consisted in just my home; and the country had not been simply waiting to embrace me and acknowledge my Waldzell superiority. Even at home I soon encountered disappointments, difficulties, and discords. It took a while before I noticed. I was shielded by my naive confidence, my boyish faith in myself, and my happiness, and shielded also by the morality of the Order which I had brought back with me, by the habit of meditation.

  "But what a disappointment and disillusionment I had at the university where I wanted to study political subjects. The general tone among the students, the level of their education and social life, the personalities of so many of the teachers--how all this contrasted with what I had become accustomed to among you. You recall how in defending our world against yours I used to extol the unspoiled, naive life? If that was a piece of foolishness deserving punishment, my friend, I have been harshly punished. Because this naive, innocent, instinctual life, this childlike, untrammeled brilliance of the simple soul, may possibly exist among peasants or artisans, or somewhere, but I never succeeded in finding it, let alone sharing in it. You remember too, don't you, how I would speechify about the arrogance and affectation of Castalians, attacking them for being a conceited and decadent lot with their caste spirit and their elite haughtiness. Now I had to discover that people in the world were no less proud of their bad manners, their meager culture, their coarse, loud humor, the dull-witted shrewdness with which they kept themselves to practical, egotistic goals. They regarded themselves as no less precious, sanctified, and elect in their narrow-minded crudity than the most affected Waldzell show-off could ever have done. They laughed at me or patted me on the back, but a good many of them reacted to the alien, Castalian qualities in me with the outright enmity that the vulgar always have for everything finer. And I was determined to take their dislike as a distinction."

  Designori paused briefly, and threw a glance at Knecht to see whether he was tiring him. His eyes met his friend's and found in them an expression of close attention and friendliness which comforted and reassured him. He saw that Knecht was totally absorbed; he was listening not as people listen to casual talk or even to an interesting story, but with fixed attention and devotion, as if concentrating on a subject of meditation. At the same time Knecht's eyes expressed a pure, warmhearted good will--so warm that it seemed to Plinio almost childlike. He was swept with a kind of amazement to see such an expression upon the face of the same man whose many-sided daily labors, whose wisdom and authority in the governance of his office he had admired all through the day. Relieved, he continued:

  "I don't know whether my life has been useless and merely a misunderstanding, or whether it has a meaning. If it does have a meaning, I should say it would be this: that one single specific person in our time has recognized plainly and experienced in the most painful way how far Castalia has moved away from its motherland. Or for my part it might be put the other way around: how alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that Province's spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how little they know about each other, or want to know. If I had any one task and ideal in life, it was to make myself a synthesis of the two principles, to be mediator, interpreter, and arbitrator between the two. I have tried and failed. And since after all I cannot tell you my whole life, and you would not be able to understand it all anyhow, I will describe only one of the situations in which my failure was revealed.

  "The difficulty after I began attending the university consisted not so much in my being unable to deal with the teasing or hostility that came my way as a Castalian, a show-off. Those few among my new associates who regarded my coming from the elite schools as a glory gave me more trouble, in fact, and caused me greater embarrassment. No, the hard part, perhaps the impossible task I set myself, was to continue a life in the Castalian sense in the midst of worldliness. At first I scarcely noticed; I abided by the rules I had learned among you, and for some time they seemed to prove their validity in the world. They seemed to strengthen and shield me, seemed to preserve my gaiety and inner soundness and to increase my resolve to pass my student years in the Castalian way as far as possible, following the paths that my craving for knowledge indicated and not letting anything coerce me into a course of studies designed to prepare the student as thoroughly as possible in the shortest possible time for a speciality in which he could earn his livelihood, and to stamp out whatever sense of freedom and universality he may have had.

  "But the protection that Castalia had given me proved dangerous and dubious, for I did not want to be like a hermit, cultivating my peace of soul and preserving a calm, meditative state of mind. I wanted to conquer the world, you see, to understand it, to force it to understand me. I wanted to affirm it and if possible renew and reform it. In my own person I wanted to bring Castalia and the world together, to reconcile them. When after some disappointment, some clash or disturbance, I retired to meditate, I derived great benefit at first; each time, meditation was like relaxation, deep breathing, a return to good, friendly powers. But in time I realized that this very practice of meditation, the cultivation and exercising of the psyche, was what isolated me, made me seem so unpleasantly strange to others, and actually rendered me incapable of really understanding them. I saw that I could really understand those others, those people in the world and of it, if I once again became like them, if I had no advantages over them, including this recourse to meditation.

  "Of course it may be that I am putting it in a better light when I describe it in this way. Perhaps it was simply that without associates trained to the same practices, without supervision by teachers, without the bracing atmosphere of Waldzell, I gradually lost the discipline, that I grew sluggish and inattentive and succumbed to carelessness, and that in moments of guilty conscience I then excused myself on the ground that carelessness was one of the attributes of this world, and that by giving way to it I was coming closer to an understanding of my environment. I'm not trying to make things out better than they are for your sake, but neither do I want to deny or conceal the fact that I went to considerable lengths, that I strove and fought, even where I was mistaken. I was serious about the whole problem. But whether or not my attempt to find a meaningful place for myself was mere conceit on my part--in any case, it ended as it was bound to end. The world was stronger than I was; it slowly overwhelmed and devoured me. It was exactly as if life took me at my word and molded me wholly to the world whose rightness, naive strength, and ontological superiority I so highly praised and defended against your logic in our Waldzell disputations. You remember.

  "And now I must remind you of something else which you probably forgot long ago, since it meant nothing to you. But it meant a great deal to me; it was important, important and terrible. My student years had come to an end; I had adapted, had been defeated, but not entirely. Inwardly I still thought of myself as your equal and imagined that I had made certain adjustments, shed certain customs, more out of prudence and free choice than as the consequence of defeat. And so I also clung to a good many of the habits and needs of my earlier years. Among them was the Glass Bead Game, which probably had little point, since without constant practice and constant association with equal and especially with better players, it's impossible to learn anything, of course. Playing alone can at best replace such practice the w
ay talking to oneself replaces real, serious dialogue. So without really understanding how I stood, what had happened to my player's skill, my culture, my status as an elite pupil, I struggled to save at least some of these values. In those days, whenever I sketched a Game pattern or analyzed a Game movement for one of my friends who knew something about the Game but had no notion of its spirit, it probably seemed akin to magic to these total ignoramuses. Then, in my third or fourth year at the university, I took part in a Game course in Waldzell. Seeing the countryside and the town again, visiting our old school and the Players' Village, gave me melancholy pleasure; but you were not here; you were studying somewhere in Monteport or Keuperheim at the time, and were considered an ambitious eccentric. My Game course was only a series of summer classes for pitiable worldlings and dilettantes like myself. Nevertheless, I worked hard at it and was proud at the end of the course to receive the usual C, that passing mark which qualifies the holder for future vacation courses of the same sort.

  "Well, then, a few years later I once again summoned up the energy and signed up for a vacation course under your predecessor. I tried to prepare myself for Waldzell. I read through my old exercise books, made some stabs at the technique of concentration--in short, within my modest limits I composed myself, gathered my energies, and put myself in the mood for the course rather the way a real Glass Bead Game player readies himself for the great annual Game. And so I arrived in Waldzell, where after this longer interval I found myself a good deal more alienated, but at the same time enchanted, as if I were returning to a lovely land I had lost, in whose language I was no longer very fluent. And this time my fervent wish to see you again was granted. Do you by any chance recall, Joseph?"

  Knecht looked earnestly into his eyes, nodded and smiled slightly, but said not a word.

  "Good," Designori continued. "So you remember. But just what do you remember? A casual reunion with a schoolmate, a brief encounter and disappointment, after which one goes on and thinks no more about it, unless the other fellow tactlessly reminds one about it decades later. Isn't that it? Was it anything else, was it more than that for you?"

  Although he was obviously trying very hard to hold himself in check, it was apparent that emotions accumulated over many years, and never mastered, were on the brink of eruption.

  "You are anticipating," Knecht said carefully. "We will speak of my impressions when it is my turn to render an accounting. You have the floor now, Plinio. I see that the meeting was not pleasant for you. It was not for me either, at the time. And now go on and tell me what it was like. Speak bluntly."

  "I'll try," Plinio said. "I certainly don't want to blame you for anything. I must concede that you behaved with absolute courtesy toward me--more than that. When I accepted your invitation to come here to Waldzell, where I have not been since that second course, not even since my appointment to the Castalian Commission, I made up my mind to confront you with what I experienced at that time, whether or not this visit turned out pleasantly. And now I mean to continue. I had come to the course and been put up in the guest house. The people in the course were almost all about my age; some were even a good deal older. There were at most twenty of us, the majority Castalians, but either poor, indifferent, or slack Glass Bead Game players, or rank beginners who had tardily decided that they ought to obtain some familiarity with the Game. It was a relief to me that I knew none of them. Although our instructor, one of the Archive assistants, really tried hard and was most friendly toward us, the whole thing had from the start the feeling of being a half-baked, useless affair, a make-up course whose random collection of students no more believes in its importance or chance of success than does the teacher, although no one involved will admit it. Why, you might have wondered, should this handful of people get together to engage in something they had no capacity for nor enough interest in to go at it with perseverance and devotion, and why should a skilled specialist bother to give them instruction and assign them exercises which he himself scarcely thought would come to anything? At the time I didn't know--I found out from more experienced persons later on--that I simply had bad luck with this course, that another group of participants might have made it stimulating and useful, even inspiring. It often suffices, I was later told, to have two members of the class who kindle each other, or who already know each other and are good friends, to give the whole course, for all the participants and the teacher as well, the necessary impetus. But you are the Game Master, after all; you must know all about such matters.

  "Well, then, I had rotten luck. The animating spark was missing from our haphazard group; there was no impetus, not even a little warmth. The whole thing remained a feeble extension course for grown-up schoolboys. The days passed, and my disappointment increased with each passing day. Still, besides the Glass Bead Game there was Waldzell, a place of sacred and cherished memories for me. If the Game course were a failure, I still ought to be able to celebrate a homecoming, to chat with former schoolmates, perhaps have a reunion with the friend who more than anyone else represented to me our Castalia--you, Joseph. If I saw a few of the companions of my schooldays again, if on my walks through this beautiful, beloved region I met again the lares and penates of my youth, and if good fortune would have it that we might come close to each other again and a dialogue should spring up between us as in the old days, less between you and me than between my problem with Castalia and myself--then this vacation would not be wasted; then it would not so much matter about the course and all the rest.

  "The first two old schoolfellows who crossed my path were innocuous enough. They were glad to see me, patted me on the back and asked childish question about my legendary life out in the world. But the next few were not so innocuous; they were members of the Players' Village and the younger elite and did not ask naive questions. On the contrary, when we ran into one another in one of the rooms of your sanctuaries and they could not very well avoid me, they greeted me with a pointed and rather tense politeness, or rather a condescending geniality. They made it clear that they were busy with important matters quite closed to me, that they had no time, no curiosity, no sympathy, no desire to renew old acquaintance. Well, I did not force myself on them; I let them alone in their Olympian, sardonic, Castalian tranquility. I looked across at them and their busy, self-satisfied doings like a prisoner watching through bars, or the way the poor, hungry, and oppressed eye the wealthy and aristocratic, the handsome, cultivated, untroubled, well-bred, well-rested members of an upper class with their clean faces and manicured hands.

  "And then you turned up, Joseph, and when I saw you I felt rejoicing and new hope. You were crossing the yard; I recognized you from behind by your walk and at once called you by name. At last a human soul, I thought; at last a friend, or perhaps an opponent, but someone I can talk to, a Castalian to the bone, certainly, but someone in whom the Castalian spirit has not frozen into a mask and a suit of armor. A man, someone who understands. You must have noticed how glad I was and how much I expected from you, and in fact you met me halfway with the greatest courtesy. You still recognized me, I meant something to you, it gave you pleasure to see my face again. And so we did not leave it at that brief warm greeting in the yard; you invited me and devoted, or rather sacrificed, an evening to me. But what an evening that was! The two of us tormented ourselves trying to seem jocose, civil, and comradely toward each other, and how hard it was for us to drag that lame conversation from one subject to another. Where the others had been indifferent to me, with you it was worse--this strained and profitless effort to revive a lost friendship was much more painful. That evening finally put an end to my illusions. It made me realize with unsparing clarity that I was not one of your comrades, not seeking the same goals, not a Castalian, not a person of importance, but a nuisance, a fool trying to ingratiate himself, an uncultivated foreigner. And the fact that all this was conveyed to me with such politeness and good manners, that the disappointment and impatience were so impeccably masked, actually seemed to me the worst
of it. If you had upbraided me: 'What has become of you, my friend, how could you let yourself degenerate this way?' the ice would have been broken and I would have been happy. But nothing of the sort. I saw that my notion of belonging to Castalia had come to nothing, that my love for all of you and my studying the Glass Bead Game and our comradeship were all nothing. Elite Tutor Knecht had taken note of my unfortunate visit to Waldzell; for my sake he had put himself through a whole evening of boredom, and shown me the door with undeviating courtesy."

  Designori, struggling with his agitation, broke off and with a tormented expression looked across at the Magister. Knecht sat there, all attention, absorbedly listening, but not in the least upset; he sat looking at his old friend with a smile that was full of friendly sympathy. Since Designori did not continue, Knecht rested his eyes on him, with a look of good will and satisfaction, in fact with a touch of amusement. For a minute or longer Plinio bleakly met that gaze. Then he cried out forcefully, although not angrily: "You're laughing! Laughing? You think it was all fine?"

  "I must admit," Knecht said smilingly, "that you have described that episode remarkably well, splendidly. That is exactly how it was, and perhaps the lingering sense of insult and accusation in your voice was needed for you to bring it out as effectively as you did and to recall the scene to my mind with such perfect vividness. Also, although I'm afraid you still see the whole affair in somewhat the same light as you did then, and have not fully come to terms with it, you told your story with objective correctness--the story of two young men in a rather embarrassing situation in which both had to dissemble, and one of whom--that is, you--made the mistake of concealing the painfulness of the whole matter behind a gay exterior, instead of dropping the masquerade. It seems as if you were to this day blaming me more than yourself for the fruitlessness of that encounter, although it was absolutely up to you to have set its terms. Have you really failed to see that? But still you have described it very well, I must say. You've called back the whole sense of oppression and embarrassment over that weird evening. For a while I've felt as if I had to fight for composure again, and I've been ashamed for the two of us. No, your story is exactly right. It's a pleasure to hear a story so well told."