Hermann Hesse - The Glass Bead Game

And what about the virtues of serenity, firm tempo and courage? They dwindled in size perhaps, but remained intact. Even if he might not be advancing on his own, but was only being led, even if what he was undergoing was not independent transcending, but merely a revolving of the space outside him around himself as its center, the virtues persisted and retained their value and their potency. They consisted in affirmation instead of negation, in acceptance instead of evasion. And perhaps there might even be some small virtue in his conducting himself as if he were the master and an active focus, in accepting life and self-deception — with its corollary self-determination and responsibility — without examining these things too closely. Perhaps it was inherently virtuous that for unknown reasons he was by nature more inclined to acting than acquiring knowledge, that he was more instinctual than intellectual. Oh, if only he could have a talk with Father Jacobus about these matters!

Thoughts or reveries of this sort reverberated in him after his meditation. “Awakening,” it seemed, was not so much concerned with truth and cognition, but with experiencing and proving oneself in the real world. When you had such an awakening, you did not penetrate any closer to the core of things, to truth; you grasped, accomplished, or endured only the attitude of your own ego to the momentary situation. You did not find laws, but came to decisions; you did not thrust your way into the center of the world, but into the center of your own individuality. That, too, was why the experience of awakening was so difficult to convey, so curiously hard to formulate, so remote from statement. Language did not seem designed to make communications from this realm of life. If, once in a great while, someone were able to understand, that person was in a similar position, was a fellow sufferer or undergoing a similar awakening. Fritz Tegularius had to some degree shared this insight; Plinio’s understanding had gone somewhat further. Whom else could he name? No one.

Twilight was already beginning to fall; he had been completely lost in his reflections, was altogether remote from his actual situation, when there came a knock on the door. Since he did not respond at once, the person outside waited a little and then tried once more, knocking softly. This time Knecht answered; he rose and went along with the messenger, who led him into the secretariat and without any further ado into the President’s office. Master Alexander came forward to meet him.

“A pity you came without warning, so that we had to keep you waiting,” he said. “I am eager to hear what has brought you here so suddenly. Nothing bad, I hope?”

Knecht laughed. “No, nothing bad. But do I really come so unexpectedly and have you no idea why I want to see you?”

Alexander gave him a troubled look. “Well, yes,” he said, “I do have some idea. I had, for example, been thinking in the past few days that the subject of your circular letter had certainly not been treated adequately as far as you were concerned. The Board was obliged to answer rather tersely, and perhaps both the tone and the substance of the answer were disappointing to you, Domine .”

“Not at all,” Joseph Knecht replied. “I hardly expected any other answer as far as the substance of the Board’s reply went. And as for the tone, that pleased me greatly. I could tell that the reply had cost the author considerable effort, almost sorrow, and that he felt the need to mingle a few drops of honey in an answer that was necessarily unpleasant and rather a snub to me. Certainly he succeeded remarkably well, and I am grateful to him for that.”

“Then you have taken the substance of the reply to heart, esteemed Master?”

“Taken note of it, and I should say that at bottom I have also understood it and approved it. I suppose the reply could not have been anything but a rejection of my petition, together with a gentle reprimand. My circular letter was something untoward, and altogether inconvenient to the Board — I never for a moment doubted that. Moreover, insofar as it contained a personal petition, it probably was not couched in a suitable way. I could scarcely expect anything but a negative reply.”

“We are pleased,” the President of the Order said with a hint of acerbity, “that you regard it in this light and that our letter therefore could not have surprised you in any painful way. We are very pleased by that. But I still do not understand. If in writing your letter you already — I do understand you aright, don’t I? — did not believe in its success, did not expect an affirmative answer, and in fact were convinced in advance that it would fail, why did you persist with it and go to the farther trouble — the whole thing must have involved considerable effort — of making a clean copy and sending it out?”

Knecht gave him an amiable look as he replied: “Your Excellency, my letter had two purposes, and I do not think that both were entirely fruitless. It contained a personal request that I be relieved of my post and employed at some other place. I could regard this personal request as relatively subsidiary, for every Magister ought to regard his personal affairs as secondary, insofar as that is possible. The petition was rejected; I had to make the best of that. But my circular letter also contained something quite different from that request, namely a considerable number of facts and ideas which I thought it my duty to call to the attention of the Board and to ask you all to weigh carefully. All the Masters, or at any rate the majority of them, have read my exposition — let us not say my warnings — and although most of them were loath to ingest them and reacted with a good deal of annoyance, they have at any rate read and registered what I believed it essential to say. The fact that they did not applaud the letter is, to my mind, no failure. I was not seeking applause and assent; I intended rather to stir uneasiness, to shake them up. I would greatly regret if I had desisted from sending my letter on the grounds you mention. Whether it has had much or little effect, it was at least a cry of alarm, a summons.”

“Certainly,” the President said hesitantly. “But that explanation does not solve the riddle for me. If you wished your admonitions, warnings, cries of alarm to reach the Board, why did you weaken or at least diminish the effectiveness of your golden words by linking them with a private request, moreover a request which you yourself did not seriously believe would be or could be granted? For the present I don’t understand that. But I suppose the matter will be clarified if we talk it over. In any case, there is the weak point in your circular letter: your connecting the cry of alarm with the petition. I should think that you surely had no need to use the petition as a vehicle for your sermon. You could easily have reached your colleagues orally or in writing if you thought they had to be alerted to certain dangers. And then the petition would have proceeded along its own way through official channels.”

Knecht continued to look at him with the utmost friendliness. “Yes,” he said lightly, “it may be that you are right. Still — consider the complications of the matter once more. Neither the admonition nor the sermon was anything commonplace, ordinary, or normal. Rather, both belonged together in being unusual and in having arisen out of necessity and a break with convention. It is not usual and normal for anyone, without some urgent provocation from outside, to suddenly implore his colleagues to remember their mortality and the dubiousness of their entire lives. Nor is it usual and commonplace for a Castalian Magister to apply for a post as schoolteacher outside the Province. To that extent the two separate messages of my letter do belong together quite well. As I see it, a reader who had really taken the entire letter seriously would have had to conclude that this was no matter of an eccentric’s announcing his premonitions and trying to preach to his colleagues, but rather that this man was in deadly earnest about his ideas and his distress, that he was ready to throw up his office, his dignity, his past, and begin from the beginning in the most modest of places; that he was weary of dignity, peace, honor, and authority and desired to be rid of them, to throw them away. From this conclusion — I am still trying to put myself into the mind of the readers of my letter — two corollaries would have been possible, so it seems to me: the writer of this sermon is unfortunately slightly cracked; or else the writer of this troublesome sermon is obviously not cracked, but normal and sane, which means there must be more than whim and eccentricity behind his pessimistic preachments. And that ‘more’ must then be a reality, a truth. I had imagined some such process in the minds of my readers, and I must admit that I miscalculated. My petition and my admonition did not support and reinforce each other. Instead, they were both not taken seriously and were laid aside. I am neither greatly saddened nor really surprised by this rejection, for at bottom, I must repeat, I did expect it to turn out that way. And I must also admit that I desired it so. For my petition, which I assumed would fail, was a kind of feint, a gesture, a formula.”