THE ANNUAL GAME, remembered to this day as the Chinese House Game, and often quoted, was for Knecht and his friend Tegularius a happy outcome to their labors, and for Castalia and the Boards proof that they had done well to summon Knecht to the highest office. Once more Waldzell, the Players’ Village, and the elite had the satisfaction of a splendid and exultant festival. Not for many years had the annual Game been such an event as it was this time, with the youngest and most-discussed Magister in Castalian history making his first public appearance and showing what he could do. Moreover, Waldzell was determined to make up for the failure and disgrace of the previous year. This time no one lay ill, no cowed deputy awaited the great ceremony with apprehension, coldly ringed by the malevolent distrust of the elite, faithfully but listessly supported by nervous officials. Quiet, inaccessible, entirely the high priest, white-and-gold-clad major piece on the solemn chessboard of symbols, the Magister celebrated his and his friend’s work. Radiating calm, strength, and dignity, beyond the reach of any profane summons, he appeared in the festival hall in the midst of his many acolytes, conducting step after step of his Game with the ritual gestures. With a luminous golden stylus he delicately inscribed character after character on the small tablet before him, and the same characters promptly appeared in the script of the Game, enlarged a hundredfold, upon the gigantic board on the rear wall of the hall, to be spelled out by a thousand whispering voices, called out by the Speakers, broadcast to the country and the world. And when at the end of the first act he wrote the summary formula for that act upon his tablet, with graceful and impressive poise gave instructions for the meditation, laid down the stylus and, taking his seat, assumed the perfect meditation posture, in the hall, in the Players’ Village, throughout Castalia and beyond, in many countries of the globe, the faithful devotees of the Glass Bead Game reverently sat down for the selfsame meditation and sustained it until the moment the Magister in the hall rose to his feet once again. It was all as it had been many times before, and yet it was all stirring and new. The abstract and seemingly timeless world of the Game was flexible enough to respond, in a hundred nuances, to the mind, voice, temperament, and handwriting of a given personality, and the personality in this case was great and cultivated enough to subordinate his own inspirations to the inviolable inner laws of the Game itself. The assistants and fellow players, the elite, obeyed like well-drilled soldiers, yet each one of them, even though he might be executing only the bows or helping to draw the curtain around the meditating Master, seemed to be performing his own Game, inspired by his own ideas. But it was the crowd, the great congregation filling the hall and all of Waldzell, the thousands of souls who followed the Master down the hieratic and labyrinthine ways through the endless, multidimensional imagery of the Game, who furnished the fundamental chord for the ceremony, the low, throbbing base bellnote, which for the more simple-hearted members of the community is the best and almost the only experience the festival yields, but which also awakens awe in the subtle virtuosi and critics of the elite, in the acolytes and officials all the way up to the leader and Master.
It was an exalted festival. Even the envoys from the outside world sensed this, and proclaimed it; and in the course of those days a good many new converts were won over to the Glass Bead Game forever. In the light of this triumph, however, Joseph Knecht, at the end of the ten-day festival, made some highly curious remarks in summing up the experience to his friend Tegularius. “We may be content,” he said. “Yes, Castalia and the Glass Bead Game are wonderful things; they come close to being perfect. Only perhaps they are too much so, too beautiful. They are so beautiful that one can scarcely contemplate them without fearing for them. It is not pleasant to think that some day they are bound to pass away as everything else does. And yet one must think of that.”
With this historic statement, the biographer is forced to approach the most delicate and mysterious part of his task. Indeed, he would have preferred to postpone it for a while longer and continue — with that placidity which clear and unambiguous conditions afford to the narrator of them — to depict Knecht’s successes, his exemplary conduct of his office, the brilliant peak of his life. But it would seem to us misleading, and out of keeping with our subject, if we failed to take account of the duality, or call it polarity, in the revered Master’s life and character, even though it was so far known to no one but Tegularius. From now on our task, in fact, will be to accept this dichotomy in Knecht’s soul, or rather this ever-alternating polarity, as the central feature of his nature, and to affirm it as such. As a matter of fact, a biographer who thought it proper to deal with the life of a Castalian Magister entirely in the spirit of hagiography,
The man who could say, on one of the finest days of his life, at the end of his first festival Game and after a singularly successful and impressive demonstration of the Castalian spirit, “It is not pleasant to think that some day Castalia and the Glass Bead Game are bound to pass away — and yet one must think of that” — this man had early on, long before he had acquired insight into history, borne within himself a metaphysical sense of the transitoriness of all that has evolved and the problematical nature of everything created by the human mind. If we go back to his boyhood we will remember his depression and uneasiness whenever a fellow pupil disappeared from Eschholz because he had disappointed his teachers and been demoted from the elite to the ordinary schools. There is no record that a single one of those expelled had been a close friend of young Joseph; what disturbed him was not personal loss, not the absence of this or that individual. Rather, his grief was caused by the mild shock to his child’s faith in the permanence of Castalian order and Castalian perfection. He himself took his vocation so seriously as something sacred, and yet there were boys and youths who had been granted the happiness of acceptance into the elite schools of the Province and had squandered this boon, thrown it away. This was shocking, and a sign of the power of the world outside Castalia. Perhaps also — though here we can only speculate — such incidents aroused the boy’s first doubts of the Board of Educators’ infallibility, since this Board now and then brought to Castalia pupils whom it subsequently had to dismiss again. There is no saying whether these earliest stirrings of criticism of authority also affected his thinking.
In any case, the boy felt every dismissal of an elite pupil not only as a misfortune, but also as an impropriety, an ugly glaring stain, whose presence was in itself a reproach involving all of Castalia. This, we think, is the basis for that feeling of shock and distraction which Knecht as a schoolboy experienced on such occasions. Outside, beyond the boundaries of the Province, was a way of life which ran counter to Castalia and its laws, which did not abide by the Castalian system and could not be tamed and sublimated by it. And of course he was aware of the presence of this world in his own heart also. He too had impulses, fantasies, and desires which ran counter to the laws that governed him, impulses which he had only gradually managed to subdue by hard effort.
These impulses, he concluded, could be so strong in a good many pupils that they erupted despite all restraints and led those who yielded to them away from the elite world of Castalia and into that other world which was dominated not by discipline and cultivation of the mind, but by instincts. To one striving for Castalian virtue that world seemed sometimes a wicked underworld, sometimes a tempting playground and arena. For generations many young consciences have experienced the concept of sin in this Castalian form. And many years later, as an adult student of history, Knecht was to perceive more distinctly that history cannot come into being without the substance and the dynamism of this sinful world of egoism and instinctuality, and that even such sublime creations as the Order were born in this cloudy torrent and sooner or later will be swallowed up by it again. This is what underlay all the powerful movements, aspirations, and upheavals in Knecht’s life. Nor was this ever merely an intellectual problem for him. Rather, it engaged his innermost self more than any other problem, and he felt it as partly his responsibility. His was one of those natures which can sicken, languish, and die when they see an ideal
