The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi)

Table of contents :
(Title)......Page 6
Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski......Page 8
Contents......Page 24
The Glass Bead Game: A General Introduction to Its History for the Layman......Page 26
The Life of Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht......Page 64
1. The Call......Page 66
2. Waldzell......Page 105
3. Years of Freedom......Page 129
4. Two Orders......Page 164
5. The Mission......Page 195
6. Magister Ludi......Page 223
7. In Office......Page 251
8. The Two Poles......Page 281
9. A Conversation......Page 305
10. Preparations......Page 338
11. The Circular Letter......Page 363
12. The Legend......Page 389
Joseph Knecht's Posthumous Writings......Page 446
The Poems of Knecht's Student Years......Page 448
1. The Rainmaker......Page 465
2. The Father Confessor......Page 507
3. The Indian Life......Page 539

Citation preview

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

translated from the German DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL

by Richard and Clara Winston with a Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski

Holt, Rinehart and Winston New Yorlc, Chicago, San, Francisco

THE GLASS BEAD GAME ( MAGI�TER

LUDI)

HERMANN HESSE

ENGLISH TRANSLATION COPYRIGHT © 1969 by HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON, INC. Originally published in Geiman under the title of Das Gla sperlenspiel, Copyright 1943 by Fretz & Wasmuth Verlag AG Zlirich FOREWORD by Theodore Ziolkowski Copyright© 1969 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form. Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart and Winston of Canada, Limited. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-80343 First Edition SBN: 03-081851-6 (Trade edition) SBN: 03-084066-X (Text edition) Printed in the United States of America Designed by Patricia de Groot

Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse's last major work,

appeared in Switzerland in 1943. When Thomas Mann, then living in California, received the two volumes of that first edition, he was dumbfounded by the conspicuous parallels between Hesse's "Tentative Sketch of the Life of Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht" and the novel that he himself was writing, Doctor Faustus ( 1947). For a11 their differences in mood, style and theme, both works employ a similar fiction: a pleasant though somewhat pompous narrator recounts, with a sympathy matched only by his pedantry, the life of a man whom he loves and admires. Since in each case the narrator is incapable of fully comprehending the problem­ atic genius of his biographical subject, an ironic tension is produced between the limited perspective of the narrator and the fuller vision that he unwittingly conveys to the reader. Both authors were obsessed, in addition, with the

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FOREWORD

self-destructive course of modem civilization, and this con­ cern pervades both novels. But Mann's view is more imme­ diate. His narrator, Serenus Zeitblorn, can see and hear the exploding bombs of World War Two as he writes, and the spectacular career of the composer Adrian Leverktihn par­ allels with ominous precision the history of Germany from the declining Empire through the shortlived brilliance of the Weimar Republic to the raging madness of National Socialism. In Hesse's novel, in contrast, that same period is described with the detachment of a narrator looking back at the "Age of the Feuilleton" from a vantage point in the distant future. Unlike Mann's Leverktihn, Hesse's (Joseph Knecht succeeds in analyzing the dangers of an excessive aestheticism and acts to avert the catastrophe of intellectual irresponsibility) In both novels, finally, the authors slyly weave their experience of our culture into a pastiche of hidden quotations and characters a clef. Thomas Mann, immediately sensing that the serious theme of Hesse's novel was enclosed within "a cunning artistic joke," recognized the source of its humor in "the parody of biography and the grave scholarly attitude." But people won't dare to laugh, he wrote Hesse. "And you will be secretly annoyed at their dead-earnest respect." (Hesse was pleased that his friend had put a finger on the comic aspect of the novel; but Mann's prediction was correct. In the quarter-century since its publication, The Glass Bead Game has enjoyed the adulation customarily awarded to literary "classics." Indeed, largely on its merits Hesse re­ ceived in 1946 the Nobel Prize for which Mann, among others, had repeatedly nominated him. Hesse's opus mag­ num was one of the first works by a distinguished emigre to be published in Germany after the war, and it has been regularly reprinted there since 1946. The book was duti­ fully translated into English, Swedish, French, Spanish, Italian, and other languages. But the novel, whose title has supplied us with one of those imagistically suggestive catch­ words for our age, like "the Waste Land" or "the Magic Mountain," has suffered the fate of many classics-it is less

FOHEWOHD

ix

frequently read than cited, more often studied than appre­ ciated. In Germany many readers, blandly ignoring the im­ plicit criticism in the novel, tended to see in Hesse's cultural province nothing but a welcome utopian escape from the harsh postwar realities. More disceming European critics have usually been so preoccupied with the fashionably grave implications that they have neither laughed at its humor nor smiled at its ironies. � In part these one-sided readings are understandable, for the humor is often hidden in private jokes of the sort to which HessE� became increasingly partial in his later years''. The games begin on the title page, for the motto attributed to "Albertus Secundus" is actually fictitious. Hesse wrote the motto himself and had it translated into Latin by two former schoolmates, who are cited in Latin abbreviation as the editors: Franz Schall ("noise" or Clangor) and Feinhals ("slender neck" or Collo fino ). The book is full of this "onomastic comedy" that appealed to Thomas Mann, also a master of the art. Thus Carlo Ferromonte is an italianized form of the name of the author's nephew, Karl Isenberg, who assisted Hesse with the music history that is interwoven with the history of the Glass Bead Game. The "inventor" of the Game, Bastian Perrot of Calw, gets his name from Heinrich Perrot, the owner of a machine shop where Hesse once worked for a year after he dropped out of school. The figure of Thomas von dcr Trave is a detailed and easily recognizable portrait of Thomas Mann, who was born in the town of Liibeck on the river Travc. In the person of Fritz Tegularius, Hesse has given us his interpretation of the bril­ liant but unbalanced character of Friedrich Nietzsche. And Tegularius' spiritual opponent in the novel, Father Jacobus, borrows some of his words and most of his ideas from Nietzsche's antagonist, the historian Jakob Burckhardt. The reader who fails to catch these sometimes obscure references is not only missing much of the fun of the book, he is also unaware of its implications in the realm of cultural history and criticism. The reception of The Glass Bead Game in this country

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FOREWORD

has been affected by other factors as well. The book has been available since 1949 under the misleading title Magister Ludi. But if it failed to make an impact, this was due equally to the translation by Mervyn SavilL which fails to bring out its irony, and to the fluctuations of Hesse's repu­ tation in the United States. Although Hesse's stature was recognized in Europe ( where he was praised by such admirers as Thomas Mann, Andre Gide, and T.S. Eliot) for some thirty years before he received the Nobel Prize, Time magazine noted in 1949 that his works were still virtually unknown here. His eightieth birthday, widely celebrated abroad, passed unnoticed in the United States in 1957. And when Hesse died in 1962, a New York Times obituary stated that he was "largely unapproachable" for American readers. This neglect is due in part to the introspective, lyrical qual­ ity of his novels, which depart radically from the more realistic tradition that dominated American fiction between the world wars. But another circumstance is probably more important in accounting for the lack of interest in his works for a good fifteen years after he received the Nobel Prize. Hesse's novels fictionalize the admonitions of an outsider who urges us to question accepted values, to rebel against the system, to challenge conventional "reality" in the light of higher ideals. For almost two decades after World War Two our society was characterized largely by the button­ down collar mentality of a silent generation whose goal it was to become a part of the establishment and to reap its benefits as rapidly as possible. Such ages have little use for critics of the system and prophets of the ideal. But times have changed, and Hesse has suddenly become -to use a current shibboleth-relevant. But relevance re­ sides in the mind of the perceiver, and the under-thirty generation that has embraced Hesse in the sixties as an un­ derground classic is better known for its rebelliousness than for its sense of irony. As a result, the Hesse cult in the United States has revolved primarily around such painfully humorless works as Demian and Siddhatlui, in which read­ ers have discovered an anticipation of their infatuation with

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xi

Eastern mysticism, pacifism, the search for personal values, and revolt against the establishment. Those who have gone on to Steppenwolf have greeted it as a psychedelic orgy of sex, drugs, and jazz, but have conveniently overlooked the ironic attitude through which those superficial effects are put back into perspective by the author. It was partly as a reaction against such self-indulgent interpretations, which he encountered as much as forty years ago, that Hesse un­ dertook The Glass Bead Game. \Vhat is the "Glass Bead Game"? In the idyllic poem "Hours in the Garden" ( 1936), which he wrote during the composition of his novel, Hesse speaks of "a game of thoughts called the Glass Bead Game" that he practiced while burning leaves in his garden. As the ashes filter down through the grate, he says, "I hear music and see men of the past and future. I see wise men and poets and scholars and artists harmoniously building the hundred-gated cathe­ dral of Mind." These lines depict as personal experience that intellectual pastime that Hesse, in his novel, was to define as "the unio mystica of all separate members of the Universitas Litterarum" and that he bodied out symbolically in the form of an elaborate Game performed according to the strictest rules and with supreme virtuosity by the man­ darins of his spiritual province. This is really all that we need to know. The Glass Bead Game is an act of mental synthesis through which the spiritual values of all ages are perceived as simultaneously present and vitally alive. It was with full artistic consciousness that Hesse described the Game in such a way as to make it seem vividly real within the novel and yet to defy any specific imitation in reality. The humorless readers who complained to Hesse that they had invented the Game before he put it into his novel­ Hesse actually received letters asserting thisl-completely missed the point. For the Game is of course purely a sym­ bol of the human imagination and emphatically not a pat­ entable "Monopoly" of the mind. The Game, in turn, is the focal point and raison d'etre of an entire province of the spirit called Castalia ( from the

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Pamassian spring sacred to the Muses) and located in an unspecified future. ( Hesse has indicated that he thought of his narrator as writing around the beginning of the twenty­ fifth century.) But again Hesse makes it clear that he is not predicting a specific utopia but, rather, trying to represent the model of a reality that has actually existed from time to time in such orders as the Platonic academics or yoga schools. It is "a spiritual culture worth living in and serv­ ing," he explained to one correspondent. Castalia, in other words, represents any human institution devoted wholly and exclusively to affairs of the mind and imagination. As such, the spiritual province of the novel constitutes the goal of a search upon which Hesse had been embarked for many years. But this last novel is at the same time the document of an intense personal crisis, for it depicts not only the ful­ fillment of a long sought ideal, but also its ultimate rejection. Hesse's literary cai-eer parallels the development of mod­ em literature from a fin de siecle aestheticism through ex pressionism to a contemporary sense of human commitment. Born in the Black Forest town of Calw in 1877, Hesse in his youth reflected the neo-roruantieism then prevalent among many writers of his generation in England, France, and Ger­ many. The :!listy yearnings of his earliest stories and poems display the frank escapism of a young man who is not at all at home in the bourgeois reality of \Vilhelmine Germany and who projects his dreams into a romantic kingdom that he locates, according to the title of one work, "An Hour beyond Midnight." But the success of his first major novel, Peter Camenzind ( 1904), reconciled the young writer, at least temporarily, with a world that was prepared to bestow upon him the material rewards of literary fame. From aes­ theticism he shifted to the melancholy realism that marked his next poems and stories as well as the novels Under tT1e Wheel ( 19o6), Ge1trude ( 1910), and Rossfwlde ( 1914). Putting aside his romantic longings, he nssumed the role of a settled family man who advocated in his fictions a bitter­ sweet doctrine of renunciation and compromise. But the war brought a radical change. Hesse, who had

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xiii

been living in Switzerland since 1912, found that his out­ spoken pacifism alienated many of his former friends and readers, who succumbed to the wave of martial exhilaration sweeping over Europe in August of 1914. Meanwhile, family and marital difficulties shattered the illusion of a happy life that he had carefully sought to preserve for some ten years. A lengthy psychoanalytic treatment at the hands of a dis­ ciple of Jung in 1916 and 1917 completed his disillusionment with his present state and the process of psychic re-evalua­ tion. Hesse came to the conclusion that he had been living a lie and denying the authentic impulses of his own being. In 1919 he moved to the village of Montagnola, near Lugano in southern S\vitzcrland, where he lived in relative seclusion until his death in 1962. Here he wrote most of the major works for which he has subsequently become famous and in which he sought to discover a more mature ideal of the spirit to replace that "reality" with which he had become disenchanted. In several essays that he wrote around 1920--most nota­ bly in pieces on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky-Hesse argued that men must seek a new morality that, transcending the conventional dichotomy of good and evil, will embrace all extremes of life in one unified vision. A later essay, "A Bit of Theology" ( 1932), outlines the three stage progression toward this goal. The child, he says, is born into a state of unity with all being. It is only when the child is taught about good and evil that he advances to a second level of individuation characterized by despair and alienation; for he has been made aware of laws and moral codes, but feels incapable of adhering to the arbitrary standards established by conventional religious or moral systems since they ex­ clude so much of what seems perfectly natural. A few men -like the hero of Siddhartha or those whom Hesse calls "the Immortals" in Steppenwolf-manage to attain a third level of awareness where they are once again capable of accepting all being. But most men arc condemned to live on the second level, sustained only by a sense of humor through which they neutralize oppressive reality and by an

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act of the imagination through which they share from time to time in the kingdom of the Immortals, the realm of spirit. Hesse's novels trace this struggle in the lives of heroes set against backgrounds from different ages of civilization. In each case the triadic rhythm of development is the same; only the historical circumstances differ. In Demian ( 1919) the milieu is that of the student generation of the turbulent years immediately preceding World War I. The hero of Siddhartha ( 1922) progresses through the three stages in the classical India of Buddha. Steppenwolf ( 1927) ironi­ cally depicts the dilemma of a European intellectual con­ fronted with the tawdry pop culture of the twenties, while the dual protagonists of Narcissus and Goldmund ( 1930) act out their individuation in the waning of the Middle Ages. In the thinly veiled symbolic autobiography of The Journey to the East ( 1932), finally, the hero joins a League of Journeyers to the East in a timeless present set sometime after "the Great War." Each novel postulates the possibility of a spiritual kingdom toward which the hero strives, whether he reaches it or not. Castalia is clearly another attempt, this time projected into the future, to represent this same ideal: a symbolic realm where all spiritual values are kept alive and present, specifica11y through the practice of the Glass Bead Game. In this sense, then, the novel was originally envisaged as yet another variation in Hesse's continuing search for a spiritual dimension of life, for it depicts a future society in which the realm of Culture is set apa1t to pursue its goals in splendid isolation, unsullied by the "reality" that Hesse had grown to distrust. The Cl.ass Bead Game was a continuation and intensifica­ tion in another sense as well. Hesse was aware of the fact that his earlier novels had employed the same basic pat­ tern of individual development against different historical backgrounds. He now decided to incorporate this structural tendency into a single new novel. The idea that came to him, he wrote to a friend in 1945, was "reincarnation as a mode of expression for stability in the midst of Hux." Long

FOREWORD

xv

before he began writing, he remarks, he had in mind "an individual but supratemporal life . . . a man who experi­ ences in a series of rebirths the grand epochs in the history of mankind." The novel, in other words, was to consist of a number of parallel lives, ranging through time, presumably, from the pre-historic past to the remote future. But the em­ phasis was to be distributed evenly among the parts. "The book is going to contain several biographies of the same man, who lives on earth at different times-or at least thinks that he had such existences," he wrote to his sister in 1934. Around this time Hesse wrote and published separately three such biographies: one about a prehistoric rainmaker; one set in the Golden Age of India; and a third depicting an episode from the patristic period of the early Christian church. ( A fourth life, set among the Pietists of eighteenth­ century Swabia, occupied Hesse for almost a year, but was never published during his lifetime.) As we now read the novel in its final form, of course, the arrangement of the parts is different. The biography of Joseph Knecht, which was to have been but the last in a long series of parallel lives, has grown to comprise the twelve central chapters of the book. The history of the Glass Bead Game and the organization of the cultural prov­ ince are sketched in a lengthy introduction, and the three parallel lives, along with some poems, are added in an ap­ pendix as school exercises of young Knecht. Why this shift in plan, which seems to have taken place in the mid-thirties after parts of the book had already been written and pub­ lished? At first it was simply a matter of expediency. Hesse found that he could best render "the inner reality of Cas­ talia" through the fi gure of a dominating central figure. "And so Knecht stepped into the center of the narrative." In fact, in the first three chapters of his biography we get a far clearer idea of the Castalian ideal at its finest than in the narrator's more abstract introduction. But Joseph Knecht ends by defecting from Castalia, a conclusion that was far from Hesse's mind when he first dreamed of this new version of the spiritual kingdom and

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when he wrote the first of the lives. At least two factors con­ tributed to change Hesse's attitude toward the idea] which he had been striving to portray in so many works for almost twenty years. First, the sheer reality of contemporary events -the disintegration of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the horrors of Nazism-opened Hesse's eyes to the failure of the inte1lectuals and convinced him of the futility of any spiritual realm divorced wholly from contemporary social reality. His ideal had to give way, he wrote, "under the pressures of the moment." This is the meaning that emerges clearly from young Knecht's debates with that emissary from the outside world, Plinio Designori, who ar­ gues that a life consecrated exclusive]y to the mind is not only unfruitful, but also dangerous. Fritz Tcgularius, the brilliant scholar who is totally unfit for any position of re­ sponsibility in the order, is the living example of the excesses of an aestheticism cultivated in isolation from reality. Sec­ ondly, Hesse's growing uneasiness regarding an absolute spiritual kingdom was substantiated by his study of Burck­ hardt's writings. It is Burckhardt, in the person of Father Jacobus, who convinces Knecht-Hesse that even the most perfect spiritual institution, in the eyes of history, is a rela­ tive organism. In order to survive it must adapt itself to the social exigencies of the times. The central chapters of the biography, therefore, recapitulate in fictional form Hesse's own shift from his original belief in a haughty Nietzschean elitism to a more compassionate social consciousness shaped by Burckhardt's historicism. The ideological tensions be­ tween Knecht, Plinio, and Father Jacobus reflect on the level of character the areas of Culture, State, and Church, whose complex interrelationships Burckhardt investigated in his Observations on \Vorlcl History ( a course of lectures de­ livered in 1870-1871 and posthumously published in 1905). Seen in this light and put into the contemporary idiom, Knccht's life represents typologically the radicalization of the intellectua1, who moves from the vita contemplativa not to the opposite extreme of the vitcL activa, but to an inter­ mediate position of responsible action controlled by dis-

FOREWORD

xvii

passionate reflection. It is essential to understand that Knecht's defection from Castalia, far from implying any repudiation of the spiritual ideal, simply calls for a new consciousness of the social responsibility of the intellectual. Knecht remains true to his name, which means "servant." Now his service takes on a fuller meaning. By quitting Castalia, Knecht fulfills two functions. He serves Castalia by warning it, through his example, to forsake its posture of arrogant and self-indulgent autonomy, which can lead ultimately only to its destruction. And he makes a commit­ ment by putting spirit and intellect at the service of the world outside in the person of his pupil, the youth Tito. Knecht's death has been variously interpreted, and cer­ tainly that final scene has symbolic overtones that expand its dimensions. But Hesse made its basic meaning quite clear in a letter of 1947. "He leaves behind a Tito for whom this sacrificial death of a man vastly superior to him wilJ remain forever an admonition and an example." The spir­ itual ideal, once attained, has now been put back into the service of life. The Glass Bead Game, then, is indispensable for a com­ plete understanding of Hesse's thought. It is possible to read Siddhartha as a self-centered pursuit of nirvana, but Joseph Knecht gives up his life out of a sense of commitment to a fellow human being. It is possible to see in Steppenwolf a heady glorification of hip or even hippie culture, but Joseph Knecht shows that the only true culture is that which re­ sponds to the social requirements of the times. The Glass Bead Game, finally, makes it clear that Hesse advocates thoughtful commitment over self-indulgent solipsism, re­ sponsible action over mindless revolt. For Joseph Knecht is no impetuous radical thrusting non negotiable demands upon the institution and demanding amnesty from the consequences of his deeds. He attains through disciplined achievement the highest status in the Order and commits himself to action only after thoughtfully assessing its im­ plications for Castalia and the consequences for himself. Above all-for the novel is not a philosophical tract or a

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FOREWORD

political pamphlet, but a work of art-Hesse suggests that revolt need not be irrational and violent, that indeed it is more effective when it is rational and ironic. This is the value of the temporal distance, the double perspective vouchsafed by the fiction. In the Introduction, looking back at our own civilization from the vantage point of the future, we see it in all its glaring self-contradictions. At the same time, we look ahead to the Castalia of the future, where the problems of our age are displayed in a realistic abstraction that permits us to consider them rationally and dispassion­ ately. Castalia has more than a little in common with the intellectual and cultural institutions of the sixties, to the extent that they have become autonomous empires cut off from the social needs of mankind and cultivating their own Glass Bead Games in glorious isolation. And Knecht's con­ viction that a State ruled without the tempering influence of Culture is doomed to brutishness reflects a prevalent con­ temporary concern: our computerized society has become so bureaucratically impersonal that it is no longer guided sufficiently by forces that are in the highest sense humane. The longer we consider Hesse's novel, the more clearly we realize that it is not a telescope focused on an imaginary future, but a mirror reflecting with disturbing sharpness a paradigm of present reality. All of these considerations justify a new translation of Hesse's late masterpiece. Our society has caught up with his vision. And Richard and Clara Winston have produced a translation that is eminently usable for this age. I do not mean merely that their translation is "correct" in avoiding the many mistakes of the earlier English version. More im­ portant: they have succeeded in catching the sense and style of the book. They realize that with this last novel Hesse shifted his focus from the individual to the institu­ tion; hence they have not made the mistake of calling it Magister Ludi, which would suggest that it is simply an­ other German Bildungsroman, a pretty fiction of personal development unrelated to the more general concerns of so­ ciety. Instead, they have reinstated the title that Hesse gave

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xix

to the original ( Das Gl.asperlenspiel), which sums up in a word the glory and tragedy of culture in our time. By cap­ turing the monkish tone of the narrator, who repeats him­ self with clerical pedantry, the translation opens up the irony of the work. For the Castalian self-obsession from which Knecht defects is nowhere more evident than in the smug complacency of the narrator in the Introduction and opening chapters. Ironically, as he learns to appreciate the meaning of Knecht's life by writing his biography, the nar­ rator assumes a more humane and, in the finest sense, "spir­ itual" tone, thus vindicating Knecht's action. Perhaps even the worst translation could not conceal the "message" of Hesse's novel. But only a subtle, sensitive one can render what Thomas Mann called "the parody of biog­ raphy and the grave scholarly attitude." It is easy, too easy, to be sober and grave. That is in fact the most serious shortcoming of Hesse's most ardent admirers at present. This new translation of The Glass Bead Game offers the American reader the opportunity, as Thomas Mann sug­ gested, to dare to laugh. If parody alone can adequately render the reality of our times, only irony offers us the free­ dom and detachment that are the essential condition of re­ sponsible analysis and action. This is the final aesthetic meaning of The Glass Bead Game.

May 1969

THEODORE ZIOLKOWSKI

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

A tentative sketch of the life of Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht together with Knecht 's posthumous writings edited by HERMANN HESSE

dedicated to the Journeyers to the East

CONTENTS The Glass Bead Game: A General Introduction to Its History for the Layman The Life of Magister Ludi Joseph Knecht

7

45

1 The Call 47 2 Waldzell 86 3 Years of Freedom 110 4 Two Orders 145 5 The Mission 176 6 Magister Ludi 204 7 In Office 232 8 The Two Poks 262 9 A Conversation 286 10 Preparations 3 19 11 The Circular Letter 344 12 The Legend 37°

Joseph Knecht's Posthumous Writings The Poems of Knecht's Student Years The Three Lives 1 The Rainmaker 446 2 The Father Confessor 488 3 The Indian Life 520

427

THE GLASS BEAD GAME: A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO ITS HISTORY I?QR THE LAYMAN

. . . Non entia enim licet quodammodo levibusque ho­ minibus facilius atque incuriosius verbis reddere quam entia, veruntamen pio diligentique rerum scriptori plane aliter res se habet: nihil tantum repugnat ne verbis illustretur, at nihil adeo necesse est ante ho1dnum oculos proponere ut certas quasdam res, quas esse neque demonstrari neque probari potest, quae contra eo ipso, quod pii diligentesque viri illas quasi ut entia tractant, enti nascendique facultati paululum appropinquant. ALBERTUS SECUNDUS

tract. de cristall. spirit. ed. Clangor ot Collof. lib. I, cap. 28. In Joseph Knecht's holograph translation:

. . . For although in a certain sense and for light-minded persons non existent things can be more easily and irrespon­ sibly represented in words than existing things, for the seri­ ous and conscientious historian it is just the reverse. Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to the possibility of being born.

It is our intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we have been able to collect con­ cerning Joseph Knecht, or Ludi Magister Josephus III, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead Game. We are not unaware that this endeavor runs, or seems to run, somewhat counter to the prevailing laws and usages of our intellectual life. For, after all, obliteration of individuality, the maximum integration of the individual into the hier­ archy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling principles. And in the course of our long tradition this principle has been observed with such thoroughness that today it is exceedingly difficult, and in many cases completely impossible, to obtain biographical and psy­ chological information on various persons who have served the hierarchy in exemplary fashion. In very many cases it is no longer even possible to determine their original names.

12

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

The hierarchic organization cherishes the ideal of anonym­ ity, and comes very close to the realization of that ideal. This fact remains one of the abiding characteristics of in­ tellectual life in our Province. If we have nevertheless persisted in our endeavor to de­ termine some of the facts about the life of Ludi Magister Josephus III, and at least to sketch the outlines of his character, we believe we have done so not out of any cult of personality, nor out of disobedience to the customs, but on the contrary solely in the service of truth and scholar­ ship. It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis. We uphold and venerate the idea that under­ lies the anonymity of our authorities and our intellectual life. But a glance at the early history of that life of the mind we now lead, namely, a glance at the development of the Glass Bead Game, shows us irrefutably that every phase of its development, every extension, every change, every essential segment of its history, whether it be seen as progressive or conservative, bears the plain imprint of the person who introduced the change. He was not nec essarily its sole or actual author, but he was the instru­ ment of transformation and perfection. Certainly, what nowadays we understand by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and historians of earlier times meant by it. For them, and espe­ cially for the writers of those days who had a distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all original and idiosyncratic quali­ ties to achieve the greatest possible integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal. If wc look closely into the matter we shall see that the ancients had already perceived this ideal. The figure of the Sage or Perfect One among the ancient Chinese, for ex­ ample, or the ideal of Socratic ethics, can scarcely be dis-

A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

13

tinguished from our present ideal; and many a great or­ ganization, such as tl1e Roman Church in tlle eras of its greatest power, has recognized similar principles. Indeed, many of its greatest figures, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, appear to us-like early Greek sculptures-more the classi­ cal representatives of types than individuals. Nevertheless, in the period before tlle reformation of the intellectual life, a reformation which began in the twentieth century and of which we are the heirs, that authentic ancient ideal had patently come near to being entirely lost '\Ve are astonished when the biographies of those times rather garrulously relate how many brothers and sisters the hero had, or what psychological scars and blotches were left behind from his casting off the skins of childhood and puberty, from the struggle for position and the search for love. \Ve moderns are not interested in a hero's pathology or family history, nor in his drives, his digestion, and how he sleeps. Not even his intellectual background-the influence upon his development of his favorite studies, favorite reading, and so on-is particularly important to us. For us, a man is a hero and deserves special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which make for the savor and worth of the individual. And if conflicts arise between the individual and the hierarchy, we regard these very con­ flicts as a touchstone for the stature of a personality. We do not approve of the rebel who is driven by his desires and passions to infringements upon law and order; we find all the more worthy of our reverence the memory of those who tragically sacrificed themselves for the greater whole. These latter are the heroes, and in the case of these truly exemplary men, interest in the individual, in the name, face, and gesture, seems to us permissible and natural. For we do not regard even the perfect hierarchy, the most harmonious organization, as a machine put together out of lifeless units that count for nothing in themselves, but as a

14

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

living body, formed of parts and animated by organs which possess their own nature and freedom. Every one of them shares in the miracle of life. In this •sense, then, we have endeavored to obtain information on the life of Joseph Knecht, Master of the Glass Bead Game, and especially to col1ect everything written by himse]f. We have, moreover, obtained several manuscripts we consider worth reading. What we have to say about Knecht's personality and life is surely familiar in whole or in part to a good many mem­ bers of the Order, especially the Glass Bead Game players, and for this reason among others our book is not addressed to this circle alone, but is intended to appeal more widely to sympathetic readers. For the narrower circle, our book would need neither introduction nor commentary. But since we also wish our hero's life and writings to be studied outside the Order, we arc confronted with the somewhat difficult task of prefacing our book with a brief popular introduction, for that less­ prepared reader, into the meaning and history of the Glass Bead Game. We stress that this introduction is intended only for popular consumption and makes no claim whatso­ ever to clarifying the questions being discussed within the Order itself on the problems and history of the Game. The time for an objective account of that subject is still far in the future. Let no one, therefore, expect from us a complete history and theory of the Glass Bead Caine. Even authors of higher rank and competence than ourself would not be capable of providing that at the present time. That task must remain reserved to later ages, if the sources and the intcllectua1 prerequisites for the task have not previously been lost. Still less is our essay intended as a textbook of the Glass Bead Game; indeed, no such thing will ever be written. The only way to learn the rules of this Game of games is to take the usual prescribed course, which requires many years; and none of the initiates could ever possibly have any in­ terest in making these rules easier to learn. These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game,

A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

15

constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and mts, but especially mathematics and music ( and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly dis­ ciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property-on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this in­ strument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. These manuals, pedals, and stops arc now fixed. Changes in their number and order, and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except in theory. Any enrichment of the language of the Game by addition of new contents is sub­ ject to the strictest conceivable control by the directorate of the Game. On the other hand, within this fixed structure, or to abide by our image, within the complicated mecha­ nism of this giant organ, a whole universe of possibilities and combinations is available to the individual player. For even two out of a thousand stringently played games to resemble each other more than superficially is hardly possible. Even if it should so happen that two players by chance were to choose precisely the same small assortment of themes for the content of their Game, these two Games could present an entirely different appearance and run an entirely different course, depending on the qualities of mind, character, mood, and virtuosity of the players. How far back the historian wishes to place the origins

16

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, a t least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There arc hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis's hallucinatory visions. This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a tmiversitas litterarmn, every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation be­ tween science and a1t or science and religion. Men like Abelard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in concentric systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences. In that age in which music and mathematics almost simultaneously attained clnssical heights, appronchcs and cross-fertilizations between the two disciplines occurred frequcutly. And two centuries earlier we find in Nicholas of Cues sentences of the same tenor, such as this: "The mind adapts itself to potentiality in order to measure every­ thing in the mode of potentiality, and to absolute necessity in order to mcnsurc everything in the mode of unity nnd simplidty as God does, nnd to the necessity of nexus in order to measure everything with respect to its peculiar nature; finally, it adapts itself to determinate potentiality in order to measure everything with respect tu its existence. But furthermore the mind also measures symbolically, by

A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

17

comparison, as when it employs numerals and geometric fi gures and equates other things with them." Incidentally, this is not the only one of Nicholas's ideas that ahnost seems to suggest our Glass Bead Game, or cor­ responds to and springs from a similar branch of the imag­ ination as the play of thought which occurs in the Game. Many similar echoes can be found in his writings. His pleasure in mathematics also, and his delight and skill in using constructions and axioms of Euclidean geometry as similes to clarify theological and philosophical concepts, likewise appear to be very close to the mentality of the Game. At times even his peculiar Latin ( abounding in words of his own coinage, whose meaning, however, was perfectly plain to any Latin scholar) calls to mind the improvisatory agility of the Game's language. As the epigraph of our treatise may already have sug­ gested, Albertus Secundus deserves an equal place among the ancestors of the Glass Bead Game. And we suspect, although we cannot prove this by citations, that the idea of the Game also dominated the minds of those learned musicians of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who based their musical compositions on mathe­ matical speculations. Here and there in the ancient litera­ tures we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured princes. These might take the form of chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to their usual functions. And of course everyone has heard those fables and legends from the form­ ative years of all civilizations which ascribe to music powers far greater than those of any mere art: the capacity to control men and nations. These accounts make of music a kind of secret regent, or a lawbook for men and their governments. From the most ancient days of China to the myths of the Greeks we find the concept of an ideal, heavenly life for men under the hegemony of music. The Glass Bead Game is intimately bound up with this cult of music ( "in

18

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

eternal transmutations the secret power of song greets us here below," says Novalis). Although we thus recognize the idea of the Game as eter­ nally present, and therefore existent in vague stirrings long before it became a reality, its realization in the form we know it nevertheless has its speci£c history. We shall now attempt to give a •brief account of the most important stages in that history. The beginnings of the intellectual movement whose fruits are, among many others, the establishment of the Order and the Glass Bead Game itself, may be traced back to ,a period which Plinius Ziegenhalss, the historian of literature, designated as the Age of the Feuilleton, by which name it has been known ever since. Such tags are pretty, but dangerous; they constantly tempt us to a biased view of the era in question. And as a matter of fact the Age of the Feuilleton was by no means uncultured; it was not even intellectually impoverished. But if we may believe Ziegenhalss, that age appears to have had only the dimmest notion of what to do with culture. Or rather, it did not know how to assign culture its proper place within the economy of life and the nation. To be frank, we really arc very poorly informed about that era, even though it is the soil out of which almost everything that distinguishes our cultural life today has grown. It was, according to Ziegenhalss, an era emphatically "bourgeois" and given to an almost untrammeled individu­ alism. If in order to suggest the atmosphere we cite some of its features from Ziegcnhalss' description, we may at least do so with the confidence that these features have not been invented, badly drawn, or grossly exaggerated. For the great scholar has documented them from a vast number of literary and other sources. We take our cue from this scholar, who so far has been the sole serious investigator of the Fcuillctonistic Age. As we read, we should remember that it is easy and foolish to sneer at the mistakes or barbarities of remote ages.

A GENERAL INTRODUCTION

19

Since the end of the Middle Ages, intellectual life in Europe seems to have evolved along two major lines. The first of these was the liberation of thought ,and belief from the sway of all authority. In practice this meant the struggle of Reason, which at last felt it had come of age and won its independence, against the domination of the Roman Church. The second trend, on the other hand, was the covert but passionate search for a means to confer legiti­ macy on this freedom, for a new and sufficient authority arising out of Reason itself. We oan probably generalize and say that Mind has by and large won this often strangely contradictory battle for two aims basically at odds with each other. Has the gain been worth the countless victims? Has our present structure of the life of the mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long enough, to justify as worthwhile sacrifices all the sufferings, convulsions, and abnormalities: the trials of heretics, the burnings at stake, the many "geniuses" who ended in madness or suicide? For us, it is not permissible to ask these questions. History is as it has happened. Whether it was good, whether it would have been better not to have happened, whether we will or will not acknowledge that it has had "meaning"-all this is irrelevant. Thus those struggles for the "freedom" of the human intellect likewise "happened," and subsequently, in the oourse of the aforementioned Age of the Feuilleton, men came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they could stand. For while they had overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State partially, they had not succeeded in formu­ lating an authentic law they could respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy. Ziegenhalss recounts some truly astonishing examples of the intellect's debasement, venal­ ity, and self-betrayal during that period. We must confess that we cannot provide an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an un­ commonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were

20

THE GLASS BEAD GAME

produced by the millions, and were ,a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of eu1ture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the eleverer among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegcnhalss, at any rate, eontends that many such picecs are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufaetured artieles do indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be under­ stood until the key is found again. The producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the newspapers; in other eases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding title of "writer," but a great many of them seem to have belonged to the scholar elass. Quite a few were celebrated university pro­ fessors. Among the favorite subjeets of such essays were anec­ dotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and women. They bore such titles as "Fricdrieh Nietzsehe and Women's Fashions of 1870," or "The Com­ poser Rossini's Favorite Dishes," or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives of Great Courtesans," and so on. Another popular type of artiele was the historieal baekground piece on what was cuuently being talked about among the well­ to-do, sueh as "The Dream of Creating Gold Through the Centuries,;' or "Physieo-ehcmical Experiments in Influencing the Weather," and lnmdrcds of similar subjects. \Vhen we look at the titles that Ziegcnhalss cites, we feel smprisc that there should have been people who devoured such ehitchat for their daily rc•ading; but what astonishes us far more i