Nevertheless, there are many tokens that he was really fond of his friend. As we see it, it was not just the latter’s outstanding talent, his nervous brilliance and receptivity, particularly to all the problems of the Glass Bead Game, that drew Knecht to him. Rather, Knecht took so strong an interest not only in his friend’s great gifts, but also in his faults, in his sickliness, in precisely those qualities that other Waldzellers found disturbing and frequently intolerable in Tegularius. This eccentric was utterly Castalian. His whole mode of existence, inconceivable outside the Province, was so entirely consonant with its atmosphere and level of culture that if he had not been so eccentric and hard to get along with he might have deserved the epithet arch-Castalian. And yet this arch-Castalian hardly fitted in with his fellows; he was no more popular with them than with his superiors, the officials. He constantly disturbed people, repeatedly offended them, and but for the stout protection and guidance of his prudent friend he would probably have been destroyed very early. For what was called his illness was primarily a vice, a character defect, a form of rebelliousness. He was profoundly unhierarchical, totally individualistic in his attitudes and his conduct. He adjusted to the system only enough to pass muster within the Order.
He was a good, even a shining light as a Castalian to the extent that he had a many-sided mind, tirelessly active in scholarship as well as in the art of the Glass Bead Game, and enormously hard-working; but in character, in his attitude toward the hierarchy and the morality of the Order he was a very mediocre, not to say bad Castalian. The greatest of his vices was a persistent neglect of meditation, which he refused to take seriously. The purpose of meditation, after all, is adaptation of the individual to the hierarchy, and application in it might very well have cured him of his neurasthenia. For it infallibly helped him whenever, after a period of bad conduct, excessive excitement, or melancholia, his superiors disciplined him by prescribing strict meditation exercises under supervision. Even Knecht, kindly disposed and forgiving though he was, frequently had to resort to this measure.
There was no question about it: Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd. And, to our mind, this was the very reason his friend cherished him.
Certainly there was always a measure of pity in Knecht’s relationship to Tegularius. His imperiled and usually unhappy state appealed to all his friend’s chivalric feelings. But this would not have sufficed to sustain this friendship after Knecht’s elevation to an official life overburdened with work, duties, and responsibilities. We take the view that Tegularius was no less necessary and important in Knecht’s life than Designori and Father Jacobus had been. Moreover, exactly like the other two, he was a dynamic element, a small open window that looked out upon new prospects. In this peculiar friend Knecht sensed, we think, the features of a type. As time went on he realized that the type was one not yet existent except for Tegularius. For Tegularius was a portent of the Castalian as he might some day become unless the life of Castalia were rejuvenated and revitalized by new encounters, new forces. Like most solitary geniuses, Tegularius was a forerunner. He actually lived in a Castalia that did not yet exist, but might come into being in the future; in a Castalia still sequestered from the world, but inwardly degenerating from senility and from relaxation of the meditative morality of the Order; a Castalia in which the highest flights of the mind were still possible, as well as totally absorbed devotion to sublime values — but this highly developed, freely roaming intellectual culture no longer had any goals beyond egotistic enjoyment of its own overbred faculties. Knecht saw Tegularius as the two things in one: embodiment of the finest gifts to be found in Castalia, and at the same time a portent of the demoralization and downfall of those abilities. Measures must be taken to keep Castalia from becoming a dream-ridden realm populated entirely by Tegulariuses.
The danger was remote, but it was there. Castalia as Knecht knew it needed only to build its walls of aristocratic isolation slightly higher, needed only to undergo a decline in the discipline of the Order, a lowering of the hierarchical morality, and Tegularius would cease to be an eccentric individual; he would become the prototype of a deteriorating Castalia. Magister Knecht’s most important insight, the source of all his concern, was that the potentiality for such decadence existed. The disposition for it was there; in fact it had already begun. Probably he would have realized this much later, perhaps never at all, had not this future Castalian, whom he knew so intimately, lived at his side. To Knecht’s keen instincts, Tegularius was a danger signal, as the first victim of a still unknown disease would be for a clever physician. And Fritz was after all no average man; he was an aristocrat, a supremely gifted person. If the still unknown disease just coming to light in this forerunner Tegularius were ever to spread and change the whole image of Castalian man, if the Province and the Order were ever to assume the degenerate, morbid form latent in them, these future Castalians would not be all Tegulariuses. Not everyone would have his precious gifts, his melancholy genius, his flickering intensity and acrobatic artistry. Rather, the majority of them would have only his unreliability, his tendency to fritter away his talents, his lack of any discipline or sense of community. In times of anxiety Knecht seems to have had such gloomy premonitions; and surely it cost him a great deal of strength to overcome them, partly by meditation, partly by intensified activity.
The very case of Tegularius offers an instructive example of the way Knecht attempted to overcome morbidity and temperamental difficulties by meeting them directly. But for Knecht’s watchfulness and pedagogic guidance, his imperiled friend would in all likelihood have come to grief early in his life. What is more, he would undoubtedly have introduced endless disturbances into the Players’ Village. There had in any case been a good deal of such discord ever since Fritz had become a member of the elite. With consummate art the Magister kept his friend tolerably well on course, while at the same time contriving to employ his gifts in the interests of the Glass Bead Game and to extract fine achievements from Fritz’s talent. The patience with which he coped with the latter’s eccentricities, overcoming them by tirelessly appealing to his virtues, must be called a masterpiece in the technique of human relations. Incidentally, it would be a fine project which might yield some surprising insights (we should like to recommend it strongly to some of our historians of the Glass Bead Game) to subject the annual Games of Knecht’s magistracy to a close analysis of their stylistic peculiarities. These Games, so majestic and yet sparkling with delightful inspirations and formulations, so scintillating and original in their rhythms, yet such a far cry from smug virtuosity, owed their underlying idea, their development, and the slant of their series of meditations exclusively to Knecht’s mind, whereas the fine polishing and the minor details of Game technique were mostly the work of his collaborator Tegularius. Even had these Games been forgotten, Knecht’s life and work would lose none of its attractiveness and pertinence for posterity. But to our great good fortune they have been recorded and preserved like all official Games. And they do not merely lie dead in the Archives. They survive in our traditions to this day, are studied by the young, supply cherished examples for many a Game course and many a seminar. And in them the collaborator survives, who otherwise would be forgotten, or would at any rate be no more than a strange, shadowy figure out of the past, haunting a host of anecdotes.