In the end, several months after that first reunion, Designdri accepted the repeated invitation to visit Waldzell. One windy, slightly overcast autumn afternoon, the two men drove through a countryside constantly alternating between light and shade toward the site of their schooldays and early friendship. Knecht was in a blithe frame of mind, while his guest was silent but moody, undergoing abrupt alternations, like the harvested fields between sunlight and shadow, between the joys of return and the sadness of alienation. Near the village, they alighted and tramped on foot along the old paths which they had walked together as schoolboys, remembering schoolmates and teachers and some of their topics of discussion in those long-ago days. Designori stayed a day as Knecht’s guest, looking on at all of his official acts and labors, as had been agreed. At the end of the day — the guest was due to leave early next morning — they sat together in Knecht’s living room, already on the verge of their old intimacy. The course of the day, during which he had been able to observe the Magister’s work hour by hour, had made a great impression upon Designori. That evening the two men had a conversation which Designori recorded immediately after his return home. Although it incorporates a few unimportant matters which some readers may feel disturb the even flow of our account, we think it advisable to set down the complete text.
“I had in mind to show you so many things,” the Magister said, “and now I did not get to them after all. For example, my lovely garden — do you still recall the Magister’s Garden and Master Thomas’s plantings? Yes, and so many other things. I hope there will be future occasions for seeing them. But in any case, you have had the chance to check on a good many of your recollections, and you also have some idea of the nature of my official duties and my routine.”
“I am grateful to you for that,” Plinio said. “Only today have I begun to divine again what your Province really is, and what remarkable secrets it contains, although over the years I have thought about all of you here far more than you suspect. You have afforded me a glimpse of your office and of your life, Joseph, and I hope this will not be the last time and that we shall have many opportunities to discuss the things I have seen here, which I cannot yet talk about today. On the other hand, I am well aware that I should in some way be requiting your cordiality, and that my reserve must have taken you aback. However, you will visit me too some day, and see my native ground. For the present I can only tell you a little, just enough for you to know something about my situation. Speaking frankly, though it will be embarrassing and something of a penance for me, will probably unburden my heart.
“You know that I come from an old family that has served the country well and also been well disposed toward your Province — a conservative family of landowners and moderately high officials. But you see, even this simple fact brings me sharply up against the gulf that separates the two of us. I say ‘family’ and imagine I am saying something simple, obvious, and unambiguous. But is it? You people of the Province have your Order and your hierarchy, but you do not have a family, you do not know what family, blood, and descent are, and you have no notion of the powers, the hidden and mighty magic of what is called ‘family.’ I fear that this is also true for most of the words and concepts which express the meaning of our lives. The things that are important to us are not to you; very many are simply incomprehensible to you, and others have entirely different meanings among you and among us. How can we possibly talk to each other? You see, when you speak to me, it is as if a foreigner were addressing me, although a foreigner whose language I learned and spoke myself in my youth, so that I understand most of what is said. But the reverse is not the case; when I speak to you, you hear a language whose very phrases are only half familiar to you, while you are entirely ignorant of the nuances and overtones. You hear tales about a life, a way of existing, which is not your own. Most of it, even if it happens to interest you, remains alien and at best only half understood. You remember our many debates and talks during our schooldays. On my part they were nothing but an attempt, one of many, to bring the world and language of your Province into harmony with my own. You were the most receptive, the most willing and honest among all those with whom I attempted to communicate in those days; you stood up bravely for the rights of Castalia without being against my different world and unsympathetic to its rights, not to speak of despising it. In those days we certainly came rather close to each other. But that is a subject we will return to later.”
