my equilibrium. It was far from a pleasant state; in fact it was very hard to bear. I thought up the wildest schemes for escaping and gaining my freedom. For example, I imagined myself going out into the world as an itinerant musician and playing dances for wedding parties. If some recruiting officer from afar had appeared, as in old tales, and coaxed me to don a uniform and follow any company of soldiers into any war, I would have gone along. And so things went from bad to worse, as so often happens to people in such moods. I so thoroughly lost my grip on myself that I could no longer deal with my trouble alone, and had to seek help.”
He paused for a moment and chuckled softly under his breath. Then he continued: “Naturally I had a studies adviser, as the rules require, and of course it would have been sensible and right as well as my duty to ask him for advice. But the fact is, Joseph, that precisely when we run into difficulties and stray from our path and are most in need of correction, precisely then we feel the greatest disinclination to return to the normal way and seek out the normal form of correction. My adviser had been dissatisfied with my last quarterly report; he had offered serious objections to it; but I had thought myself on the way to new discoveries and had rather resented his objections. In brief, I did not like the idea of going to him; I did not want to eat humble pie and admit that he had been right. Nor did I want to confide in my friends. But there was an eccentric in the vicinity whom I knew only by sight and hearsay, a Sanscrit scholar who went by the nickname of ‘the Yogi.’ One day, when my state of mind had grown sufficiently unbearable, I paid a call on this man, whose solitariness and oddity I had both smiled at and secretly admired. I went to his cell intending to talk with him, but found him in meditation; he had adopted the ritual Hindu posture and could not be reached at all. With a faint smile on his face, he hovered, as it were, in total aloofness. I could do nothing but stand at the door and wait until he returned from his absorption. This took a very long time, an hour or two hours, and at last I grew tired and slid to the floor. There I sat, leaning against the wall, continuing to wait. At the end I saw the man slowly awaken; he moved his head slightly, stretched his shoulders, slowly uncrossed his legs, and as he was about to stand, up his gaze fell upon me.
“‘What do you want?’ he asked.
“I stood up and said, without thinking and without really knowing what I was saying: ‘It’s the sonatas of Andrea Gabrieli.’
“He stood up at this point, seated me in his lone chair, and perched himself on the edge of the table. ‘Gabrieli?’ he said. ‘What has he done to you with his sonatas?’
“I began to tell him what had been happening to me, and to confess the predicament I was in. He asked me about my background with an exactness that seemed to me pedantic. He wanted to know about my studies of Gabrieli and the sonata, at what hour I rose in the morning, how long I read, how much I practiced, when were my mealtimes and when I went to bed. I had confided in him, in fact imposed myself on him, so that I had to put up with his questions, but they made me ashamed; they probed more and more mercilessly into details, and forced me to an analysis of my whole intellectual and moral life during the past weeks and months.
“Then the Yogi suddenly fell silent, and when I looked puzzled he shrugged and said: ‘Don’t you see yourself where the fault lies?’ But I could not see it. At this point he recapitulated with astonishing exactness everything he had learned from me by his questioning. He went back to the first signs of fatigue, repugnance, and intellectual constipation, and showed me that this could have happened only to someone who had submerged himself disproportionately in his studies and that it was high time for me to recover my self-control, arid to regain my energy with outside help. Since I had taken the liberty of discontinuing my regular meditation exercises, he pointed out, I should at least have realized what was wrong as soon as the first evil consequences appeared, and should have resumed meditation. He was perfectly right. I had omitted meditating for quite a while on the grounds that I had no time, was too distracted or out of spirits, or too busy and excited with my studies. Moreover, as time went on I had completely lost all awareness of my continuous sin of omission. Even now, when I was desperate and had almost run aground, it had taken an outsider to remind me of it. As a matter of fact, I was to have the greatest difficulty snapping out of this state of neglect. I had to return to the training routines and beginners’ exercises in meditation in order gradually to relearn the art of composing myself and sinking into contemplation.”
With a small sigh the Magister ceased pacing the room. “That is what happened to me, and to this day I am still a little ashamed to talk about it. But the fact is, Joseph, that the more we demand of ourselves, or the more our task at any given time demands of us, the more dependent we are on meditation as a wellspring of energy, as the ever-renewing concord of mind and soul. And — I could if I wished give you quite a few more examples of this — the more intensively a task requires our energies, arousing and exalting us at one time, tiring and depressing us at another, the more easily we may come to neglect this wellspring, just as when we are carried away by some intellectual work we easily forget to attend to the body. The really great men in the history of the world have all either known how to meditate or have unconsciously found their way to the place to which meditation leads us. Even the most vigorous and gifted among the others all failed and were defeated in the end because their task or their ambitious dream seized hold of them, made them into persons so possessed that they lost the capacity for liberating themselves from present things, and attaining perspective. Well, you know all this; it’s taught during the first exercises, of course. But it is inexorably true. How inexorably true it is, one realizes only after having gone astray.”
This story had just enough effect upon Joseph for him to apprehend the risk he himself was running, so that he turned to his meditation exercises with renewed seriousness. What really impressed him was the fact that the Master had for the first time revealed to him something of his personal life, of his youth and early studies. For the first time Joseph fully realized that even a demigod, even a Master, had once been young and capable of erring. He felt gratitude, too, for the confidence the revered Master had placed in him by making this confession. It was possible for one to go astray, to flag, to make mistakes, to break rules, and still to deal with all such difficulties, to find one’s way back, and in the end even to become a Master. Joseph overcame the crisis.
During the two or three years at Waldzell during which the friendship between Plinio and Joseph continued, the school watched the spectacle of these combative friends like a drama in which everyone had at least some small part, from the headmaster to the youngest freshman. The two worlds, the two principles, had become embodied in Knecht and Designori; each stimulated the other; every disputation became a solemn and symbolic contest which concerned everyone at the school. From every contact with his native soil on the holiday visits home Plinio would bring back new energy; and from every withdrawal for reflection, from every new book, every meditation exercise, every meeting with the Magister Musicae Joseph also derived new energy, made himself better fitted to be the representative and advocate of Castalia. As a child he had experienced his first vocation. Now he experienced the second. These years shaped and forged him into the perfect Castalian.
He had also some time ago completed his elementary lessons in the Glass Bead Game and even then, during holidays and under the eye of a Games Director, had begun sketching out his own Glass Bead Games. In this activity he now discovered one of the most abundant sources of joy and relaxation. Not since he had insatiably practiced harpsichord and piano pieces with Carlo Ferromonte had anything done him so much good, so refreshed, strengthened, reassured, and delighted him as did these first advances into the starry firmament of the Glass Bead Game.
During these same years young Joseph Knecht wrote those poems which have been preserved in Ferromonte’s copy. It is quite possible that there were originally more of them than have come down to us, and it may be assumed that the poems, the earliest of which dates back to a time before Knecht’s introduction to the Glass Bead Game, helped him to carry out his role and to withstand the many tests of those critical years. Here and there in these poems, some skillfully wrought and some hastily scribbled, every reader will discover traces of the profound upheaval and crisis through which Knecht was then passing under the influence of Plinio. A good many of the lines sound a note of profound disturbance, of fundamental doubts about himself and the meaning of his life — until, in the poem entitled “The Glass Bead Game” he seems to have attained belief and surrender. Incidentally, a measure of concession to Plinio’s world, an element of rebellion against certain unwritten laws of Castalia, is contained in the mere fact that he wrote these poems and even on occasion showed them to several schoolmates. For while Castalia has in general renounced the production of works of art (even musical production is known and tolerated there only in the form of stylistically rigid composition exercises), writing poetry was regarded as the most impossible, ridiculous, and prohibited of conceivable acts. Thus these poems were anything but a game, anything but an idle calligraphic amusement; it took high pressure to start this flow of productivity, and a certain defiant courage was required to admit to the writing of these verses.
It should also be mentioned that Plinio Designori likewise underwent considerable change and development under the influence of his antagonist. This was reflected in more than the refinement of his methods of argument. During the comradely rivalry of those school years Plinio saw his opponent steadily rising and maturing into an
