What he must do was to sanctify and make wholesome the power Nature had bestowed on him by placing it in the service of the hierarchy. This was something he had always taken for granted. But where was his rightful place, where would his energies be put to best use and bear fruit? The capacity to attract and more or less to influence others, especially those younger than himself, would of course have been useful to an army officer or a politician; but in Castalia there was no place for such occupations. Here these qualities were useful only to the teacher and educator, but Knecht felt hardly drawn to such work. If it had been a question of his own desires alone, he would have preferred the life of the independent scholar to all others — or else that of a Glass Bead Game player. And in reaching this conclusion he once more faced the old, tormenting question: was this game really the highest, really the sovereign in the realm of the intellect? Was it not, in spite of everything and everyone, in the end merely a game after all? Did it really merit full devotion, lifelong service? Generations ago this famous Game had begun as a kind of substitute for art, and for many it was gradually developing into a kind of religion, allowing highly trained intellects to indulge in contemplation, edification, and devotional exercises.
Obviously, the old conflict between aesthetics and ethics was going on in Knecht. The question never fully expressed but likewise never entirely suppressed, was the very one that had now and then erupted, dark and threatening, from beneath the surface of the schoolboy poems he had written in Waldzell. That question was addressed not just to the Glass Bead Game, but to Castalia as a whole.
There was a period when this whole complex of problems troubled him so deeply that he was always dreaming of debates with Designori. And one day, as he was strolling across one of the spacious courtyards of the Waldzell Players’ Village, he heard someone behind him calling his name. The voice sounded very familiar, although he did not recognize it at once. When he turned around he saw a tall young man with a trim beard rushing tempestuously toward him. It was Plinio, and with a surge of affection and warm memories, Joseph greeted him heartily. They arranged to meet that evening. Plinio, who had long ago finished his studies at the universities in the outside world and was already a government official, had come to Waldzell on holiday for a short guest course in the Glass Bead Game, as he had in fact done once before, several years earlier.
The evening they spent together, however, proved an embarrassment to both friends. Plinio was here as a guest student, a tolerated dilettante from outside; although he was pursuing his course with great eagerness, it was nevertheless a course for outsiders and amateurs. The distance between them was too great; he was facing a professional, an initiate whose very delicacy and polite interest in his friend’s enthusiasm for the Glass Bead Game inevitably made him feel that he was not a colleague but a child playfully dabbling on the outer edges of a science which the other understood to its very core. Knecht tried to turn the conversation away from the Game by asking Plinio about his official functions and his life on the outside. And now Joseph was the laggard and the child who asked innocent questions and was tactfully tutored. Plinio had gone into law, was seeking political influence, and was about to become engaged to the daughter of a party leader. He spoke a language that Joseph only half understood; many recurrent expressions sounded empty to him, or seemed to have no content. At any rate he realized that Plinio counted for something in his world, knew his way about in it, and had ambitious aims. But the two worlds, which ten years ago both youths had each touched with tentative curiosity and a measure of sympathy, had by now grown irreconcilably apart.
Joseph could appreciate the fact that this man of the world and politician had retained a certain attachment to Castalia. This was, after all, the second time he was sacrificing a holiday to the Glass Bead Game. But in the end, Joseph thought, it was pretty much the same as if he were one day to pay a visit to Plinio’s district and attend a few sessions of the court as a curious guest, and have Plinio show him through a few factories or welfare institutions. Both were disappointed. Knecht found his former friend coarse and superficial. Designori, for his part, found his former schoolmate distinctly haughty in his exclusive esotericism and intellectuality; he seemed to Plinio to have become a “pure intellect” altogether absorbed by himself and his sport.
