As he paused to marshal his thoughts, Knecht said cautiously: “This matter of not being able to understand may not be as drastic as you make it out. Of course two peoples and two languages will never be able to communicate with each other so intimately as two individuals who belong to the same nation and speak the same language. But that is no reason to forgo the effort at communication. Within nations there are also barriers which stand in the way of complete communication and complete mutual understanding, barriers of culture, education, talent, individuality. It might be asserted that every human being on earth can fundamentally hold a dialogue with every other human being, and it might also be asserted that there are no two persons in the world between whom genuine, whole, intimate understanding is possible — the one statement is as true as the other. It is Yin and Yang, day and night; both are right and at times we have to be reminded of both. To be sure, I too do not believe that you and I will ever be able to communicate fully, and without some residue of misunderstanding, with each other. But though you may be an Occidental and I a Chinese, though we may speak different languages, if we are men of good will we shall have a great deal to say to each other, and beyond what is precisely communicable we can guess and sense a great deal about each other. At any rate let us try.”
Designori nodded and continued: “For the time being I want to tell you the little you must know in order to have some inkling of my situation. Well, then, first of all, the family is the supreme power in a young person’s life, whether or not he acknowledges it. I got on well with my family as long as I was a guest student in your elite school. Throughout the year I was well taken care of among you; during the holidays I was pampered at home, for I was the only son. I had a deep and in fact a passionate love for my mother; separation from her was the only grief I felt each time I departed. My relationship to my father was cooler, but friendly, at least during all the years of my boyhood and youth that I spent among you. He was an old admirer of Castalia and proud to see me being educated in the elite schools and initiated into such elevated matters as the Glass Bead Game. My vacations at home were gay and festive; I might almost say that the family and I in a sense knew each other only in party dress. Sometimes, when I set out for vacation, I pitied all of you who were left behind for having nothing of such happiness.
“I need not say much about those days; you knew me better than anyone else, after all. I was almost a Castalian, a little gayer, coarser, and more superficial, perhaps, but happy and enthusiastic, full of high spirits. That was the happiest period in my life, although of course at the time I never suspected that this would be so, for during those years in Waldzell I expected that happiness and the crowning experiences of my life would come after I returned home from your schools and used the superiority I had acquired in them to conquer the outside world. Instead, after my departure from you a conflict began which has lasted to this day, and I have not been the victor in this struggle. For the place I returned to no longer consisted in just my home; and the country had not been simply waiting to embrace me and acknowledge my Waldzell superiority. Even at home I soon encountered disappointments, difficulties, and discords. It took a while before I noticed. I was shielded by my naive confidence, my boyish faith in myself, and my happiness, and shielded also by the morality of the Order which I had brought back with me, by the habit of meditation.
“But what a disappointment and disillusionment I had at the university where I wanted to study political subjects. The general tone among the students, the level of their education and social life, the personalities of so many of the teachers — how all this contrasted with what I had become accustomed to among you. You recall how in defending our world against yours I used to extol the unspoiled, naive life? If that was a piece of foolishness deserving punishment, my friend, I have been harshly punished. Because this naive, innocent, instinctual life, this childlike, untrammeled brilliance of the simple soul, may possibly exist among peasants or artisans, or somewhere, but I never succeeded in finding it, let alone sharing in it. You remember too, don’t you, how I would speechify about the arrogance and affectation of Castalians, attacking them for being a conceited and decadent lot with their caste spirit and their elite haughtiness. Now I had to discover that people in the world were no less proud of their bad manners, their meager culture, their coarse, loud humor, the dull-witted shrewdness with which they kept themselves to practical, egotistic goals. They regarded themselves as no less precious, sanctified, and elect in their narrow-minded crudity than the most affected Waldzell show-off could ever have done. They laughed at me or patted me on the back, but a good many of them reacted to the alien, Castalian qualities in me with the outright enmity that the vulgar always have for everything finer. And I was determined to take their dislike as a distinction.”
Designori paused briefly, and threw a glance at Knecht to see whether he was tiring him. His eyes met his friend’s and found in them an expression of close attention and friendliness which comforted and reassured him. He saw that Knecht was totally absorbed; he was listening not as people listen to casual talk or even to an interesting story, but with fixed attention and devotion, as if concentrating on a subject of meditation. At the same time Knecht’s eyes expressed a pure, warmhearted good will — so warm that it seemed to Plinio almost childlike. He was swept with a kind of amazement to see such an expression upon the face of the same man whose many-sided daily labors, whose wisdom and authority in the governance of his office he had admired all through the day. Relieved, he continued:
“I don’t know whether my life has been useless and merely a misunderstanding, or whether it has a meaning. If it does have a meaning, I should say it would be this: that one single specific person in our time has recognized plainly and experienced in the most painful way how far Castalia has moved away from its motherland. Or for my part it might be put the other way around: how alien our country has become from her noblest Province and how unfaithful to that Province’s spirit; how far body and soul, ideal and reality have moved apart in our country; how little they know about each other, or want to know. If I had any one task and ideal in life, it was to make myself a synthesis of the two principles, to be mediator, interpreter, and arbitrator between the two. I have tried and failed. And since after all I cannot tell you my whole life, and you would not be able to understand it all anyhow, I will describe only one of the situations in which my failure was revealed.