There is no other mention of the Glass Bead Game and its “esoteric” aspect in all the rest of Knecht’s correspondence of that period. Indeed, he does not seem to have written many letters, or else some of them have been lost. At any rate, the largest and best-preserved correspondence, that with Ferromonte, deals almost entirely with problems of music and musical stylistic analysis.
Thus there was a special meaning and resolution behind the peculiar zigzag course of Knecht’s studies, which consisted in nothing less than the circumstantial retracing and prolonged analysis of a single Game pattern. In order to assimilate the contents of this one pattern, which the schoolboys had composed as an exercise within a few days, and which could be read off in a quarter hour in the language of the Glass Bead Game, he spent year after year sitting in lecture halls and libraries, studying Froberger and Alessandro Scarlatti, fugues and sonata form, reviewing mathematics, learning Chinese, working through a system of tonal figuration and the Feustelian theory of the correspondence between the scale of colors and the musical keys.
We may ask why he had chosen this toilsome, eccentric, and above all lonely path, for his ultimate goal (outside of Castalia, people would say: his choice of profession) was undoubtedly the Glass Bead Game. He might freely have entered one of the institutes of the Vicus Lusorum, the settlement of Glass Bead Game players in Waldzell, as a guest scholar. In that case all the special studies connected with the Game would have been made easier for him. Advice and information on all questions of detail would have been available to him at any time, and in addition he could have pursued his studies among other scholars in the same field, young men with the same devotion to the Game, instead of struggling alone in a state that often amounted to voluntary banishment. Be that as it may, he went his own way. We suspect that he avoided Waldzell partly to expunge as far as possible from his own mind and the minds of others the memory of his role as a student there, partly so that he would not stumble into a similar role among the community of Glass Bead Game players. For he probably bore away the feeling from those early days that he was predestined to become a leader and spokesman, and he did all that he could to outwit the obtrusiveness of fate. He sensed in advance the weight of responsibility; he could already feel it toward his fellow students from Waldzell, who went on adulating him even though he withdrew from them. And he felt it especially toward Tegularius, who would go through fire and water for him — this he knew instinctively.
Therefore he sought seclusion and contemplation, while his destiny tried to propel him forward into the public realm. It is in these terms that we imagine his state of mind at the time. But there was another important factor that deterred him from taking the usual courses at the higher Glass Bead Game academies and made an outsider of him. That was an inexorable urge toward research arising from his former doubts about the Glass Bead Game. To be sure, he had once tasted the experience that the Game could be played in a supreme and sacred sense; but he had also seen that the majority of players and students of the Game, and even some of the leaders and teachers, by no means shared that lofty and sacramental feeling for the Game. They did not regard the Game language as a lingua sacra, but more as an ingenious kind of stenography. They practiced the Game as an interesting or amusing specialty, an intellectual sport or an arena for ambition. In fact, as his letter to the Music Master shows, he already sensed that the search for ultimate meaning does not necessarily determine the quality of the player, that its superficial aspects were also essential to the Game, that it comprised technique, science, and social institution. In short, he had doubts and divided feelings; the Game was a vital question for him, had become the chief problem of his life, and he was by no means disposed to let well-meaning spiritual guides ease his struggles or benignly smiling teachers dismiss them as trivial.
Naturally he could have made any one of the tens of thousands of recorded Glass Bead Games and the millions of possible games the basis of his studies. He knew this and therefore proceeded from that chance Game plan that he and his schoolmates had composed in an elementary course. It was the game in which he had for the first time grasped the meaning of all Glass Bead Games and experienced his vocation as a player. During those years he kept with him at all times an outline of that Game, noted down in the usual shorthand. In the symbols, ciphers, signatures, and abbreviations of the Game language an astronomical formula, the principles of form underlying an old sonata, an utterance of Confucius, and so on, were written down. A reader who chanced to be ignorant of the Glass Bead Game might imagine such a Game pattern as rather similar to the pattern of a chess game, except that the significances of the pieces and the potentialities of their relationships to one another and their effect upon one another multiplied manyfold and an actual content must be ascribed to each piece, each constellation, each chess move, of which this move, configuration, and so on is the symbol.
Knecht’s studies went beyond the task of acquainting himself in the utmost detail with the contents, principles, books, and systems contained in the Game plan, and retracting as he went a way back through various cultures, sciences, languages, arts, and centuries. He had also set himself the task that none of his teachers even recognized, of employing these objects to check in detail the systems and possibilities of expression in the art of the Glass Bead Game.
To anticipate his results: here and there he found a gap, an inadequacy, but on the whole our Glass Bead Game withstood his stringent reassessment. Otherwise he would not have returned to it at the end of his work.
If we were writing a study in cultural history, a good many of the places and scenes of Knecht’s student days would certainly merit description. As far as possible he preferred places where he could work alone, or with only a very few others, and to some of these places he retained a lifelong grateful attachment. He frequently stayed in Monteport, sometimes as the Music Master’s guest, sometimes as a participant in a musicological seminar. Twice we find him in Hirsland, the headquarters of the Order, as a participant in the “Great Exercise,” the twelve-day period of fasting and meditation. He used later to tell his intimates with special affection about the “Bamboo Grove,” the lovely hermitage which was the scene of his I Ching studies. There he learned and experienced things of crucial importance. There, too, guided by a wonderful premonition or Providence, he found unique surroundings and an extraordinary person: the founder and inmate of the Chinese hermitage, who was called Elder Brother. We think it proper to describe at greater length this most remarkable episode in his years of free study.