The Glass Bead Game

he even intended to do himself some harm. It seemed as if they were going to pay for all their faults of omission and commission in the boy’s upbringing, just when they were hoping to remedy things.

Against Knecht’s advice, he insisted that something must be done; he could not take this latest crisis passively, and worked himself up to a pitch of impatience and nervous agitation which his friend found deplorable. It was therefore decided to send messages to the homes of a few of Tito’s friends, where he sometimes stayed overnight. Knecht was relieved when Madame Designori left to attend to this, and he had Plinio to himself for a while.

“Plinio,” he said, “you look as if your son had just been carried dead into the house. He is no longer a small child and is not likely to have been run over or to have eaten deadly nightshade. So get a grip on yourself, my dear fellow. Since the boy isn’t here, permit me for a moment to teach you something in his stead. I have been observing you and find that you’re not in the best of form. The moment an athlete receives an unexpected blow or pressure, his muscles react of their own accord by making the necessary movements, stretching or contracting automatically and so helping him master the situation. You too, my pupil Plinio, the moment you received the blow — or what you exaggeratedly thought a blow — should have applied the first defensive measure against psychic assaults and resorted to slow, carefully controlled breathing. Instead you breathed like an actor when he seeks to represent extreme emotion. You are not sufficiently armored; you people in the world seem to be singularly exposed to suffering and cares. There is something helpless and touching about your state; though often, when real suffering is involved and there is meaning to such pangs, it is also magnificent. But for everyday life these protective measures are most valuable and should not be ignored. I will make sure that your son will be better armed when he needs such equipment. And now, Plinio, be so kind as to do a few exercises with me, so that I can see whether you have really forgotten it all.”

With the breathing exercises, which he guided by strictly rhythmical commands, he was able to distract Plinio from his self-induced agonies until he was willing to listen to rational arguments and dismantle the structure of alarm and anxiety he had so lavishly built. They went up to Tito’s room, where Knecht looked benignly around at the confusion of boyish possessions. He picked up a book lying on the night-table, saw a slip of paper jutting from it, and found it was a note from the vanished boy. Laughing, he handed the paper to Designori, whose expression immediately brightened. Tito had written that he was leaving at daybreak and going to the mountains alone, where he would wait at Belpunt for his new teacher. He hoped, the message said, that his parents would not mind his having this last little jaunt before his freedom was once more awfully restricted; his spirits sank when he thought of having to make this pleasant little journey accompanied by his teacher, a prisoner under supervision.

“Quite understandable,” Knecht commented. “I’ll leave for Belpunt tomorrow and will probably find the boy already there. But now you’d better go to your wife and tell her the news.”

For the rest of the day the atmosphere in the house was happy and relaxed. That evening, on Plinio’s insistence, Knecht summarized the events of the past several days, and in particular described his two conversations with Master Alexander. On that evening he also scribbled some curious lines of verse on a scrap of paper which is today in the possession of Tito Designori. That came about in the following way.

Before dinner his host had left him alone for an hour. Knecht saw a bookcase full of old books which aroused his curiosity. Idle reading was another pleasure which he had unlearned and almost forgotten in years of abstinence. This moment now reminded him intensely of his student years: to stand before a shelf of unknown books, reach out at random, and choose one or another volume whose gilt or author’s name, format or the color of the binding, appealed to him. With pleasure he glanced over the titles on the spines and saw that the shelf consisted entirely of nineteenth- and twentieth-century belles-lettres. Finally he picked out a faded cloth-bound volume whose title, Wisdom of the Brahmans, tempted him. Standing for a while, then seated, he leafed through the book, which contained many hundreds of didactic poems. It was a curious composite of learned loquacity and real wisdom, of philistinism and genuine poetry. This strange and touching book held, it seemed to him, a good deal of important esoteric philosophy, but this was almost lost in the heavyhanded treatment. The best poems were by no means the ones in which the poet tried hard to give form to a theory or a truth, but the ones in which the poet’s temperament, his capacity for love, his sincerity, humanitarianism, and deep respectability, found expression. As Knecht delved into the book, with mixed feelings of esteem and amusement, he was struck by a stanza which he absorbed with satisfaction and assent. Reading it, he nodded smilingly, as if it had been specially sent to him for this day in his life. It went:

Our days are precious but we gladly see them going
If in their place we find a thing more precious growing:
A rare, exotic plant, our gardener’s heart delighting;
A child whom we are teaching, a booklet we are writing.

He opened the drawer of the desk, found a sheet of paper, and copied out the stanza. Later he showed it to Plinio, and commented: “I liked these lines. There is something special about them; they are so dry and at the same time so deeply felt. And they so well suit me and my momentary situation and mood. Although I am not a gardener and don’t intend to devote my days to the cultivation of an exotic plant, I am a teacher, and am on the way to my task, to the child I mean to teach. How I am looking forward to it! As for the author of these lines, the poet Ruckert, I would suppose he possessed all three of these noble passions: that of gardener, teacher, and writer. I suppose the third ranked highest with him; he shapes the stanza so that it receives the maximum stress, and dotes so on the object of his passion that he becomes positively tender and calls it not a book, but a booklet. How touching that is.”

Plinio laughed. “Who knows,” he observed, “whether the diminutive is not just a rhymester’s trick because he needed a two-syllable instead of a one-syllable word there.”

“Let us not underestimate him,” Knecht replied. “A man who wrote tens of thousands of lines of verse in his lifetime would not be driven into a corner by shabby metrical necessity. No, just listen to it, how loving it sounds, and at the same time just a little sheepish: a booklet we are writing. Perhaps it isn’t only his affection that transforms the book into a booklet. Perhaps he also meant it apologetically. Probably this poet was so devoted to his writing that now and again he felt his own passion for making books as a kind of vice. In that case the word booklet would have not only the sense of an endearment, but also a propitiating, disarming connotation, as when a gambler invites someone to a ‘little game’ or a drinker asks for ‘just a drop.’ Well, these are speculations. In any case, I find myself in full agreement and sympathy with the poet about the child he wishes to teach and the booklet he wants to write. Because I am not only familiar with the passion for teaching; I’m also rather inclined to do a little scribbling too. And now that I have liberated myself from officialdom, I am much drawn to the idea of using my leisure and good spirits one of these days to write a book — or rather, a booklet, a little thing for friends and those who share my views.”

“What about?” Designori asked with curiosity.

“Oh, anything, the subject would not matter. It would only be a pretext for me to seclude myself and enjoy the happiness of having a great deal of leisure. The tone would be what mattered to me, a proper mean between the solemn and the intimate, earnestness and jest, a tone not of instruction, but of friendly communication and discourse on various things I think I have learned. I don’t suppose the way this poet Friedrich Ruckert mixes instruction and thinking, information and casual talk, would be my way, and yet something about it appeals strongly to me; it is personal and yet not arbitrary, playful and yet submits to strict rules of form. I like that. Well, for the present I shall not enter upon the joys and problems of writing little books; I have to keep my mind on other tasks. But some time later, I imagine, I might very well experience the joys of authorship, of the sort I foresee: an easygoing, but careful examination of things not just for my solitary pleasure, but always with a few good friends and readers in mind.”

Next morning Knecht set out for Belpunt. Designori had wanted to accompany him, but Knecht had firmly vetoed the idea, and when the father attempted to press it, had almost snapped at him. “The boy will have enough to do coming to terms with this nuisance of a new teacher,” he said curtly. “To foist his father on him at the same time would scarcely help things.”

As he rode through the brisk September morning in the car Plinio had hired for him, his good humor of yesterday returned. He chatted frequently with the chauffeur, asking him to stop or drive slowly every so often