The Magic Mountain quotes

Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before.

Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more immediately before the present it falls?

More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again.

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail—for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up?

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no, nor seven months either.

Space, rolling and revolving between him and his native heath, possessed and wielded the powers we generally ascribe to time. From hour to hour it worked changes in him, like to those wrought by time, yet in a way even more striking.

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.

Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine.

Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

Such was the experience of young Hans Castorp. He had not meant to take the journey seriously or commit himself deeply to it;

Then he ran down the narrow corridor and sprang out upon the platform to greet his cousin properly. The meeting took place without exuberance, as between people of traditional coolness and reserve.

Strange to say, the cousins had always avoided calling each other by their first names, simply because they were afraid of showing too much feeling.

And, as they could not well address each other by their last names, they confined themselves, by established custom, to the “thou.”

It isn’t dry and yet isn’t loose either—that is very far from being the right word for it. It is just as if one could look right into him when he coughs, and see what it looks like: all slime and mucous—”

“Oh,” said Joachim, “I hear it every day, you don’t need to describe it to me.”

But Hans Castorp could not get over the coughing he had heard. He kept repeating that he could see right into the gentleman rider’s vitals; when they reached the restaurant his travel-weary eyes had an excited glitter.

… rather weak in the chest, and for that reason a calling which would keep him in the open, and in which there was no mental strain or fatigue to speak of, might be quite the right thing for him, Hans Castorp thought with easy condescension.

He had the greatest respect for work⁠—though personally he found that he tired easily.

And here we revert to our suggestion of a few pages back: the idea that an unfavourable influence exerted upon a man’s personal life by the times in which he lives may even extend to his physical organism.

And here we revert to our suggestion of a few pages back: the idea that an unfavourable influence exerted upon a man’s personal life by the times in which he lives may even extend to his physical organism.

Hans Castorp respected work⁠—as how should he not have? It would have been unnatural.

Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life; when you came down to it, there was nothing else that was estimable. It was the principle by which one stood or fell, the Absolute of the time;

Joachim sought for a reply. “Good Lord,” he said, “they are so free— I mean, they are so young, and time is nothing to them, and then they may die—perhaps—why should they make a long face?

Sometimes I think being ill and dying aren’t serious at all, just a sort of loafing about and wasting time; life is only serious down below.

You will get to understand that after a while, but not until you have spent some time up here.”

“

Why not? One must call things by their right names; life is enriched and ennobled thereby. I too have my vices.

”

“My great complaint is that it is my fate to spend my malice upon such insignificant objects. I hope, Engineer, you have nothing against malice? In my eyes, it is reason’s keenest dart against the powers of darkness and ugliness.

Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment.

” And he began to talk about Petrarch, whom he called the father of the modern spirit.

“You say ‘actually,’ ” Hans Castorp answered. He sat with one leg flung over the balustrade, and his eyes looked bloodshot. “

But after all, time isn’t ‘actual.’ When it seems long to you, then it is long; when it seems short, why, then it is short.

But how long, or how short, it actually is, that nobody knows.” He was unaccustomed to philosophize, yet somehow felt an impulse to do so.

Hans Castorp had opportunity for the fleeting observation that her cheekbones were broad and her eyes narrow.—A vague memory of something, of somebody, stirred him slightly and fleetingly as he looked.

“Of course, a female!” he thought, or rather he actually uttered, in a murmur, yet so that the schoolmistress, Fräulein Engelhart, understood.

The poor old spinster smiled in sympathy.

His eyelids, which he had scarcely been able to hold up, now declined to close; they twitched rebelliously open whenever he shut them. He told himself that it was not his regular bedtime; that during the day he had probably rested too much.

Someone seemed to be beating a carpet out of doors⁠—which was not very probable, and proved not to be the case, for it was the beating of his own heart he heard, quite outside of himself and away in the night, exactly as though someone were beating a carpet with a wicker beater.

It had not yet grown entirely dark in the room; the light from the little lamps in the loggias, Joachim’s and the Russian pair’s, fell through the open balcony door.

The thermometer showed a few degrees above freezing, but the snow lay a foot deep, and a completely wintry landscape spread itself before Hans Castorp’s astonished eyes. They had turned off the heat. The temperature of the room was 45°.

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin, in bitter irony.

“You can’t tell,” answered the matter-of-fact Joachim. “We may have fine summer weather yet. Even in September it is very possible. The truth is, the seasons here are not so distinct from each other;

when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.

We are aware that the intercalation of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself.

That is not true clarity, it is a dreamy, inexpressive, irresponsible clarity, without consequences and therefore dangerous, because it betrays one into soft complacence.—Let music play her loftiest role, she will thereby but kindle the emotions, whereas what concerns us is to awaken the reason.

Music is to all appearance movement itself⁠—yet, for all that, I suspect her of quietism.

Let me state my point by the method of exaggeration: my aversion from music rests on political grounds.”

And Pribislav said nothing at all, only hastily tried the screw and stuck the pencil in his pocket.

Never again did they speak to each other; but this one time, thanks to the enterprise of Hans Castorp, they had spoken.

He wrenched his eyes open, amazed at the depths of the trance in which he had been sunk. “I’ve been dreaming,” he thought. “Yes, that was Pribislav. It’s a long time since I thought of him. I wonder what became of the shavings.

The ladies barely breathed. Lawyer Paravant rattled his ear anew, that the critical moment might find it open and receptive. And Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness.

Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.

”

the days rushed on—yes, in the mass they rushed on, though at the same time each single day stretched out long and longer to hold the crowded, secret hopes and fears that filled it to overflowing.

Ah, time is a riddling thing, and hard it is to expound its essence!

Must we put plainer name to those inward experiences which at once both weighted and gave wings to Hans Castorp’s days? We all know them; their emotional inanity ran true to type.

For it cannot be denied that there was such opposition; some of it such as he must always have felt from the very beginning, the rest arising from the particular situation and his partly vicarious, partly secret and personal experiences among “those up here.”

What a creature is man, how widely his conscience betrays him! How easy it is for him to think he hears, even in the voice of duty, a licence to passion!

Hans Castorp listened to Herr Settembrini out of a sense of duty and fairness, in the idea of hearing both sides; with the best of intentions he tested the latter’s views on the subject of the republic, reason and the bello stile.

All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself—or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness—such words as these would better convey the idea.

They bring you your midday broth, as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow

; and it comes over you—but whence or how you do not know, it makes you quite giddy to see the broth coming in—that you are losing a sense of the demarcation of time, that its units are running together, disappearing;

“Look at his heart,” and the Hofrat lifted his huge hand again from his thigh and pointed with his forefinger at the pulsating shadow.

Good God, it was the heart, it was Joachim’s honour-loving heart, that Hans Castorp saw!

“I am looking at your heart,” he said in a suppressed voice.

But irony that is ‘not for a moment equivocal’—what kind of irony would that be, I should like to ask, if I may make so bold as to put in my oar? It would be a piece of dried-up pedantry!”

Thus ungrateful is immature youth! It takes all that is offered, and bites the hand that feeds it.

But it would have seemed too risky to put his opposition into words. He confined himself to commenting upon what Herr Settembrini had said about Hermine Kleefeld, which he found ungenerous—or rather, had his reasons for wishing to find it so.

“I beg of you, Engineer, not to impute to me anything of the sort. I despise paradoxes, I hate them. All that I said to you about irony I would say over again about paradoxes, and more besides.

Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all!

Moreover, I note that you are once more defending disease—”

Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death, with which it may well belong—allied to the grave and its unsavory anatomy.”

“Well roared, lion,” Herr Castorp could not help thinking, as he often did when Herr Settembrini delivered himself of something pedagogic.

Aloud he only said: “We’ve been having to do with X-ray anatomy in these days, down on the lower-floor. Behrens called it that, when he X-rayed us.”

October began as months do: their entrance is, in itself, an unostentatious and soundless affair, without outward signs and tokens; they, as it were, steal in softly and, unless you are keeping close watch, escape your notice altogether.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year.

Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

they, as it were, steal in softly and, unless you are keeping close watch, escape your notice altogether. Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year.

Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

To Hans Castorp the first day of October and the last day of September were as like as two peas; both were equally cold and unfriendly, and those that followed were the same.

What a blessed dispensation of providence, he thought, that there should be a regular Sunday afternoon distribution of letters! One might say that he spent the week in waiting for the next week’s delivery.

And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction

; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waking, we say, is long.

“Thanks, Herr Settembrini. It still has its difficulties it seems. It very likely will have, up to the last day. My cousin told me when I came that many people never got used to it.

But one gets used in time to not getting used.

”

it had been so pointed, so unsocial, so little conversable in its nature, that merely to commend its eloquence seemed lacking in tact.

One does not tell a schoolmaster that he has expressed himself well.

Hans Castorp, indeed, had done so once or twice in the early days of their acquaintance, probably from an instinct to preserve the social equilibrium; but the humanist’s utterances had never before reached quite such a didactic pitch.

Hans Castorp expressed it: “

A cigar like that is alive⁠—it breathes.

Fact. Once, at home, I had the idea of keeping Maria in an airtight tin box, to protect her from damp. Would you believe it, she died! Inside of a week she perished—nothing but leathery corpses left.”

“Oxidization too. The same. Yes, young man, life too is principally oxidization of the cellular albumen, which gives us that beautiful animal warmth, of which we sometimes have more than we need.

Tut, living consists in dying, no use mincing the matter

—une destruction organique, as some Frenchman with his native levity has called it. It smells like that, too. If we don’t think so, our judgment is corrupted.”

of form developing out of rudimentary, but always present, primordia; read with compelling interest of life, and its sacred, impure mysteries.

What was life? No one knew.

It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life;

Thus far pathology, the theory of disease, the accentuation of the physical through pain; yet, in so far as it was the accentuation of the physical, at the same time accentuation through desire.

Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial?

But those first six weeks, as he thought of them in retrospect, seemed a very long time, while the six just passed had been insignificant. His fellow-guests were right to make light of them.

Six weeks, why, that was not so many as the week had days; little indeed, when one considered what a small affair a week was, from Monday to Sunday and then Monday again.

One needed only to see how valueless the next smaller time-unit was to realize that not much could come even of a whole row of them put together. Rather the total effect was to intensify the process of contraction, shrinkage, blurring, and effacement.

She stood there, in her paper cap, and looked him up and down, with a smile that betrayed no trace of pity, nor any concern for the ravages written on his brow.

The sex knows no such compassion, no mercy for the pangs that passion brings; in that element the woman is far more at home than the man, to whom, by his very nature, it is foreign.

Nor does she ever encounter him in it save with mocking and malignant joy—compassion, indeed, he would have none of.

“

Oh, l’amour n’est rien, s’il n’est pas de la folie, une chose insensée, défendue et une aventure dans le mal.

Autrement, c’est une banalité agréable, bonne pour en faire de petites chansons paisibles dans les plaines.

And beside himself at her touch, now on both his knees, with bowed head and closed eyes, he went on: “Oh, l’amour, tu sais—

Le corps, l’amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu’un.

Car le corps, c’est la maladie et la volupté, et c’est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l’amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie!

What is time? A mystery, a figment⁠—and all-powerful.

It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask.

It was a prophecy whose slighting note would have been harder to bear had he not known that prophecies are sometimes made in order that they may not come to pass—as a spell, indeed, against their fulfilment.

Prophecies of this kind mock the future: saying to it how it should shape itself, to the end that it shall shame to be so shaped.

The genius, in the course of the conversation we have repeated, and elsewhere, called Hans Castorp a “joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide,” which might in some sense be considered a translation of the Settembrinian epithet “life’s delicate child”;

The Italian, already in front of him, turned his head to say: “

Gods and mortals have been known to visit the nether world and find their way back again. But in that kingdom they know that he who tastes even once of its fruits belongs to them.

”

but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer.

You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point.

A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!”

I express it as it is, in the words that come to me.

Tragic joy, triumphant sadness—that was what made our ancestors leap and exult around the leaping flames: they did so as an act of homage to the madness of the circle, to an eternity without duration, in which everything recurs⁠—in sheer despair, if you like.

”

“

Whatever profits man, that is the truth.

In him all nature is comprehended, in all nature only he is created, and all nature only for him. He is the measure of all things, and his welfare is the sole and single criterion of truth.

All educational organizations worthy of the name have always recognized what must be the ultimate and significant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolute mandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of the personality.

And lastly, it is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it finds its pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience.

”

But the responsibility is mine, and as such I feel it. It is my duty to point out to your tender years the intellectual perils of intercourse with this man, and to beg you to keep your acquaintance with him within safe limits.

His form is logic, but his essence is confusion.

”

We dispute. We quarrel, nearly every day, till we draw blood; but I confess the contrariness and mischievousness of his ideas but render our acquaintance the more attractive. I need the friction.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them⁠—and I am only confirmed in mine.

How could you assert so much of yours, Lieutenant, or you, Engineer? You are defenceless against intellectual sophistry, you are exposed to danger from the influence of this half fanatical, half pernicious quackery—danger to the intellect and to the soul.”

… in my mind any good and telling phrase I may have chanced to avail myself of—a power hostile to civilization and progress, to work and to life, against whose mephitic breath it is the noblest task of the teacher to shield the mind of youth.”

Who could talk more beautifully than Herr Settembrini, who clearer, or in better-rounded periods?

Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen thanked him most warmly for all he had said, and mounted the Berghof steps, while Herr Settembrini betook himself once more to his humanistic writing-desk, in the storey above Naphta’s silken cell.

The seat at his right was vacant, was only occupied for a few days by a guest, such as he himself had once been, a visiting relative from below, an envoy, one might say—no other than Hans’s uncle James Tienappel.

It was uncanny, to have suddenly sitting next him a delegate and ambassador from home, exhaling from the very weave of his English suit of clothes the atmosphere of that old life in the “upper” world so far below.

But it was bound to come. For a long time Hans Castorp had silently reckoned with the possibility of an advance from the flat-land, and even been fairly sure what personal shape it would take.

He opened it with foreknowledge of its contents, and read the announcement of James Tienappel’s impending arrival. He had business in Switzerland, and would take the occasion to make Hans a visit on his heights. He would be here the day after tomorrow.

“Good,” thought Hans Castorp. “Excellent,” he thought. And added to himself something like “Don’t mention it!”

“If you only knew!” he silently apostrophized the oncoming one. In a word, he took the approaching visit with utter composure;

He sat without hat or overcoat, in the air, fresh to frostiness, of the autumn evening. “I suppose you aren’t cold?” James asked him, shivering in his inch-thick ulster. He talked fast and rather indistinctly, his teeth showing a tendency to chatter.

“We don’t feel the cold,” Hans Castorp said, with tranquil brevity.

The Consul could not look at him enough as they sat and drove. Hans Castorp asked after relatives and friends at home. James conveyed various greetings, including Joachim’s, who was already with the colours, and radiant with pride and joy.

A holiday that would soon have lasted a year and a quarter, and now another half a year on top of that! Who, deuce take it, had all that time to waste? Hans Castorp laid back his head, and laughed, a quiet, brief chuckle.

Time! Uncle James would have to alter his ideas about time, in the first place, before he could talk.

Tienappel said he would have a serious conversation tomorrow with the Hofrat, on Hans’s affair. “By all means,” advised the nephew. “You’ll like him. An interesting character, brusque to a degree, yet melancholy.”

Yet his father, so fine and so intelligent by comparison with those louts, and starry-eyed as never one of them, did his task according to the Law, striking down the creature while its senses were undimmed, and letting its lifeblood well out until it sank.

The boy Leib felt that the stupid goyim were actuated by an easy and irreverent good nature, which paid less honour to the deity than did his father’s solemn mercilessness; thus the conception of piety came to be bound up in his mind with that of cruelty, and the idea of the sacred and the spiritual with the sight and smell of spurting blood.

For he probably saw that his father had not chosen his bloody trade out of the same brutal tastes that moved the lusty gentile butcher or his own Jewish assistant to find gratification in it, but rather on spiritual grounds, and in a sense bespoken …

In man’s spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit—in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man.

The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health.

How, then, could one who posed as the friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man’s humanity? Herr Settembrini had progress ever on his lips:

but he could simply not compete with Naphta in the matter of ascetic, self-mortifying objectivity. Absolute authority, iron discipline, coercion, submission, the Terror! All that might have its own value, but it paid scant homage to the individual and the dignity of his critical faculty.

It was the army regulations of the Prussian Frederick, the Exercise-book of the Spanish Loyola all over again; it was rigid, it was devout, to the very marrow.

But one question remained to be asked:

namely, the dazzling effect of all that whiteness, and the veiling of his field of vision, so that his sense of sight was almost put out of action.

It was nothingness, white, whirling nothingness, into which he looked when he forced himself to do so.

Only at intervals did ghostly-seeming forms from the world of reality loom up before him: a stunted fir, a group of pines, even the pale silhouette of the hay-hut he had lately passed.

I, from my column, perceive all this. In this state he must live gallantly, associate in friendly reverence with himself, for only he is aristocratic, and the counter-positions are not at all.

Man is the lord of counter-positions, they can be only through him, and thus he is more aristocratic than they.

More so than death, too aristocratic for death—that is the freedom of his mind. More aristocratic than life, too aristocratic for life, and that is the piety in his heart.

Reason stands simple before him, for reason is only virtue, while death is release, immensity, abandon, desire. Desire, says my dream. Lust, not love. Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together.

Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful human intercourse—always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice. Ah, yes, it is well and truly dreamed. I have taken stock. I will remember.

I have taken stock. I will remember. I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet well remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to humankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

—And with this—I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal. Long, long have I sought after this word, in the place where Hippe appeared to me, in my loggia, everywhere.

that is, from the point of view of a safe homecoming. For twice such a turn had come, in his dream and fantasy, as had made him start up—once from horror, and again for rapture.

It seemed, indeed, that life meant well by her lone-wandering delicate child.

Be all that as it might, and whether it was morning or afternoon—there could in fact be no doubt that it was still late afternoon—in any case, there was nothing in the circumstances or in his own condition to prevent his going home, which he …

An hour later the highly civilized atmosphere of the Berghof caressed him. He ate enormously at dinner. What he had dreamed was already fading from his mind.

What he had thought⁠—even that selfsame evening it was no longer so clear as it had been at first.

To be sure, that isn’t alchemy or purification, it is simple conserving, hence the word ‘conserve.’

The magic part of it lies in the fact that the stuff that is conserved is withdrawn from the effects of time, it is hermetically sealed from time, time passes it by, it stands there on its shelf shut away from time.

Well, that’s enough about the conserve jars. It hasn’t much to do with the subject. Pardon me, you were going to enlighten me further.”

“And yet,” Naphta added, after a pause, “I would counsel you not to take this man and what he stands for as altogether a laughing matter; since we are on the subject, let me warn you to be on your guard.

The insipid is not synonymous with the harmless. Stupidity is not necessarily free from suspicion.

These people have watered their wine, that was once such a fiery draught, but the idea of the brotherhood itself remains strong enough to stand a good deal of water.

“The problem of tolerance, my dear Engineer, is rather too large for you to tackle.

Do not forget that tolerance becomes crime, if extended to evil.

”

You do not love the Word, or you have it not, or you are chary with it to unfriendliness. The articulate world does not know where it is with you. My friend, that is perilous.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictious word, preserves contact⁠—it is silence which isolates.

The suspicion lies to hand that you will seek to break your silence with deeds. You will ask Cousin Giacomo” (Settembrini had taken to calling Joachim Giacomo, for convenience sake) “to step out in front of your silence,

Bitterer, harder to understand, for him who knew and walked beside him than for the devoted one himself, whose knowledge, even though he knew and kept silent, was academic in its nature, was in a way less his own concern than his companion’s.

It is a fact that a man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

Whether he realizes it or not, he illustrates the pertinence of the adage: So long as we are, death is not; and when death is present, we are not. In other words, between death and us there is no rapport;

It is a fact that a man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own. Whether he realizes it or not, he illustrates the pertinence of the adage:

So long as we are, death is not; and when death is present, we are not.

In other words, between death and us there is no rapport; it is something with which we have nothing to do—and only incidentally the world and nature. And that is why all living creatures can contemplate it with composure, with indifference, unconcern, with egoistic irresponsibility.

As though circumstances which to Herr Albin were but an opportunity to enjoy the boundless advantages of shame, were to the young officer a source of chagrin and self-contempt. Before what, before whom, did his once frank and open glance seek to swerve aside?

How strange is this shame of the living creature that slips away into a corner to die, convinced that he may not expect from outward nature any reverence or regard for his suffering and death!

Convinced, and rightly: a troop of swallows on exultant wing will give no heed to a maimed comrade, nay, they will even peck him with their beaks. But the example is from the lower reaches of nature.

But about death—no one who came back from it could tell you anything, because we don’t realize it.

We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life.

But the beginning and the end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that’s that.”

Would force it, you know—of course, that’s the way of the service down there, all force, all compulsion—he joined the service while he was febrile, he took a life-and-death chance. Field of honour, you know—slipped away from us, and now he’s dead on the field.

Honour was the death of him, and death⁠—well, you might put it the other way round too.

At any rate, he’s gone—‘had the honour to take his leave.’ A madman, a crazy chap.” And he left, tall and stooped, his neck-bone very prominent.

may even have sought to balance this by the lively expression of his grief, especially when Leo Naphta further presumed on his advantage, while he had it, and sententiously added: “

The mistake you literary men make is in thinking that only the spirit makes for virtue. It is nearer the truth to say that only where there is no spirit is there true virtue.

”

So long ago, indeed, that we wonder if the reader is clear how long ago it was.

For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life.

Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once.

We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader’s recollections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying.

You walk, and walk⁠—never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished.

O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale;

No, ladies and gentlemen! It was not thus—it was not thus that I—how mistaken to imagine that I—quite right, ladies and gentlemen! Set‑tled. Let us drop the subject. I feel we understand each other, and now—to the point!”

He had said absolutely nothing. But look, manner, and gestures were so peremptory, perfervid, pregnant, that all, even Hans Castorp, were convinced they had heard something of high moment

; or, if aware of the total lack of matter and sequence in the speech, certainly never missed it. We wonder how it might appear to a deaf person.

“Brother,” said Peeperkorn. His great torso lolled back in free and regal intoxication against his chair. His arm lay stretched along the cloth and he tapped the table with fist lightly clenched. “Brother-in-blood—prospective. In the near future—after a proper interval for reflection.—Very good. Set‑tled.—

Life, young man, is a female. A sprawling female, with swelling breasts close to each other, great soft belly between her haunches, slender arms, bulging thighs, half-closed eyes. She mocks us.

She challenges us to expend our manhood to its uttermost span, to stand or fall before her. To stand or fall. To fall, young man—do you know what that means? The defeat of the feelings, their overthrow when confronted by life—that is impotence.

Peeperkorn treated both with distinguished attention, a respect which Hans Castorp would have called ironic had he not known that irony is not on the grand scale.

Kings are never ironical⁠—not even in the sense of a direct and classic device of oratory, to say nothing of any other kind.

The Dutchman’s manner toward Hans Castorp’s friends was rather mocking than ironic. He made beautiful fun of them, either openly or veiled in exaggerated respect.

“By all means,” said he. “Absolutely. That is to say—very good. Very good indeed.” He tried to imitate Peeperkorn’s gestures. “Yes, yes,” he went on, laughing, “you find it stupid, Herr Settembrini, and I admit it is unclear, which in your eyes is even worse.

Stupid⁠—well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

There, I have made an epigram—a bon mot! What do you think of it?”

But how should you be? You would have degenerated. Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience.

Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.

C’est ça. You don’t realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you an enemy of the human race?”

“Even when you make admissions, there is always some impertinence about them. You are impertinent by nature—not only with me, but in general—God knows why.

Your admiration, your very humility, is an impertinence.

Don’t think I can’t see it. I ought not to speak with you at all, and certainly not when you dare to talk about waiting for me. It is inexcusable that you are still here.

Thus, as I have lain in my loge, it has been revealed to me, and I am enchanted to be able to tell you all about it.

There are two paths to life: one is the regular one, direct, honest. The other is bad, it leads through death⁠—that is the spirituel way.

”

But we feel that it would also be inept—to borrow Hans Castorp’s useful word—and certainly not in the least “genial.” For what would “clean-cut” be? The subject is so equivocal, the limits so fluctuating. We make bold to laugh at the idea.

Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kinds of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly?

All ambiguity is therein resolved: love cannot but be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshliness. It is always itself, as the height of shrewd “geniality” as in the depth of passion;

Feeling, you understand, is the masculine force that rouses life. Life slumbers. It needs to be roused, to be awakened to a drunken marriage with divine feeling. For feeling, young man, is godlike.

Man is godlike, in that he feels. He is the feeling of God.

God created him in order to feel through him. Man is nothing but the organ through which God consummates his marriage with roused and intoxicated life. If man fails in feeling, it is blasphemy;

Dear, good Castorp, don’t despise me for whining like this—but after all, couldn’t she let me have my way? There would be something higher about it, Castorp; I am not a beast of the field, in my way I am a man too.

Pure fleshly desire casts about, here, there, and everywhere; it is not bound, not fixed, and so we call it animal. But when it is fixed upon a human being, with a human face, then we begin talking about love.

It is not that I just crave her carnal part, to enjoy as if she were a flesh-and-blood doll;

Pure fleshly desire casts about, here, there, and everywhere; it is not bound, not fixed, and so we call it animal. But when it is fixed upon a human being, with a human face, then we begin talking about love.

It is not that I just crave her carnal part, to enjoy as if she were a flesh-and-blood doll; if there were one least little thing different about her face, it might be that I should not crave her at all⁠—which shows that I love her soul, and love her with my soul.

For love of the face is love of the soul—”

they shaped. What could the others do? In such matters he was accustomed to command, and the weight of his personality would always have been decisive, even if he had not been, as he was, master and mover of the expedition.

Size itself is tyrannical, autocratic; thus it has always been, thus it will remain.

Mynheer desired to eat in sight, in thunderous hearing of the waterfall, it was his mighty will. Who did not wish to go hungry must acquiesce. Most of them felt dissatisfied.

Hans Castorp looked about him.

He saw on every side the uncanny and the malign, and he knew what it was he saw: life without time, life without care or hope, life as depravity, assiduous stagnation; life as dead.

Yet it was occupied too, it had activities of various kinds, pursued simultaneously; now and again one of these would assume the proportions of a craze, and subordinate everything to itself. Old residents experienced the periodic revival of more than one of these fads.

What did Herr Settembrini think about “delusions”; which were a mixture of actuality and dream, perhaps less strange in nature than to our crude, everyday processes of thought?

The mystery of life was literally bottomless.

What wonder, then, if sometimes illusions arose—and so on and so forth, in our hero’s genial, confiding, loose and flowing style.

At bottom, and boldly confessed, the desire does not exist; it is a misapprehension precisely as impossible as the thing itself, as we should soon see if nature once let it happen.

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

This was what they were all obscurely feeling; and since it was here simply a question not of an actual return, but merely a theatrical staging of one, in which they should only see the departed, no more, the thing seemed humanly unthinkable;