But enough of this. We shall mention only the one further fact that some years later, when Knecht was already a highly respected personage in Waldzell and invited Elder Brother to give a course there, he received no answer.
Afterward Joseph Knecht described the months he lived in the Bamboo Grove as an unusually happy time. He also frequently referred to it as the “beginning of my awakening” — and in fact from that period on the image of “awakening” turns up more and more often in his remarks, with a meaning similar to although not quite the same as that he had formerly attributed to the image of vocation. It could be assumed that the “awakening” signified knowledge of himself and of the place he occupied within the Castalian and the general human order of things; but it seems to us that the accent increasingly shifts toward self-knowledge in the sense that from the “beginning of his awakening” Knecht came closer and closer to a sense of his special, unique position and destiny, while at the same time, the concepts and categories of the traditional hierarchy of the world and of the special Castalian hierarchy became for him more and more relative matters.
His Chinese studies were far from concluded during his stay in the Bamboo Grove. They continued, and Knecht made particular efforts to acquire a knowledge of ancient Chinese music. Everywhere in the older Chinese writers he encountered praise of music as one of the primal sources of all order, morality, beauty, and health. This broad, ethical view of music was familiar to him from of old, for the Music Master could be regarded as the very embodiment of it
Without ever forsaking the fundamental plan of his studies, which as we have seen he outlined in his letter to Fritz Tegularius, he pushed forward energetically on a broad front wherever he scented an element of essential value to himself, that is to say, wherever the path of “awakening,” on which he had already set out, seemed to lead him. One of the positive results of his period of apprenticeship with Elder Brother was that he overcame his resistance against returning to Waldzell. Henceforth he participated in one of the advanced courses there every year, and without quite realizing how it had happened he became a personage regarded with interest and esteem in the Vicus Lusorum. He belonged to that central and most sensitive organ of the entire Game organization, that anonymous group of players of proven worth in whose hands lay the destinies of the Game at any given time, or at least the type of play that happened to be in fashion.
Officials of the Game institutes belonged to but did not dominate this group, which usually met in several remote, quiet rooms of the Game Archives. There the members beguiled their time with critical studies of the Game, championing the inclusion of new subject areas, or arguing for their exclusion, debating for or against certain constantly shifting tastes in regard to the form, the procedures, the sporting aspects of the Glass Bead Game. Everyone who had made a place for himself in this group was a virtuoso of the Game; each knew to a hair the talents and peculiarities of all the others. The atmosphere was like that in the corridors of a government ministry or an aristocratic club where the rulers and those who will take over their responsibilities in the near future meet and get to know one another. A muted, polished tone prevailed in this group. Its members were ambitious without showing it, keen-eyed and critical to excess. Many in Castalia, and some in the rest of the country outside the Province, regarded this elite as the ultimate flower of Castalian tradition, the cream of an exclusive intellectual aristocracy, and a good many youths dreamed for years of some day belonging to it themselves. To others, however, this elect circle of candidates for the higher reaches in the hierarchy of the Glass Bead Game seemed odious and debased, a clique of haughty idlers, brilliant but spoiled geniuses who lacked all feeling for life and reality, an arrogant and fundamentally parasitic company of dandies and climbers who had made a silly game, a sterile self-indulgence of the mind, their vocation and the content of their life.
