The Glass Bead Game

A Toccata by Bach

Frozen silence… Darkness prevails on darkness.
One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds
Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths,
Compound the night with day, build length and breadth,
Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts,
A loose blue atmosphere, earth’s deep dense fullness.

That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation
Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation
Ignites a gleaming terrified new world.
All changes where the seeds of light descend,
Order arises, magnificence is heard
In praise of life, of victory to light’s great end.

The mighty urge glides on, to move
Its power into all creatures’ being,
Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God’s doing:
Now joy and pain, words, art, and song,
World towering on world in arching victory throng
With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love.

Translated by Alex Page

A Dream

Guest at a monastery in the hills,
I stepped, when all the monks had gone to pray,
Into a book-lined room. Along the walls,
Glittering in the light of fading day,
I saw a multitude of vellum spines
With marvelous inscriptions. Eagerly,
Impelled by rapturous curiosity,
I picked the nearest book, and read the lines:
The Squaring of the Circle — Final Stage.
I thought: I’ll take this and read every page!
A quarto volume, leather tooled in gold,
Gave promise of a story still untold:
How Adam also ate of the other tree…
The other tree? Which one? The tree of life?
Is Adam then immortal? Now I could see
No chance had brought me to this library.
I spied the back and edges of a folio
Aglow with all the colors of the rainbow,
Its hand-painted title stating a decree:
The interrelationships of hues and sound:
Proof that for every color may be found
In music a proper corresponding key.
Choirs of colors sparkled before my eyes
And now I was beginning to surmise:
Here was the library of Paradise.
To all the questions that had driven me
All answers now could be given me.
Here I could quench my thirst to understand,
For here all knowledge stood at my command.
There was provision here for every need:
A title full of promise on each book
Responded to my every rapid look.
Here there was fruit to satisfy the greed
Of any student’s timid aspirations,
Of any master’s bold investigations.
Here was the inner meaning, here the key,
To poetry, to wisdom, and to science.
Magic and erudition in alliance
Opened the door to every mystery.
These books provided pledges of all power
To him who came here at this magic hour.

A lectern stood near by; with hands that shook
I placed upon it one enticing book,
Deciphered at a glance the picture writing,
As in a dream we find ourselves reciting
A poem or lesson we have never learned.
At once I soared aloft to starry spaces
Of the soul, and with the zodiac turned,
Where all the revelations of all races,
Whatever intuition has divined,
Millennial experience of all nations,
Harmoniously met in new relations,
Old insights with new symbols recombined,
So that in minutes or in hours as I read
I traced once more the whole path of mankind,
And all that men have ever done and said
Disclosed its inner meaning to my mind.