Thus, in managing to assign a place to his refractory friend Fritz, and in providing him with an area in which he could work effectively, Knecht enriched the history and culture of Waldzell, while at the same time assuring his friend’s memory a certain permanence. Incidentally, this great educator was well aware of the real basis of his educational influence on his friend. That basis was his friend’s love and admiration. As we have seen, the Magister’s harmonious personality, his innate sense of mastery, had almost from the first won over so many other fellow aspirants and pupils that he counted on this more than on his high office to sustain his authority, despite his kindly and conciliatory nature. He sensed precisely the effect of a friendly word of greeting or appreciation, or of withdrawal and disregard. Long afterward one of his most ardent disciples related that one time Knecht did not speak a single word to him in class and in his seminar, seemingly did not see him, ignored him completely — and that in all the years of his schooling this had been the bitterest and most effective punishment he had ever known.
We have considered these retrospective observations essential in order that our reader may perceive the two antipodal tendencies in Knecht’s personality. Having followed our account to the present peak of Knecht’s remarkable life, the reader will then be prepared for its final phases. The two tendencies or antipodes of this life, its Yin and Yang, were the conservative tendency toward loyalty, toward unstinting service of the hierarchy on the one hand, and on the other hand the tendency toward “awakening,” toward advancing, toward apprehending reality. For Joseph Knecht in his role of believer and devoted servant, the Order, Castalia, the Glass Bead Game were sacrosanct. To him in his awakened, clairvoyant, pioneering role they were, irrespective of their value, full-grown institutions, their struggles long past, vulnerable to the danger of aging, sterility, and decadence. The idea underlying them always remained sacred to him, but he had recognized the particular forms that idea had assumed as mutable, perishable, in need of criticism. He served a community of the mind whose strength and rationality he admired; but he thought it was running grave risks by tending to see its own existence as the be-all and end-all, by forgetting its duties to the country and the outside world. If it continued along this course, growing increasingly separated from the whole of life, it was doomed to fall into sterility. In those earlier years he had had presentiments of this peril; that was why he had so often hesitated, fearing to devote himself solely to the Glass Bead Game. In discussions with the monks, and especially with Father Jacobus, the problem had come to mind ever more forcibly, even while he was bravely defending Castalia. Ever since he had been back in Waldzell, and holding office as Magister Ludi, he had continually seen tangible symptoms of that danger: in the loyal but unworldly and formalistic methods of work among his own officials and in many of the other departments; in the highly intelligent but arrogant expertise of the Waldzell elite; and last but not least, in the touching but worrisome personality of his friend Tegularius.
With his first difficult year in office behind him, he resumed his historical studies. For the first time he examined the history of Castalia with his eyes open, and soon became convinced that things were not going as well as the inhabitants of the Province thought. Castalia’s relationships with the outside world, the reciprocal influences operating between Castalia and the life, politics, and culture of the country, had been on the downgrade for decades. Granted, the Federal Council still consulted the Board of Educators on pedagogical and cultural matters; the Province continued to supply the country with good teachers and to pronounce on all questions of scholarship. But these matters had assumed a routine and mechanical cast. Young men from the various elites of Castalia nowadays volunteered less eagerly, and less frequently, for teaching assignments extra muros. Individuals and authorities in the rest of the country less frequently turned for advice to Castalia, whose opinion had in earlier times been sought and listened to even, for example, on important cases of law. If the cultural level of Castalia were compared with that of the country at large, it became apparent that the two were by no means approaching each other; rather, they were moving apart in a deeply troubling way. The more cultivated, specialized, overtired that Castalian intellectuality became, the more the world inclined to let the Province be and to regard it not as a necessity, as daily bread, but as a foreign body, something to be a little proud of, like a precious antique which for the time being the owners would not like to give up or give away, but which they would happily keep stored in the attic. Without fully grasping the situation, people on the outside attributed to Castalians a mentality, a morality, and a sense of self which was no longer viable in real, active life.
The interest of the country’s citizens in the life of the Pedagogic Province, their sympathy with its institutions and especially with the Glass Bead Game, were likewise on the downgrade, as was the sympathy of the Castalians for the life and the fate of the country. Knecht had long ago realized that this lack of interest in each other was a grave fault in both, and it was a grief to him that as Master of the Glass Bead Game in his Players’ Village he dealt exclusively with Castalians and specialists. Hence his endeavors to devote himself more and more to beginners’ courses, his desire to have the youngest pupils — for the younger they were, the more they were still linked with the whole of life and the outside world, the less tamed, trained, and specialized they were. Often he felt a wild craving for the world, for people, for unreflective life — assuming that such still existed out there in the unknown world. Most of us have now and then been touched by this longing, this sense of emptiness, this feeling of living in far too rarefied an atmosphere. The Board of Educators, too, is familiar with this problem; at least it has from time to time looked for methods to combat it, such as by laying more stress on physical exercises and games, and by experimenting with various crafts and gardening. If our observations are correct, the directorate of the Order had of late shown a tendency to abandon some overrefined specialties in the scholarly disciplines and to emphasize instead the practice of meditation. One need not be a skeptic or prophet of doom, nor a disloyal member of the Order, to concede that Joseph Knecht was right in recognizing, a considerable time before the present day, that the complicated and sensitive apparatus of our republic had become an aging organism, in many respects badly in need of rejuvenation.