After Knecht had told him the nature of his assignment, he commented: “Your superiors in Castalia are not exactly brilliant diplomats, but they are not so bad either, and they know a good thing when they see it. I shall give all the consideration to your mission, and my decision will depend partly on how well you can explain your Castalian constitution and ideals, and make them seem plausible to me. Let us give ourselves all the time we need for that.” Seeing that Knecht still looked somewhat crestfallen, he gave a brittle laugh and said: “If you like, you can also regard my proceeding thus as a kind of lesson. We are two diplomats, and diplomats’ intercourse is always a combat, no matter how friendly a form it may take. In our struggle, as it happens, I was momentarily at a disadvantage; I had lost the initiative. You knew more than I. Now the balance has been restored. The chess move was successful; therefore it was the right one.”
Knecht thought it important to win Father Jacobus’s approval for the Castalian authorities’ project; but it seemed to him far more important to learn as much as possible from him, and for his own part to serve this learned and powerful man as a reliable guide to the Castalian world. A good many of Knecht’s friends and later disciples envied him as remarkable men are always envied, not only for their greatness of soul and energy, but also for their seeming luck, their seeming preferment by destiny. The lesser man sees in the greater as much as he can see, and Joseph Knecht’s career cannot help striking every observer as unusually brilliant, rapid, and seemingly effortless. Certainly we are tempted to say of that period in his life: he was lucky. Nor would we wish to try to explain this “luck” rationalistically or moralistically, either as the causal result of external circumstances or as a kind of reward for special virtue. Luck has nothing to do with rationality or morality; by its nature it has about it a quality akin to magic, belonging to a primitive, more youthful stage of mankind’s history. The lucky innocent, showered with gifts by the fairies, pampered by the gods, is not the object of rational study, and hence not a fit subject for biographical analysis; he is a symbol who always stands outside the personal and the historical realms. Nevertheless, there are outstanding men with whose lives “luck” is intimately bound up, even though that luck may consist merely in the fact that they and the task proper to their talents actually intersect on the plane of history and biography, that they are born neither too soon nor too late. Knecht seems to have been one of these. Thus his life, at least for a considerable part of his way, gives the impression that everything desirable simply fell into his lap. We do not wish to deny or to gloss over this aspect of his life. Moreover, we could explain it rationally only by a biographical method which is not ours, neither desired nor permitted in Castalia; that is, we would have to enter into an almost unlimited discussion of the most personal, most private matters, of health and sickness, the oscillations and curves in his vitality and self-confidence. We are quite sure that any such biographical approach — which is out of the question for us — would reveal a perfect balance between Knecht’s “luck” and his suffering, but nevertheless would falsify our portrayal of his person and his life.
