exemplary Castalian. The figure of his friend more and more vigorously and vividly embodied for him the spirit of the Province. Just as he himself had infected Joseph with some of the atmospheric turbulence of his own world, he for his part inhaled the Castalian air and succumbed to its charm and power. In his last year at the school, after a two-hour disputation on the ideals and perils of monasticism, fought out in the presence of the highest Glass Bead Game class, Plinio took Joseph out for a walk and made a confession to him. We quote it from a letter of Ferromonte’s:
“Of course I’ve known for a long time, Joseph, that you are not the credulous Glass Bead Game player and Castalian saint whose part you have been playing so splendidly. Each of us stands at an exposed spot in this battle, and each of us probably knows that what he is fighting against rightfufiy exists and has its undeniable value. You yourself take the side of intensive cultivation of the mind, I the side of natural life. In our contest you have learned to track down the dangers of the natural life and have made them your target. Your function has been to point out how natural, naive living without discipline of the mind is bound to become a mire into which men sink, reverting to bestiality. And I for my part must remind you again and again how risky, dangerous, and ultimately sterile is a life based purely upon mind. Good, each defends what he believes to be primary, you mind and I nature. But don’t take offense — it sometimes seems to me that you actually and naively consider me an enemy of your Castalian principles, a fellow who fundamentally regards your studies, exercises, and games as mere tomfoolery, even though he briefly joins in them for one reason or another. How wrong you would be if you really believed that, my friend. I’ll confess to you that I am infatuated with your hierarchy, that it often enthralls me like happiness itself. I’ll confess to you that some months ago, when I was at home with my parents for a while, I had it out with my father and won his permission for me to remain a Castalian and enter the Order if this should be my desire and decision at the end of my schooldays. I was happy when he at last gave his consent. As it happens, I shall not make use of his permission; I’ve recently realized that. Not that I’ve lost my taste for it, not at all. But I more and more see that for me to remain among you would mean escaping. It would be a fine, a noble escape perhaps, but still an escape. I shall return and become a man of the outside world, but one who continues grateful to your Castalia, who will go on practicing a good many of your exercises, and will come every year to join in the celebration of the great Glass Bead Game.”
Knecht informed his friend Ferromonte of Plinio’s confession with deep emotion. And Ferromonte himself added, in the letter we have just cited: “To me, as a musician, this confession of Plinio, to whom I had not always been entirely fair, was like a musical experience. The contrast of world and Mind, or of Plinio and Joseph, had before my eyes been transfigured from the conflict of two irreconcilable principles into a double concerto.”
When Plinio had come to the end of his four-year course and was about to return home, he brought the headmaster a letter from his father inviting Joseph Knechf to spend the coming vacation with him. This was an unusual proposal. Leaves for journeys and stays outside the Pedagogic Province did exist, chiefly for purposes of study. They were not so very rare, but were exceptional and generally granted only to older and more seasoned researchers, never to younger students still at school. But since the invitation had come from so highly esteemed a family and personage, Headmaster Zbinden did not presume to reject it on his own, but presented it to a committee of the Board of Educators. The reply was a laconic refusal. The friends had to say good-by to each other.
“We’ll try the invitation again sometime,” Plinio said. “Sooner or later it will work out. You must someday see my home and meet my family, and realize that we are not just commercial-minded scum. I shall miss you very much. And make sure, Joseph, that you rise quickly in this complicated Castalia of yours. Of course you’re highly suited to become a member of the hierarchy, but in my opinion more at the top than the bottom of the heap — in spite of your name. I prophesy a great future for you; one of these days you’ll be a Magister and be counted among the illustrious.”
Joseph gave him a sad look.
“Go ahead and make fun of me,” he said, struggling with the emotion of parting. “I am not so ambitious as you, and if I should ever attain to some office, you will long since have become president or mayor, university professor, or deputy. Think kindly of us, Plinio, and of Castalia; don’t become entirely estranged from us. After all, there have to be a few people in the outside world who know more about Castalia than the jokes they make about us out there.”
They shook hands, and Plinio departed.
For his last year in Waldzell, Joseph remained out of the limelight. His exposed and strenuous function as a more or less public personality had suddenly come to an end. Castalia no longer needed a defender. Joseph devoted his free time during that year chiefly to the Glass Bead Game, which enthralled him more and more. A notebook of jottings from that period, dealing with the meaning and theory of the Game, begins with the sentence: “The whole of both physical and mental life is a dynamic phenomenon, of which the Glass Bead Game basically comprehends only the aesthetic side, and does so predominantly as an image of rhythmic processes.”
THREE
YEARS OF FREEDOM
JOSEPH KNECHT WAS about twenty-four years old at this time. With graduation from Waldzell, his school days were over, and there now began his years of free study. With the exception of his uneventful boyhood in Eschholz, these were probably the most serene and happy years of his life. There is, after all, always something wonderful and touchingly beautiful about a young man, for the first time released from the bonds of schooling, making his first ventures toward the infinite horizons of the mind. At this point he has not yet seen any of his illusions dissipated, or doubted either his own capacity for endless dedication or the boundlessness of the world of thought.
Especially for young men with gifts like those of Joseph Knecht, who have not been driven by a single talent to concentrate on a specialty, but whose nature rather aims at integration, synthesis, and universality, this springtide of free study is often a period of intense happiness and very nearly of intoxication. Were it not preceded by the discipline of the elite schools, by the psychic hygiene of meditation exercises and the lenient supervision of the Board of Educators, this freedom would even be dangerous for such natures and might prove a nemesis to many, as it used to be to innumerable highly gifted young men in the ages before our present educational pattern was set, in the pre-Castalian centuries. The universities in those days literally swarmed with young Faustian spirits who embarked with all sails set upon the high seas of learning and academic freedom, and ran aground on all the shoals of untrammeled dilettantism. Faust himself, after all, was the prototype of brilliant amateurishness and its consequent tragedy.
In Castalia, as it happens, the intellectual freedom of the student is infinitely greater than it ever was at the universities of earlier ages, since the available materials and opportunities for study are far ampler. Moreover, studies in Castalia are in no way restricted or colored by material considerations, by ambition, timidity, straitened circumstances of the parents, prospects for livelihood and career, and so on. In the academies, seminars, libraries, archives, and laboratories of the Pedagogic Province every student is completely equal, no matter what his origins and prospects. The hierarchy grades the student solely by his qualities of mind and character. On the other hand most of the freedoms, temptations, and dangers to which so many talented youths succumb at the secular universities simply do not exist in Castalia. Not that there is a dearth of danger, passion, and bedazzlement there — how could these elements ever be completely absent from human life? But at least certain opportunities for going off the rails, for disappointment and disaster, have been eliminated. There is no danger of the Castalian student’s becoming a drinker. Nor can he waste the years of his youth in tomfoolery, or the empty braggadocio of secret societies, as did some generations of students in olden times. Nor is he apt to make the discovery someday that his degree was a mistake, that there are gaps in his preparatory education which can never be filled. The Castalian order of things protects him against such blunders.
The danger of wasting himself on women or on losing himself in sports is also minimal. As far as women are concerned, the Castalian student is not subject to the temptations and dangers of marriage, nor is he oppressed by the prudery of a good many past eras which imposed continence on students or else made them turn to more or less venal and sluttish women. Since there is no marriage for the Castalians, love is not governed by a morality directed toward marriage. Since the Castalian has no money and virtually no property, he also cannot purchase love. It is customary in the Province for the daughters of the citizenry not to marry early, and in the years before
