The Glass Bead Game

in progress, but of Waldzell. He saw himself rather in that blue room in the Archives where he was currently giving a seminar in dialectics every third day, with only five participants. Every hour of that bred far greater tension and demanded a greater output of energy than all the rest of his official duties, which were also not easy and which he could not evade or postpone. For as the former Music Master had informed him, the Board provided him with a timekeeper and coach who supervised the course of his day hour by hour, advising him about his schedule and guarding him against too much concentration on any one thing, as well as against total overstrain. Knecht was grateful to him, and even more grateful to Alexander, the man deputized by the directorate of the Order, who enjoyed a great reputation as master of the art of meditation. Alexander saw to it that Joseph, even though he was working to the utmost limit of his strength, practiced the “little” or “brief” meditation exercise three times daily, and that he abided strictly by the prescribed course and number of minutes for each such exercise.

Before his evening meditation he and his aides, the coach and the meditation master, were supposed to review each official day, noting what had been well done or ill done, feeling his own pulse, as meditation teachers call this practice, that is, recognizing and measuring one’s own momentary situation, state of health, the distribution of one’s energies, one’s hopes and cares — in a word, seeing oneself and one’s daily work objectively and carrying nothing unresolved on into the night and the next day.

While the tutors observed the prodigious labors of their Magister with an interest partly sympathetic, partly aggressive, missing no opportunity to set him new tests of strength, patience, and quick-wittedness, trying one moment to inspire, the next to block his work, an uncomfortable void had come into being around Tegularius. He understood, of course, that Knecht could not spare any attention, any time, any thought or sympathy for him right now. But he could not harden himself sufficiently, could not resign himself to being so neglected. It was all the more painful to him because he not only seemed to have lost his friend from one day to the next, but also found himself the object of some suspicion on the part of his associates, and was scarcely spoken to. That was hardly surprising. For although Tegularius could not seriously stand in the way of the ambitious climbers, he was known as one of the new Magister’s partisans and favorites.

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