“I had forgotten these lines for many years,” he said, “and when they happened to come to my mind today, I no longer knew how I knew them and didn’t realize they were mine. How do they strike you today? Do they still mean anything to you?”
Tegularius considered.
“I have always had a rather odd feeling about this particular poem,” he said finally. “The poem itself is among the very few you’ve written that I didn’t really like. There was something about it that repelled or disturbed me. At the time I had no idea what it was. Today I think I see it. I never really liked this poem of yours, which you headed ‘Transcend!’ as if that were a marching order — thank God you later substituted a better title — I never really liked it because it has something didactic, moralizing, or schoolmasterly about it. If this element could be stripped away, or rather if this whitewash could be scrubbed off, it would be one of your finest poems — I’ve just realized that again. The real meaning is rather well suggested by the title ‘Stages,’ although you might just as well and perhaps better have called it ‘Music’ or ‘The Nature of Music.’ For if we discount the moralizing or preachy attitude, it is really about the nature of music, or if you will a song in praise of music, of its serenity and resolution, its quality of being constantly present, its mobility and unceasing urge to hasten on, to leave the space it has only just entered. If you contented yourself with this contemplation or praise of the spirit of music, if you had not turned it into an admonition and sermon — though obviously you had pedagogic ambitions even then — the poem might have been a perfect jewel. But as it stands it seems to me not only too hortatory but also afflicted by faulty logic. It equates music and life solely for the sake of the moral lesson. But that is highly questionable and disputable, for it transforms the natural and morally neutral impulse which is the mainspring of music into a ‘Life’ that summons, calls, commands us, and wants to impart good lessons to us. To put it briefly, in this poem a vision, something unique, beautiful, and splendid, has been falsified and exploited for didactic ends, and it is this aspect that always prejudiced me against it.”
The Magister had been listening with pleasure as his friend worked himself up into that angry ardor which he so liked in him.
“Let’s hope you’re right,” he said half jokingly. “You certainly are right in what you say about the poem’s relationship to music. The idea of serenely moving to distant places and the underlying concept of the lines actually does come from music, without my having been conscious of it. I really don’t know whether I corrupted the idea and falsified the vision; you may be right. When I wrote the poem, at any rate, it no longer dealt with music, but with an experience — the very experience that the lovely parable of music had revealed its moral aspect to me and become, within me, an awakening and an admonition to respond to the summons of life. The imperative form of the poem, which so particularly displeases you, is not the expression of any desire to command or teach, because the command is addressed to myself alone. That should have been clear from the last line, my friend, even if you weren’t already well aware of it. I experienced an insight, a perception, an inward vision, and was bent on telling the content and the moral of this insight to myself, and impressing it on my mind. That is why the poem remained in my memory, although I was not conscious of it. So whether these lines are good or bad, they’ve accomplished their purpose; the admonition remained alive inside me and was not forgotten. Today I hear it again as if it were brand new. That’s a fine little experience, and your mockery can’t spoil it for me. But it’s time for me to go. How lovely were those days, my friend, when we were both students and could so often allow ourselves to break the rules and stay together far into the nights, talking. A Magister can no longer allow himself such luxuries — more’s the pity.”
“Oh,” Tegularius said, “he could allow it — it’s a question of not having the courage.”
Laughing, Knecht placed a hand on his shoulder.
“As far as courage goes, my boy, I might be guilty of worse pranks than that. Good night, old grumbler.”
Gaily, he left the cell. But on the way out through the deserted corridors and courtyards of the Vicus Lusorum his seriousness returned, the seriousness of parting. Leave-takings always stir memories. Now, on this nocturnal walk, he remembered that first time he had strolled through Waldzell and the Vicus Lusorum as a boy, a newly arrived Waldzell pupil, filled with misgivings and hopes. Only now, moving through the coolness of the night in the midst of silent trees and buildings, did he realize with painful sharpness that he was seeing all this for the last time, listening for the last time to silence and slumber stealing over the Players’ Village, by day so lively; for the last time seeing the little light above the gatekeeper’s lodge reflected in the basin of the fountain; for the last time watching the clouds in the night sky sailing over the trees of his Magister’s garden. Slowly, he went over all the paths and into all the nooks and corners of the Players’ Village. He felt an impulse to open the gate of his garden once more and enter it, but he did not have the key with him, and that fact swiftly sobered him and caused him to collect himself. He returned to his apartment, wrote a few letters, including one to Designori announcing his arrival in the capital, and then spent some time in careful meditation to calm his intense emotions, for he wanted to be strong in the morning for his last task in Castalia, the interview with the Head of the Order.
The following morning the Magister rose at his accustomed hour, ordered his car, and drove off; only a few persons noticed his departure and none gave it any thought. The morning seemed to be drowning in the mists of early autumn as he drove toward Hirsland. He arrived toward noon and asked to be announced to Magister Alexander, the President of the Order. Under his arm he carried, wrapped in a cloth, a handsome metal casket normally kept in a secret compartment in his office. It contained the insignia of his office, the seals and the keys.
He was received with some surprise in the “main” office of the Order. It was almost unprecedented for a Magister to appear there unannounced and uninvited. On instructions from the President of the Order he was given lunch, then shown to a rest cell in the old cloisters and informed that His Excellency hoped to be able to find time for him in two or three hours. He asked for a copy of the rules of the Order, settled down with it and read through the entire booklet, to assure himself once more of the simplicity and legality of his plan. Nevertheless, even at this late hour he could not see how to put into words its meaning and its psychological justification.
There was a paragraph in the rules that had once been assigned to him as a subject for meditation, in the last days of his youthful freedom. That had been shortly before his admission into the Order. Now, reading the paragraph again, he meditated on it once more, and while doing so he became aware of how utterly different a person he was now from the rather anxious young tutor he had then been. “If the High Board summons you to a post,” the passage read, “know this: Each upward step on the ladder of officialdom is not a step into freedom, but into constraint. The greater the power of the office, the stricter the servitude. The stronger the personality, the more forbidden is the arbitrary exercise of will.” How final and unequivocal all that had once sounded, but how greatly the meaning of so many of the words had changed, especially such insidious words as “constraint,” “personality,” “will.” And yet how beautifully clear, how well-formed and admirably suggestive these sentences were; how absolute, timeless, and incontestably true they could appear to a young mind! Ah yes, and so they would have been, if only Castalia were the world, the whole multifarious but indivisible world, instead of being merely a tiny world within the greater, or a section boldly and violently carved out of it. If the earth were an elite school, if the Order were the community of all men and the Head of the Order God, how perfect these sentences would be, and how flawless the entire Rule. Ah, if only that had been so, how lovely, how fecund and innocently beautiful life would be. And once that had really been so; once he had been able to see it that way: the Order and the Castalian spirit as equivalent to the divine and the absolute, the Province as the world, Castalians as mankind, and the non-Castalian sphere as a kind of children’s world, a threshold to the Province, virgin soil still awaiting cultivation and ultimate redemption, a world looking reverently up to Castalia and every so often sending charming visitors such as young Plinio.