The Glass Bead Game полностью

A curious period followed Joseph’s wonderful experience with the Music Master. He still did not know that he now belonged to the electi, to the flos juventutis, as the elite pupils were called in the Order. At first it did not enter his mind that there might be practical consequences and tangible effects of the episode upon his general destiny or his daily life. While for his teachers he was already marked by distinction and on the verge of departure, he himself was conscious of his call almost entirely as a process within himself. Even so, it made a clear dividing line in his life. Although the hour with the sorcerer (as he often thought of the Music Master) had only brought to fruition, or brought closer, something he had already sensed in his own heart, that hour nevertheless clearly separated the past from the present and the future — just as an awakened dreamer, even if he wakes up in the same surroundings that he has seen in his dream, cannot really doubt that he is now awake. There are many types and kinds of vocation, but the core of the experience is always the same: the soul is awakened by it, transformed or exalted, so that instead of dreams and presentiments from within a summons comes from without. A portion of reality presents itself and makes its claim.

In this case the portion of reality had been the Music Master. This remote, venerated demigod, this archangel from the highest spheres of heaven, had appeared in the flesh. Joseph had seen his omniscient blue eyes. He had sat on the stool at the practice piano, had made music with Joseph, made music wonderfully; almost without words he had shown him what music really was, had blessed him, and vanished.

For the present Joseph was incapable of reflecting on possible practical consequences, on all that might flow out of this event, for he was much too preoccupied with the immediate reverberations of it within himself. Like a young plant hitherto quietly and intermittently developing which suddenly begins to breathe harder and to grow, as though in a miraculous hour it has become aware of the law which shapes it and begins to strive toward the fulfillment of its being, the boy, touched by the magician’s hand, began rapidly and eagerly to gather and tauten his energies. He felt changed, growing; he felt new tensions and new harmonies between himself and the world. There were times, now, in music, Latin, and mathematics, when he could master tasks that were still far beyond his age and the scope of his schoolmates. Sometimes he felt capable of any achievements. At other times he might forget everything and daydream with a new softness and surrender, listen to the wind or the rain, gaze into the chalice of a flower or the moving waters of the river, understanding nothing, divining everything, lost in sympathy, curiosity, the craving to comprehend, carried away from his own self toward another, toward the world, toward the mystery and sacrament, the at once painful and lovely disporting of the world of appearances.