The Magic Mountain (113 page)

Thus Japoll, for whom, of course, not much could be said. His defence did not greatly invalidate the elegant contrast of honour with pusillanimity presented by the document on the other side; the less because he had not the manifolding facilities disposed of by his opponents, and could only distribute a few typed duplicates of his reply. The protocol, on the contrary, everyone received, even the most uninterested. Naphta and Settembrini, for instance, had copies sent them, which Hans Castorp saw in their hands, and remarked, to his surprise, that they too perused them with bitter concentration. For him the ruling temper of the Berghof was too much—he was powerless to dissipate its mood by a burst of blithe and cleansing laughter, but this he had confidently expected to hear from Herr Settembrini. Alas, no, even the unclouded eye of the Freemason was dimmed by the prevailing spleen; it weighed on his spirit, stilling his mirth; it made him susceptible to the rasping provocation of the tale of the ear-boxing. Moreover he, the protagonist of Life, was suffering in spirit from the state of his health. Slowly, remorselessly, with deceptive interludes of brighter hope, it grew worse. He despised, he scorned it, and himself; but had reached the point where it obliged him, every few days, to take to his bed.

His housemate and antagonist was no better off. The organic disease which had been the cause—or must we say pretext—for the untimely end to his activities within his order, made rapid progress; even the high and thin conditions of life up here could not give it pause. Naphta too was often confined to his bed; the crack in his voice was more cracked than ever when he talked; and as his fever increased he talked more, and more malignantly, than ever. That ideal opposition to the forces of disease and death, the forced surrender of which before the superior power of abject nature gave Herr Settembrini such pain, was foreign to little Naphta. His way of taking the deterioration of his physical part was not with sorrow or aversion, but with a sort of jeering levity, an unnatural lust of combat, a mania of intellectual doubt, denial, and distraction, that was a sore irritant to the other’s melancholy, and daily embittered more the intellectual quarrel between them. Hans Castorp, of course, could only speak of those at which he was present; but he felt tolerably sure he did not miss any; that his presence, the presence of the bone of pedagogic contention, was necessary, to give rise to a disputation of any magnitude. And though he did not spare Herr Settembrini the pain of finding Naphta’s gibes worth hearing, he had to admit that these were latterly going beyond all bounds and often enough overstepping the border-line of mental sanity.

For this sufferer possessed neither the power nor the good will to rise above his illness; but rather saw all the world in its sign and image. In the presence of Herr Settembrini’s quivering resentment, who would sooner have drawn his nursling away from the room or even stopped his ears, Naphta declared that matter was so bad a material that the spirit could not be realized within it. Any effort in that direction was sheer folly; nothing could come of it but distortion and fatuity. What had been the net result of the vainglorious French Revolution—what but the capitalistic bourgeois State? A magnificent outcome, truly! And one it was hoped to improve upon, forsooth, by making the horror universal! A world-republic! That would bring happiness, beyond a doubt. Progress? It was the cry of the patient who constantly changes his position thinking each new one will bring relief. The unconfessed but secretly quite general desire for war was another manifestation of the same condition. It would come, this war, and it would be a good thing, though the consequences of it would not be those anticipated by its authors. Naphta sneered at the security of the bourgeois State. He took occasion to animadvert upon it one day in autumn as they were walking on the main street. It came on to rain, and suddenly, as though at the word of command, all the world put up its umbrellas. Which served Naphta as a symbol of the cowardice and vulgar softness engendered by civilized life. An incident like the going-down of the
Titanic
was like the writing on the wall: it flung people back upon primitive conditions and fears, and thus was salutary. Afterwards, of course, came the great outcry that transportation must be safeguarded. Always the greatest outcry whenever security was threatened. It was pathetic; and the flabby humanitarianism of it went hand in hand with the wolfish cruelty and baseness of the economic conflict within the bourgeois State. War, war! For his part, he was for it; the general hankering seemed to him comparatively creditable.

Herr Settembrini introduced the word justice into the discussion, and sought to apply this lofty principle as a preventive measure against political catastrophes both foreign and domestic. But as soon as he did so, Naphta, who just previously had found the spiritual too high ever to succeed in manifesting itself in material form, now set to work to cast doubts on, to derogate from, that very spiritual. Justice! Was it, as a conception, worth worshipping? Was it first-class? Was it of divine origin? God and Nature were not even-handed, they played favourites, they exercised the right of choice, they graced one individual with dangerous distinction, to another granted the easy common lot. And as for the man of action—for him justice was on the one hand a paralysing weakness, doubt itself, on the other a trumpet-call to unscrupulous deeds. And since, in order to remain within the moral code, such a man had always to correct “justice” in the second sense by “justice” in the first, where then was the Absolute, the radical, in the conception? Moreover, one was “just” according to one standard
or
according to the other. All the rest was liberalism—in which nobody nowadays took any stock. Justice, in short, was an empty husk, a stock-in-trade of bourgeois rhetoric; to get down to business, one had always to know which justice one was dealing with: the one which would give a man his own, or the one which would give everybody alike.

Out of his shoreless stream of words, we have hit upon these in illustration of the way he sought to confound the reason. But even worse was the way he talked about science—in which he did not believe. He did not believe, he said, in it, because it was permissible to exercise choice, whether to believe in it or not. It was a belief, like any other, only worse, stupider than any; the word science was the expression of the silliest realism, which did not blush to take at their face value the more than dubious reflections of objects in the human intellect; to pass them current, and to shape out of them the sorriest, most spiritless dogma ever imposed upon humanity. Was not the idea of a material world existing by and for itself the most laughable of all selfcontradictions? But the modern natural sciences, as dogma, rested upon the metaphysical postulate that time, space, and causality, the forms of cognition, in which all phenomena are enacted, are actual conditions, existing independently of our knowledge of them. This monistic position was an insult to the spirit. Space, time, and causality—in monistic language, evolution: here was the central dogma of a freethinking, atheistical, bastard religion, by virtue of which one thought to supersede the first book of Moses, and oppose the pure light of knowledge to a stultifying fable—as though Haeckel had been present at the creation! Empiricism! The universal ether— based on exact knowledge, of course? The atom, that pretty mathematical joke of the smallest, the indivisible particle of matter—its existence had been demonstrated, undoubtedly? The doctrine of the illimitability of time and space was, surely, based on experience? In fact, anybody with a very little logic could make very merry over the theory of the endlessness and the reality of space and time; and could arrive at the result of—nothing: that is, at the view that realism is your true nihilism. How? Quite simply; since the relation to infinity of any size you chose to postulate was as zero. There was no size to the infinite; in eternity was neither duration nor change. In the spatially infinite, since every distance was, mathematically, as zero, there could not even be two points close together, to say nothing of two bodies, or of motion as such. He, Naphta, stated this, in order to counter the arrogance of materialistic science, which gave out for absolute knowledge its astronomical quackery, its windbaggery about the universe. Pitiable human kind, that by a vain mustering of meaningless figures have let themselves be driven to a conclusion of their own insignificance, to the destruction of any emphasis upon their own importance! It might be tolerable that human reason and knowledge should confine themselves to the terrestrial, and within this sphere treat as actual their experience with the subjective object. But let them go beyond that, let them once attempt to grapple with the riddle of eternity, and invent so-called cosmologies and cosmogonies, and it was beyond a jest; the presumptuousness of it reached a climax. What blasphemous rubbish, to reckon the “distance” of any star from the earth in terms of trillions of kilometres, or in light years, and to imagine that with such a parade of figures the human spirit was gaining an insight into the essence of infinity and eternity—whereas infinity had absolutely nothing whatever to do with size, nor yet eternity with duration or distance in time; they had nothing in common with natural science, being, as they were, the abrogation of that which we called nature! Verily, the simplicity of a child, who thinks the stars are holes in the tent of heaven, through which the eternal brightness shines, was a thousand times more to his mind than the whole hollow, preposterous, overweening drivel of monistic science on the subject of the “universe.”

Settembrini asked him if that about the stars represented his own personal belief. He answered that on this point he reserved to himself the freedom, and the humblemindedness, of doubt. From which again it might be seen what he understood by freedom, and whither such a conception of it might lead. If only Herr Settembrini had not ground for the fear that Hans Castorp found all this highly worth listening to! Naphta’s malicious wit lay in ambush, to spy out the weaknesses of the naturecompelling forces of progress, and convict its standard-bearers and pioneers of human relapses into the irrational. Aviators, flying men, he said, were mostly a bad lot, untrustworthy, above all exceedingly superstitious. They carried mascots on board with them, pigs and ravens and such-like; they spat three times in different directions, they wore the gloves of lucky flyers. How could such primitive unreason be reconciled with the conception of the universe which underlay their calling? The contradiction diverted him, he held forth upon it
in extenso.
But such illustrations of Naphta’s malevolence are without number—let us abandon them for the all-toopertinent tale we have to tell.

One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. The party consisted of Naphta and Settembrini, Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal. In two one-horse sleighs, Hans Castorp with the humanist, Naphta with Ferge and Wehsal, the last-named sitting with the coachman, they left the greengrocer’s at about three o’clock in the afternoon, and well bundled up drove off to the friendly music of bells, that sounds so pleasant through still, snowy air. They took the right-hand road, past Frauenkirch and Claris, southwards. Storm-clouds pushed up rapidly from that direction, and soon the only streak of blue in the sky lay behind them, over the Rhätikon. The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They went at a foot-pace. Coasting-parties rode downhill toward them, and had to dismount as they met. Sometimes from round a bend in the road would come the clear and warning sound of other bells; sleighs driven tandem would be approaching and some skill was required to pass in the narrow road. Near their destination was a beautiful view of a rocky stretch of the Zügenstrasse. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist—superterrestrial, Valhallari, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible—and afforded Herr Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man’s importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own.

One might have lodgment here; in the upper story were numbered rooms, and on the same floor the dining-room, furnished in peasant style, and well heated. They ordered a bite from the obliging landlady: coffee, honey, white bread and “pear bread,” a sort of sweetmeat, the speciality of the place; red wine was sent out to the coachman. At the other tables were sitting Swiss and Dutch visitors.

We should have been glad to relate that our friends, being warmed and cheered by the hot and excellent coffee, proceeded to elevating discourse. But the statement would be inexact. For the discourse, after the first few words, took the form of a monologue by Naphta, and even as a monologue was conducted in a manner singularly offensive, from the social point of view; the ex-Jesuit flatly turning his back on Herr Settembrini, completely ignoring the other two gentlemen, and devoting himself to Hans Castorp, to whom he held forth with marked affability.

It would have been hard to give a name to the subject of this discourse, to which Hans Castorp listened, nodding from time to time as though in partial agreement. We may presume that it was scarcely a connected argument, but rather moved loosely in the realms of the intellectual; in general pointing out, with an accompanying comment which we may characterize as cheerless, the equivocal nature of the spiritual phenomena of life, the changeful aspects and contentious unserviceability of the great abstract conceptions man has based on them, and indicating in what a rainbow-hued garment the Absolute appears upon this earth.