The Magic Mountain (18 page)

And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the beautiful syllables melt upon his tongue, as he closed his eyes and swayed his head from side to side, heedless that his hearers understood not a syllable. Obviously it was all done for the sake of impressing his companions with his memory and his pronunciation.

“But you don’t understand; you hear the words, yet without grasping their tragic import. My dear sirs, can you comprehend what it means when I tell you that it was the love of woman which the crippled Leopardi was condemned to renounce; that this it principally was which rendered him incapable of avoiding the embitterment of his soul? Fame and virtue were shadows to him, nature an evil power—and so she is, stupid and evil both, I agree with him there—he even despaired, horrible to say, he even despaired of science and progress! Here, Engineer, is the true tragedy. Here you have your ‘dilemma for the human feelings,’ here, and not in the case of that wretched woman, with whose name I really cannot burden my memory. Do not, for heaven’s sake, speak to me of the ennobling effects of physical suffering! A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—though the latter is the rule and the former the exception. It is the body, as a rule, which flourishes exceedingly, which draws everything to itself, which usurps the predominant place and lives repulsively emancipated from the soul. A human being who is first of all an invalid is
all
body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement. In most cases he is little better than a carcass—”

“Funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, on Herr Settembrini’s farther side. “You were saying something quite like that just lately.” “Was I?” said Hans Castorp. “Yes, it may be something of the kind went through my head.”

Settembrini was silent a few paces. Then he said: “So much the better. So much the better if that is true. I am far from claiming to expound an original philosophy—such is not my office. If our engineer here has been making observations in harmony with my own, that only confirms my surmise that he is an intellectual amateur and up to the present, as is the wont of gifted youth, still experimenting with various points of view. The young man with parts is no unwritten page, he is rather one upon which all the writing has already been done, in sympathetic ink, the good and the bad together; it is the schoolmaster’s task to bring out the good, to obliterate for ever the bad, by the methods of his profession.—You have been making purchases?” he asked, in a lighter tone. “No,” Hans Castorp said. “That is, nothing but—”

“We ordered a pair of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim answered unconcernedly.

“For the afternoon cure—it’s got so beastly cold; and I am supposed to do as the Romans do, up here,” Hans Castorp said, laughing and looking at the ground. “Ah ha! Blankets—the cure,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes. In fact:
placet experiri
,” he repeated, with his Italian pronunciation, and took his leave, for their conversation had brought them to the door of the sanatorium, where they greeted the lame concierge in his lodge. Settembrini turned off into one of the sitting-rooms, to read the newspapers before luncheon. He evidently meant to cut the second rest period. “Bless us and keep us!” Hans Castorp said to Joachim, as they stood in the lift. “What a pedagogue it is! He said himself that he had the ‘pedagogic itch.’ One has to watch out with him, not to say more than one means, or he is down on you at once with all his doctrines. But after all, it is worth listening to, he talks so well; the words come jumping out of his mouth so round and appetizing—when I listen to him, I keep seeing a picture of fresh hot rolls in my mind’s eye.”

Joachim laughed. “Better not tell him that. He’d be very put out I’m sure, to hear the sort of image his words call up in your mind.”

“Think so? I’m not so sure. I get the impression that it is not simply and solely for the sake of edifying us that he talks; perhaps that’s only a secondary motive. The important one, I feel sure, is the talk itself, the way he makes his words roll out, so resilient, just like a lot of rubber balls! He is very pleased when you notice the effect. I suppose Magnus, the brewer, was rather stupid, after all, with his ‘beautiful characters’; but I do think Settembrini might have said what the point really is in literature. I did not like to ask, for fear of putting my foot in it; I am not just clear about it, and this is the first time I have ever known a literary man. But if it isn’t the beautiful characters, then obviously it must be the beautiful words, and that is the impression I get from being in Settembrini’s society. What a vocabulary! and he uses the word virtue just like that, without the slightest embarrassment. What do you make of that? I’ve never taken the word in my mouth as long as I’ve lived; in school, when the book said ‘
virtus,’
we always just said ‘valour’ or something like that. It certainly gave me a queer feeling in my inside, to hear him. And it makes me nervous to hear him scolding, about the cold, and Behrens, and Frau Magnus because she is losing weight, and about pretty well everything. He is a born objector, I saw that at once, down on the existing order; and that always gives me the impression that the person is

spoilt—I can’t help it.”

“You say that,” Joachim answered consideringly, “and yet he has a kind of pride about him that makes an altogether different impression: as of a man who has great respect for himself, or for humanity in general; and I like that about him; it has something good, in my eyes.”

“You are right, there,” Hans Castorp answered. “He’s even austere; he makes one feel rather uncomfortable, as if you were—well, shall I say as if you were being taken to task? That’s not such a bad way to describe it. Can you believe it, I had the feeling he was not at all pleased at my buying the blankets? He had something against it, and he kept dwelling on it.”

“Oh, no,” Joachim said after reflecting, in some surprise. “How could he have? I shouldn’t think so.” And then, thermometer in mouth, with sack and pack, he went to lie down, while Hans Castorp began at once to wash and change for dinner—which was rather less than an hour away.

WHEN they came upstairs after the meal, the parcel containing the blankets lay on a chair in Hans Castorp’s room; and that afternoon he made use of them for the first time. The experienced Joachim instructed him in. the art of wrapping himself up, as practised in the sanatorium; they all did it, and each new-comer had to learn. First the covers were spread, one after the other, over the chair, so that a sizable piece hung down at the foot. Then you sat down and began to put the inner one about you: first lengthwise, on both sides, up to the shoulders, and then from the feet up, stooping over as you sat and grasping the folded-over end, first from one side and then from the other, taking care to fit it neatly into the length, in order to ensure the greatest possible smoothness and evenness. Then you did precisely the same thing with the outer blanket—it was somewhat more difficult to handle, and our neophyte groaned not a little as he stooped and stretched out his arms to practise the grips his cousin showed him. Only a few old hands, Joachim said, could wield both blankets at once, flinging them into position with three self-assured motions. This was a rare and enviable facility, to which belonged not only long years of practice, but a certain knack as well. Hans Castorp had to laugh at this, lying back in his chair with aching muscles; Joachim did not at once see anything funny in what he had said, and looked at him dubiously, but finally laughed too.

“There,” he said, when Hans Castorp lay at last limbless and cylindrical in his chair, with the yielding roll at the back of his neck, quite worn out with all these gymnastic exercises; “there, nothing can touch you now, not even if we were to have ten below zero.” He withdrew behind the partition, to do himself up in his turn.

That about the ten below zero Hans Castorp doubted; he was even now distinctly cold. He shivered repeatedly as he lay looking out through the wooden arch at the reeking, dripping damp outside, which seemed on the point of passing over into snow. It was strange that with all that humidity his cheeks still burned with a dry heat, as though he were sitting in an over-heated room. He felt absurdly tired from the practice of putting on his rugs; actually, as he held up
Ocean Steamships
to read it, the book shook in his hands. So very fit he certainly was not—and totally anæmic, as Hofrat Behrens had said; this, no doubt, was why he was so susceptible to cold. But such unpleasing sensations were outweighed by the great comfort of his position, the unanalysable, the almost mysterious properties of his reclining-chair, which he had applauded even on his first experience of it, and which reasserted themselves in the happiest way whenever he resorted to it anew. Whether due to the character of the upholstering, the inclination of the chair-back, the exactly proper width and height of the arms, or only to the appropriate consistency of the neck roll, the result was that no more comfortable provision for relaxed limbs could be conceived than that purveyed by this excellent chair. The heart of Hans Castorp rejoiced in the blessed fact that two vacant and securely tranquil hours lay before him, dedicated by the rules of the house to the principal cure of the day; he felt it—though himself but a guest up here—to be a most suitable arrangement. For he was by nature and temperament passive, could sit without occupation hours on end, and loved, as we know, to see time spacious before him, and not to have the sense of its passing banished, wiped out or eaten up by prosaic activity. At four o’clock he partook of afternoon tea, with cake and jam. Followed a little movement in the open air, then rest again, then supper—which, like all the other meal-times, afforded a certain stimulus for eye and brain, and a certain sense of strain; after that a peep into one or other of the optical toys, the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope, the cinematograph. It might be still too much to say that Hans Castorp had grown used to the life up here; but at least he did have the daily routine at his fingers’ ends.

There is, after all, something peculiar about the process of habituating oneself in a new place, the often laborious fitting in and getting used, which one undertakes for its own sake, and of set purpose to break it all off as soon as it is complete, or not long thereafter, and to return to one’s former state. It is an interval, an interlude, inserted, with the object of recreation, into the tenor of life’s main concerns; its purpose the relief of the organism, which is perpetually busy at its task of self-renewal, and which was in danger, almost in process, of being vitiated, slowed down, relaxed, by the bald, unjointed monotony of its daily course. But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing-down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long at a time? It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time, so closely bound up with the consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment. Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general it is thought that the interestingness and novelty of the time-content are what “make the time pass”; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow. This is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large timeunits, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all. And conversely, a full and interesting content can put wings to the hour and the day; yet it will lend to the general passage of time a weightiness, a breadth and solidity which cause the eventful years to flow far more slowly than those poor, bare, empty ones over which the wind passes and they are gone. Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; 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. Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene, of all our sojourns at cures and bathing resorts; it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident. Our first days in a new place, time has a youthful, that is to say, a broad and sweeping, flow, persisting for some six or eight days. Then, as one “gets used to the place,” a gradual shrinkage makes itself felt. He who clings or, better expressed, wishes to cling to life, will shudder to see how the days grow light and lighter, how they scurry by like dead leaves, until the last week, of some four, perhaps, is uncannily fugitive and fleet. On the other hand, the quickening of the sense of time will flow out beyond the interval and reassert itself after the return to ordinary existence: the first days at home after the holiday will be lived with a broader flow, freshly and youthfully—but only the first few, for one adjusts oneself more quickly to the rule than to the exception; and if the sense of time be already weakened by age, or—and this is a sign of low vitality—it was never very well developed, one drowses quickly back into the old life, and after four-and-twenty hours it is as though one had never been away, and the journey had been but a watch in the night.

We have introduced these remarks here only because our young Hans Castorp had something like them in mind when, a few days later, he said to his cousin, and fixed him with his bloodshot eyes: “I shall never cease to find it strange that the time seems to go so slowly in a new place. I mean—of course it isn’t a question of my being bored; on the contrary, I might say that I am royally entertained. But when I look back—in retrospect, that is, you understand—it seems to me I’ve been up here goodness only knows how long; it seems an eternity back to the time when I arrived, and did not quite understand that I was there, and you said: ‘Just get out here’—don’t you remember?—That has nothing whatever to do with reason, or with the ordinary ways of measuring time; it is purely a matter of feeling. Certainly it would be nonsense for me to say: ‘I feel I have been up here two months’—it would be silly. All I can say is ‘very long.’ “