|
settled.
It
had stopped snowing, the sky began to clear. The blue-grey
cloud-masses parted to admit glimpses of the sun, whose rays
gave a bluish cast to the scene. Then it grew altogether
fair; a bright
Page 271
hard frost and settled
winter splendour reigned in the middle of November. The arch
of the loggia framed a glorious panorama of snow-powdered
forest, softly filled passes and ravines, white, sun- lit
valleys, and radiant blue heavens above all. In the evening,
when the almost full moon appeared, the world lay in
enchanted splen- dour, marvellous. Crystal and diamond it
glittered far and wide, the forest stood up very black and
white, the quarter of the heavens where the moon was not
showed deeply dark, embroidered with stars. On the flashing
surface of the snow, shadows, so strong, so sharp and
clearly outlined that they seemed almost more real than the
objects themselves, fell from houses, trees, and
telegraph-poles. An hour or so after sunset there would be
some founeen degrees of frost. The world seemed spellbound
in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in
a deathlike, enchanted trance.
Hans Castorp stopped until far into the night in his balcony
above the ensorcelled winter scene - much longer than
Joachim, who retired at ten or a little later. His excellent
chair, with the sectional mattress and the neck-roll, he
pulled close to the snow- cushioned balustrade; at his hand
was the white table with the lighted reading-lamp, a stack
of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the "evening milk"
which was brought to each of the guests' rooms at nine
o'clock. Hans Castorp put a dash of cognac in his, to make
it more palatable. Already he "had availed himself of all
his means of protection against the cold, the entire outfit:
lay en- sconced well up to his chest in the buttoned-up
sleeping-sack he had acquired in one of the well-furnished
shops in the Platz, with the two camel's-hair rugs folded
over it in accordance with the ritual. He wore his winter
suit, with a shon fur jacket atop, a woollen cap, felt
boots, and heavily lined gloves, which, however, could not
prevent the stiffening of his fingers.
What held him so late - often until midnight and beyond,
long
after the " bad " Russian pair had left their loge - was
partly the magic of the winter night, into which, until
eleven, were woven the mounting strains of music frQm near
and far. But even more it was inertia and excitement, both
of these at once, and in combina- tion: bodily inenia, the
physical fatigue which hated any idea of moving; and mental
excitement, the busy preoccupation of his thoughts with
certain new and fascinating studies upon which the young man
had embarked, and which left his brain no rest. The weather
affected him, his organism was stimulated by the cold; he
ate enormously, attacking the mighty Berghof meals, where
the roast goose followed upon the roast beef, with the usual
Berghof appetite, which was always even larger in winter
than
Page 271
RESEARCH
273
the lower rest-hall, Frau
Redisch, the wife of a Polish industria! magnate, and Frau
Hessenfeld, a widow from Berlin, both of these new arrivals
since October, claimed the book at the same time, an~ a
regrettable incident arose after dinner, yes, more than
regrettable, for there was a violent scene, overheard by
Hans Castorp, in his loggia above. It ended in spasms of
hysteria on the part of one of the women - it might have
been Frau Redisch, but equally "Jell it might have been Frau
Hessenfeld - and she was borne away be- side herself to her
own room. The youth of the place had got hold of the
treatise before those of r~er years; studying it ill part in
groups, after supper, in their various rooms. Hans Castorp
himself saw the youth with the finger-nail hand it to
Franzchen Oberdank in the dining-room - she was a new
arrival and a light case, a flaxen- hrored young thing whose
mother had just brought her to the sanatorium.
There may have been exceptions; there may have been those
who employed the hours of the rest-cure ~'ith some serious
in- tellectual occupation, some conceivably profitable
study, either by way of keeping in touch with life in the
lowlands, or in order to give weight and depth to the
passing hour, that it might not be pure time and nothing
else besides. Perhaps here and there was one - not, of
course, to mention Herr Settembrini, with his zeal for
eliminating human suffering, or Joachim with his Russian
primer - yes, there might be one, or two, thus occupied; if
not among the guests in the dining-room, which seemed not
very likely, then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans
Castorp inclined to be- lieve it. He himself, after imbibing
all that Ocem Steamships had to offer him, had ordered
certain books from home, some of them bearing on his
profession, and they had arrived with his winter clothing:
scientific engineering, technique of ship-building, and the
like. But these volumes lay now neglected in favour of other
text- books belonging to quite a different field, an
interest in which had seized upon the young man: anatomy,
physiology, biology, works in German, French and English,
sent up to the Berghof by the book-dealer in the village,
obviously because Hans Castorp had ordered them, as was
indeed the case. He had done so of his own motion, without
telling anyone, on a solitary walk he took down to the Platz
while Joachim was occupied with the weekly weigh- ing or
injection. His cousin was surprised when he saw the books in
Hans Castorp's hands. They were expensive, as scientific
works always are: the prices were marked on the wrappel"S
and inside the front covers. Joachim asked why, if his
cousin wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them
of the Hofrat, who surely
Z74 THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
posessed a well-chosen stock. The young man answered that it
was <Juite a different thing to read when the book was
one's own; for his part, he loved to mark them and underline
passages in pencil. Joachim could hear, hoU1"S on end, the
noise made by the paper- knife going through the uncut
leaves.
The volumes were heavy, unh.-andy. Hans Castorp propped them
against his chest or stomach as he lay; they were heavy, but
he did not mind. Lying there, his mouth half open, he let
his eye glide down the learned page, upon which fell me
light from his red- shaded lamp, though he might have read,
if need were, by the bril- liance of the moonlight alone. He
read, following the lines down the page with his head, until
at the bottom his chin lay sunk upon his breast - and in
this position the reader would pause perhaps for reflection,
dozing a little or musing in half-slumber, before lifting
his eyes to the next page. He probed profoundly. While the
moon took itS appointed way above the crystalline splendours
of the mountain valley, h~ read of organized matter, of the
proper- ties of protoplasm, that sensitive substance
maintaining Itself in extraordinary fluctUation between
building up and breaking down; of form develo(>ing out of
rudimentary, but always present, (>ri- mordia; read wIth
compelling interest of life, and itS sacred, Im- pure
mysteries.
What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of it-
self, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it
was. Con- sciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to
stimulus, was undoubt- edly, to a certain degree, present in
the lowest, most undeveloped ~ges of life; it was im~ible.
to fix t!te first appea~n~e.of con- SCIOUS processes at any
poInt In the history of the mdiVldual or the race; im~ible
to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of
a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous
systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to
deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could
sus- pend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only
nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily
suspend the irrita- bility to sensation of every form of
living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom;
one could narcotize ova and sperma- tozoa with chloroform,
chloral hydrate, or morp!une. Conscious- ness, then, was
simply a function of matter organized into life; a function
that in higher manifestations tUrned upon its avatar and
became an effort to explore and explain the pnenomenon it
dis- played - a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve
self-knowl- edge, natUre in recoil- and vainly, in the
event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life,
when all is said, listen to itself.
RESEARCH Z 7 5
What was life? No one knew. No one knew the actual point
whence it sprang, where it kindled itself. Nothing in the
domain of life seemed uncausated, or insufficiently
causated, from that point on; but life itself seemed without
antecedent. If there was anything that might be said about
it, it was this: it must be so highly developed,
structurally, that nothing even distantly related to It was
present in the inorganic world. Between the protean amreba
and the vertebrate the difference was slight, unessential,
as com- ~ed to that between the simplest living organism and
that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead,
because it was in- organic. For death was only the-logical
negation of life; but be- tween life and inanimate nature
yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. They
tried to close it with hypotheses, which it swallowed down
without becoming any the less deep or broad. Seeking for a
connecting link, they had condescended to the preposterous
assumption of structureless living matter, unorgan- IZed
organisms, which darted together of themselves in the albu-
men solution, like crystals in the mother-liquor; yet
organic dif- ferentiation still remained at once condition
and expression of all life. One could point to no form of
life that did not owe its exist- ence to procreation by
parents. They had fished the primeval slime out of toe depth
of the sea, and great had been the jubilation - but the end
of it all had been shame and confusion. For it turned out
that they had mistaken a precipitate of sulphate of lime for
proto- plasm. But then, to avoid giving pause before a
miracle - for life that built itself up out of, and fell in
decay into, the same sort of matter as inorganic nature;
would have been, happening of itself, miraculous - they were
driven to believe in a spontaneous genera- tion - that is,
in the emergence of the organic from the inorganic - which
was just as much of a miracle. Thus they went on, devis- ing
intermediate stages and transitions, assuming the existence
of organisms which stood lower down than any yet known, but
them- selves had as forerunners still more primitive efforts
of nature to achieve life: primitive forms of wrnch no one
would ever catch sight, for they were all of less than
microscopic size, and previous to whose hypothetic existence
the synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken
place.
What then '!Vas life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by
a form-preserving instabilit)T, a fever of mal..~r, wrnch
accom- panied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of
albumen mole- cules that were too impossibly complicated,
too impossibly ingen- ious in structure. It was the
existence of the actually impossible-to- exist, of a
half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely
balancing.
1. 76 THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
in this restricted and feverish process of decay and
renewal, upon the point of existence. It was not matter and
it was not spirit, but somet1ting between the tWo, a
phenomenon conveyed by mat- ter, like the rainbow on the
waterfall, and like the flame. Yet why not material- it was
sentient to the point of desire and disgust, the
shamelessness of matter become sensible of itself. the
inconti- nent form of being. It was a secret and ardent
stirring in the frozen chastity of the universal; it was a
stolen and voluptuous impurity of sucking and secreting; an
exhalation of carbonic acid gas and ma- terial impurities of
mysterious origin and composition. It was a pul- lulation,
an unfolding, a form-building (made possible by the over-
balancing of its instability, yet controlled by the laws of
growth inherent within it), of something brewed out of
water, albumen, salt and fats, which was called flesh, and
which became form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the
time the essence of sensuality and desire. For this form and
beauty were not spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty
of sculpture, conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed
substance, which could in all purity make beauty perceptib1e
to the senses. Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the
somehow awakened voluptuousness of matter, of the organic.
dying-living substance itself, the reeking flesh.
-Ashe lay there above the glittering valley, lapped in the
bodily warmth
/ reserved to him by fur and wool, in the frosty night
illumine by the brilliance from a lifeless star, the image
of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It hovered
before him, somewhere in space, remote from his grasp, yet
near his sense; this body, this opaquely whitish form,
giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with all its
blemishes and native impurities, with its spots, pimples,
discolorations, irregularities; its horny, scalelike
regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls of
rudimentary lanugo. It leaned there, set off against the
cold lifelessness of the inanimate world, in its own
vaporous sphere, relaxed, the head crowned with something
cool, horny, and pigmented, which was an outgrowth of its
skin; the hands clasped at the back of the neck. It looked
down at him beneath drooping lids, out of eyes made to
appear slanting by a racial variation in the lid-formation.
Its lips were half open, even a little curled. It rested its
weight on one leg, the hip-bone stood out sharply under the
flesh, while the other, relaxed, nestled its slightly bent
knee against the inside of the sup- poning leg, and poised
the foot only upon the toes. It leaned thus, turning to
smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired sym- metty
of its limbs and trunk. The acrid. steaming shadows of the
arm-pits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic
dark-
/ Page277 /
ness, just as the eyes
did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening, and the red
blossoms of the breast to the navel lying perpendicularly
below. Under the impulsion of a central organ and of the
motor nerves originating in the spinal marrow, ch~t and
abdomen func- tioned, the peritoneal cavity expanded and
contracted, the breath, ~'armed and moistened by the mucous
membrane of the respira- tory canal, saturated with
secretions, streamed out between the lips, after it had
joined its oxygen to the hremoglobin of the blood in the
air-cells of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that
this living body, in the mysterious symmetlY of its
blood-nourished structure, penetrated throughout by nerves,
veil1S, arteries, and capillaries; with its inner framework
of bones - marrow-filled tubular bones, blade-bones,
vertebrre - which with the addition of lime had developed
out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown strong
enough to support the body weight; with the cap- sules and
well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints,
Its more than tWo hundred muscles, its central organs that
served for nutrition and respiration, for registering and
transmitting stimuli, its protective membranes, serous
cavities, its glands rich in secre- tions; with the system
of vessels and fissures of its highly compli- cated interior
surface, communicating through the body-openings with the
outer world - he understood that this ego was a livmg unit
of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple
forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even
thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it
was built up out of myriads of such small organisms, which
had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied
by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied
uses, and functions, separated, dif- ferentiated themselves,
thro\vn out forms which were the condition and result of
their growth.
This body, then, which hovered before him, this individual
and living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and
self-
nourishing individuals, which, through organic conformation
and "'"
adaptation to special ends, had parted to such an extent
with their ~
essential individuality, their freedom and living immediacy,
had ~ so much become anatomic elements that the functions of
some had ~;""
become limited to sensibility to\vard light, sound, contact,
~'armth; others only understood how to change their shape or
produce di- gestive secretions through contraction; others,
ag.ain, were de- veloped and functional to no other end than
protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or
reproduction. There were modifications of this organic
plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the
multitude of subordinate entities were only
. --- ._" .-,,"R &A&a
gIoaped in .10.- and doubtful way to form a higher living
uait. The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell
colonies; he read about half -organisms, a1gz, whose single
cells, enveloped.. a mantle of gelatine, often lay a~ from
one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, whIch, if
they had been asked, would not have known whether to be
rated as a settlement of single-celled
individuals, or as an individual single unit, and, in
bearing wimes, would have vacillated quaintly between the I
and the we. Nature
here presented a middle stage, between the hi$hly social
union of countless elementary individuaJs to form the ~es
and organs of 4 superior I, and the free individual
existence of these sim~ fonDS; the multiple-celled o~ was
only a stage in the cyclic
process, which was the course of life itself, a periodic
revolutim
from procreation to procreation. The act of fructification,
the sexual merging of two cell-bodies, stood at the
beginning of the upbuilding of every rnultiple-celled
individual, as it did at die beginning of every row of
generations of single elementary fom-. and led back to
itself. For this act was carried through many ~ cies which
had no need of it to multiply by means of proliferation;
until a moment carne when the non-sexually produced
offspring
found thcmselves once more constrained to a renewal of the
co~ lative function, and the circle came full. Such was the
multIple state of life, sprung from the union of two parent
cells, the ass0- ciation of many non-sexually originated
generations of cell units; its growth meant their increase,
and the generative circle came full again when sex-cells,
specially developed elements for the pur- pose of
reproduction, had established themselves and founa the way
to a new mingling that drove life on afresh.
Our young adventw'er, supporting a volume of embryology
on the pit of his stomach, followed the development of the
or-
ganism from the moment when the ~tozoon, firSt among a host
of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing motion of
its hinder part, struck with its fore~ against the gelatine
mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the mount of
conce~ tion, ~ ~'ch the protoplasm of the outside of the
ovum arched agajnst its approach. There was no conceivable
trick or absurdity it would not have pleased nature to
commit by way of variation upon this fixed procedure. In
some animals, the male was a para- site in the intestine of
the female. In others, the male parent reached with his arm
down the gullet of the female to deposit the semen within
her; after which, bitten off and spat out, it ran away by
itself uran its fingers, to the confusion of scientists, who
fof long had gIVen it Greek md Latin nama IS an independent
form
Page 279
RESEARCH Z
79
of life. Hans Castorp
lent an ear to the learned strife between ovists and
animalcullsts: the first of whom assened that the egg was in
itself the complete little frog, dog, 0.' human being, the
male element being only the incitement to its growth; while
the sec- ond saw in a spermatozoon, possessing head, arms,
and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed fonh, to which
the egg performed only the office of " nourisher in life's
feast." lit the end they agreed to concede equal
meritoriousness to ovum arId semen, both of which, after al~
sprang from originally indistinguishable procre- ative
cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the fructified
egg on the point of being transformed into a multiple-celled
organism, by striation and division; saw the cell-bodies
attach themselves to the lamellre of the mucous membrane;
saw the germinal vesicle, the blastula, close itself in to
form a cup or basin-shaped cavity, and begin the functions
of receiving and digesting food. That was the gastrula, the
protozoon, primeval form of all animal life, pri- meval form
of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and the
inner, the ectoderm and the entoderm, proved to be prim:tive
organs out of whose foldings-in and -out, were developed the
glands, the tissues, the sensory organs, the body processes.
A strip of the outer germinal layer, the ectoderm,
thickened, folded into a groove, closed itself into a nerve
canal, became a spinal column, bec.ame the brain. And as the
freta I slime condensed into fibrous connective tissue, into
canilage, the colloidal cells begirming to show gelatinous
substance instead of mucin. he saw in certain places the
connective tissue take lime and fat to itself out of the
sera that washed it, and begin to form bone. Embryonic man
squatted in a stooping posture, tailed, indistinguishable
from em- bryonic pig; with enormous abdomen and stumpy,
formless ex~ tremities, the facial mask bowed over the
swollen paunch; the story of his growth seemed a grim,
unflattering science, like the cursory record of a
zoological family tree. For a while he had gill- pockets
like a roach. It seemed permissible, or rather unavoidable,
contemplating the various stages of development through
which he passed, to infer the very little humanistic aspect
presented by primitive man in his mature state. His skin was
furnished with twitching muscles to keep off insects; it was
thickly covered with hair; there was a tremendous
development of the mucous mem- brane of the olfactory
organs; his ears protruded, were movable, took a lively part
in the play of the features, and were much better adapted
than ours for catching sounds. His eyes were protected by a
third, nictating lid; they were placed sidewise, excepting
the third, of which the pineal gland was the rudimentary
trace, and
Page 280
-~~ A__- "A~~"
AO__.
which was able, looking upwards, to guard him from dangers
from the upper air. Primitive man had a very long intestine,
many molars, and sound-pouches on the larnyx the better to
roar with, also he carried his sex-glands on the inside of
the intestinal cavity.
Anatomy presented our investigator with charts of human
limbs, skinned and prepared for his inspection; he saw their
superficial and their buried muscles, sinews, and tendons:
those of the thighs, the foot, and especially of the arm,
the uPFr and the forearm. He learned the Latin names with
which medIcine, that subdivision of the humanities, had
gallantly equipped them. He passed on to the skeleton, the
development of which presented new points of view - among
them a clear perception of the essential unity of all that
pertains to man, the correlation of all branches of
learning. For here, strangely enough, he found himself
reminded of his own field - or shall we say his former
field? - the scientific calling which he had announced
himself as having embraced, introducing himself thus to Dr.
Krokowski and Herr Settembrini on his ar- rival up here. In
order to learn something - it had not much mat- tered what -
he had learned in his technical school about statics, about
supports capable of flexion, about loads, about construction
as the advantageous utilization of mechanical material. It
would of course be childish to think that the science of
engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application
to organic nature; but just as little might one say that
they had been derived from organic nature. It was simply
that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and
corroborated in nature. The principle of the hollow cylinder
was illustrated in the structure of the tubular bones, in
such a way that the static demands were satis- fied with the
precise minimum of solid structure. Hans Castorp had learned
that a body which is put together out of staves and bands of
mechanically utilizable matter, conformably to the de- mands
made by draught and pressure upon it, can withStand the same
weight as a solid column of the same material. Thus in the
development of the tubular bones, it was comprehensible
that, step for step with the formation of the solid
exterior, the inner parts, whicfi were mechanically
superfluous, changed to a fatty tissue, the marrow. The
thigh-bone was a crane, in the construction of which organic
nature, by the direction she had given the shaft, carried
out, to a hair, the same draught- and pressure-curves which
Hans Castorp had had to plot in drawing an instrument
serving a similar purpose. He contemplated this fact with
pleasure; he en- joyed the reflection that his relation to
the femur, or to organic
Page 281
nature generally
was flOW threefold: it wa.~ lyrical, it was medical, it was
technological; and all of these, he felt, were one in being
human, they were variations of one and the same pr~ing human
concern, they were schools of humanistic thought.
But with all this the achievements of the protoplasm
remained unaccountable: it seemed forbidden to life that it
should under- stand itself. Most of the bio-chemical
processes were not only unknown, it lay in their very nature
that they should escape at- tention. Almost nothing was
known of the structure or composi- tion of the living unit
called the ., cell." What use was there in ~tablishing, the
compon~nts of lifel,ess muscle, when the living dId not let
Itself be chemIcally examined? The changes that took place
when the rigor mortis set in were enough to make worthless
all investigation. Nobody understood meraboIism, nobody
under- stood the true inwardness of the functioning of the
nervous sys- tem. To what propenies did the taste corpuscles
owe their reaction? In what consisted the various kinds of
excitation of cer- tain sensory nerves by odour-possessing
substances? In what, in- deed, the l'ropeny of smell itself?
The specific odours of man and beast consIsted in the
vaporization of cenain unknown substances. The composition
of the secretion called sweat was little under- stood. The
glands that secreted it produced aromata which among mammals
undoubtedly played an imponant role, but whose sig-
nificance for the human species we were not in a position to
ex- plain. The physiological significance of imponant
regions of the body was shrouded in darkness. No need to
mention the vermi- form appendix, which was a mystery; in
rabbits it was regularly found full of a pulpy substance, of
which ther~ was nothing to say as to how it got in or
renewed itself. But what about the white and grey substance
which composed the medulla, what of the optic thalamus and
the grey inlay of the pons VIITolii? The sub- stance
composing the brain and marrow was so subject to dis-
integration, there was no hope whatever of determining its
struc- ture. What was it relieved tfie conex of activity
during slumber? What prevented the stomach from digesting
itself - as sometimes, in fact, did happen after death? One
might answer, life: a special power of resistance of the
living protoplasm; but this would be not to recognize the
mystical character of such an explanation. The theory of
such an everyday phenomenon as fever was full of
contradictions. Heightened oxIdization resulted in increased
wam1th, but why was there not an increased expenditure of
warnlth to correspond? Did the paralysis of the
sweat-secretions depend upon contraction of the skin? But
such contraction took
Page 282
- place only in the case
of " chills and fever," for otherwise, in fever, the skin
was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat indicated the centnl
nervous system as the seat of the causes of heightened
catabolism as well as the source of that condition of the
skin which we were content to call abnormal, because we did
not know how to define it.
But what was all this ignorance, compared with our utter hd~
lessness in the presence of such a phenomenon as memory, or
of that other more prolonged and astounding memory which we
called the inheritance of acquired characteristics? Out of
the question to get even a glimpse of any mechanical
possibility of explication of such performances on the part
of the cell-substance. The spermatozoon that conveyed to the
egg countless complicated individual and racial
characteristics of the father was visible only through a
microscope; even the most powerful magnification was not
enough to show it as other than a homogeneous body, or to
determine its origin; it looked the same in one animal as in
another. These faCtOrs forced one to the assumption that the
cell was in the same case as with the higher form it went to
build up: that it too was already a higher foMl, composed in
its turn by the division of living bodies, individual living
units. Thus one passed from the supposed smallest unit to a
still smaller one; one was driven to separate the elementary
into its elements. No doubt at all but just as the animal
kingdom was composed of various species of animals, as the
human-animal organism was composed of a whole animal kingdom
of cell species, so the cell organism was composed of a new
and varied animal kingdom of elementary units, far below
microscopic size, which grew spontaneously, increased
spontaneously according to the law that each could bring
forth only after its kind, and, acting on the principle of a
division of labour, served together the next higher order of
existence.
Those were the genes, the living germs, bioblasts, biophores
-lying there in the frosty night, Hans Castorp rejoiced to
make acquaintance with them by name. Yet how, he asked
himself ex- citedly, even after more light on the subject
was forthcoming. how could their elementary nature be
established? I! they were living. they must be organic.
since life depended upon organiza- tion. But if they were
organized, then they could not be ele- mentary. since an
organism is not single but multiple. They were units within
the organic unit of the cell they built up. But if they
were, then, however impossibly small they were. they must
them- selves be built up. organically built up. as a law of
their existence; for the conception of a living unit meant
by definition dlat it was
Page 283
Ibuilt up out of
smalJer units which were subordinate; that is, o~nized wit~
ref~rence to ,a higher fonn.. As lor:ag as di~is!on i
YIelded organIc UnIts possessing the propertIes of life -
asslmila- i tion and reproduction - no limits were set to
it. As long as one i spoke of living units, one could not
correctly speak of elementary I
units, for the concept of unity carried with it in
perpetuity the I
concept of subordinated, upbuilding unity; and there was no
such thing as elementary life, in the sense of something
that was already life, and yet elementary.
And still, though without logical existence, something of
the ki~d ~ust be even~ually the cas~; ~or it was no,t
possible. to bnt;5h i
asIde lIke that the Idea of the orIginal procreation, the
rIse of lIfe ;
out of what was not life, That gap which in exteriiJr nature
we \
vainly sought to close, that betWeen living and dead matter,
had ~
its counterpart in nature's organic existence, and must
somehow t either be closed up or bridged over. Soon or late,
division must yield .. units " which, even though in
composition, were not organ- ized, and which mediated
betWeen life and absence of life; molec- ular groups, which
represented the transition betWeen vitalized organization
and mere chemistry. But then, arrived at the mole- cule, one
stood on the brink of another abyss, which yawned yet more
mysteriously than that betWeen organic and inorganic na-
ture: the gulf betWeen the material and the immaterial. For
the 11 molecule was co~posed of atoms, and the atom was
nowhere near ~ large enough eveh to be spoken of as
extraordinarily small. It was !
so small, such a tiny, early, transitional mass, a
coagulation of the ~ unsubstantial, of the
not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like, of ~
energy, that it was scarcely possible yet - or, if it had
been, was ~
now no longer possible - to think of it as material, but
rather as mean and border-line betWeen material and
immaterial. The prob- lem of another original procreation
arose, far more wild 9.nd mys- terious than the organic: the
primeval birth of matter out of the immaterial. In fact the
abyss betWeen material and. immaterial yawned as widely,
pressed as importunately - yes, more impor-
tunately - to be closed, as that betWeen organic and
inorganic -
nature. There must be a chemistry of the immaterial, there
must be combinations of the insubstantial, out of which
sprang the material - the atoms might represent protozoa of
material, by their nature substance and still not yet 9ulte
substance. Yet arrived at the .. not even small," the
measure slipped out of the hands; for .. not even small "
meant much the same as .. enonnously large "; and the step
to the atom provecl: to be without exaggeration portentous
in the highest degree. For at the very moment when one had
~d at
Page 284
~~--- , a the final
division of matter. when one had divided it into the im-
possibly small, at that moment there suddenly appeared upon
the horizon the astronomical cosmos!
The atom was a cosmic system, laden with energy; in which
heavenly bodies rioted rotating about a centre like a sun;
through whose ethereal space comets drove with the speed of
light years. kept in their eccentric orbits by the power of
the central body. And that was as little a mere comparison
as it would be were one to call the body of any
multiple-celled organism a .. cell state." The city, the
state, the social community regulated according to the
principle of division of labour, not only might be compared
to organic life, it actually reproduced its conditions. Thus
in the in- most reces..,es of nature, as in an endless
succession of mirrors. was reflected the macrocosm of the
heavens, whose clusters, throngs. groups. and figures, paled
by the brilliant moon, hung over the dawing, frost-bound
valley, above the head of our muffled adept. Was it too bold
a thought that among the planets of the atomic solar system
- those myriads and milky ways of solar systems which
constituted matter - one or other of these inner-worldly
heavenly bodies might find itself in a condition
corresponding to that which made it possible for our earth
to become the abode of life? For a young man already rather
befuddled inwardly. suffering from abnormal skin-conditions.
who was not without all and any experience in the realm of
the illicit, it was a specularion which, far from being
absurd, appeared so obvious as to leap to the eyes, highly
evident, and bearing the stamp of logical trutn. The "
small- ness ,. of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies would
have been an objection irrelevant to the hypothesis; since
the conception of large or small had ceased to be pertInent
at tlle moment when the cosmic character of the "smallest"
particle of matter had been revealed; while at the same
time, the conceptions of " outside " and " inside ., had
also been shaken. The atom-world was an " outside." as, very
probably, the earthly star on which we dwelt was,
organically re- garded, deeply" inside." Had not a
researcher once, audaciously fanciful, referred to the"
beasts of the Milky Way," cosmic mon- sters whose flesh,
bone, and brain were built up out of solar sys- tems? But in
that case, Hans Castorp mused, then in the moment when one
thought to have come to toe end, it all began over again
from the beginning! For then, in the very innermOst of his
nature, and in the inmost of that innermost, perhaps there
was just himself, just Hans Castorp, again and a hundred
tImes Hans Castorp, with burning face and stiffening
fingers, lying muffled on a balcony,
with a view across the moonlit, frost-nighted high valley.
and prob- i-;: "'-
Page 285
ing, with an interest
both humanistic and medical, into the life of the body!
He held a volume of pathological anatomy in the red ray from
his table-lamp, and conned its text and numerous
reproductions. He read of the existcnce of parasitic
cell-juncture and of infec- tious tumours. These were forms
of tissue - and very luxuriant forms too - produced by
foreign cell-bodies in an organism which had proved
receptive to them, and in some way or other - one must
probably say perversely - had offered them {>eculiarly
fa- vourable conditions.lt was not so much that the parasite
took away nourishment from the surrounding tissues, as that,
in the process of building up and breaking down which went
on in it as in every other cell, it produced organic
combinations which were eXtraor- dinarily toxic - undeniably
destructive - to the cells where it had been entenained.
They had found out how to i~olate the toxin from a number of
micro-organisms and produce it in concentrated form; and it
was amazing to see what small doses of this substance, which
simply belonged to a group of protein combinations, could,
when introduced into the circulation of an animal, produce
symptoms of acute poisoning and rapid degeneration. The
outward sign of this inward decay was a growth of tissue,
the pathological tumour, which was the reaction of the cells
to the stimulus of the foreign bacilli. Tubercles devcloped,
the size of a millet-seed, composed of cells resembling
mucous membrane, among or within which the bacilli lodged;
some of these were extraordinarily rich in proto- plasm,
very large, and full of nuclei. However, all this good
living soon led to ruin; for the nuclei of these monster
cells began to break down, the protoplasm they contained to
be destroyed by coagulation, and further areas of tissue to
be involved. They were attacked by inflammation, the
neighbouring blood-vessels suffered by contagion. White
blood-corpuscles were attracted to the seat of the evil; the
breaking-down proceeded apace; and meanwhile the soluble
toxins released by the bacteria half already poisoned the
nerve-centres, the entire organization was in a state of
high fever, and staggered - so to speak with heaving bosom -
toward dissolu- tion.
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. Dis- ease 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 imma-
Page 286
terial? The first
step toward evil, toward desire and death, W8 taken
precisely then, when there took place that first incr~ in
the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant
morbid groWth, produced by the irritant of some unknown
infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of
self-defence, was d1C primeval stage of matter, the
transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was
the Fall. The second creation. the birth of the organic out
of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in d1C
progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as
disease 10 the organism was an intoxication. a heightening
and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life,
life was nothing but d1C next step on the reckless path of
the spirit dishonourcd; nothing but the automatic blush of
matte!' roused to sensation and become receptive for that
which awaked it.
The books lay piled upon the table, one lay on the matting
next his chair; that whIch he had latest read rested upon
Hans Castorp's stomach and oppressed his breath; yet no
order went from the conex to the muscles in charge to take
it away. He had read down the page, his chin had sunk upon
his chest, over his innocent bl. eyes the lids had fallen.
He beheld the image of life in flower, itS structure, its
flesh-borne loveliness. She had lifted her hands from behind
her head, she opened her arms. On their inner side, 'f'8!-
ticularly beneath the tender skin of the elbow-points, he
saw die blue branchings of the larger veins. These arms were
of unspeak- able sweetness. She leantd above him, she
inclined unto him and bent down over him, he was conscious
of her organic fragrance and the mild pulsation of her
heart. Something warm and tender clasped him round the neck;
melted with desire and awe, he laid his hands upon the flesh
of her upper anns, where the fine-grained skin over
the trice~ came to his sense so heavenly cool; and upon his
li.- .- he felt the moist clinging of her kiss. -
I
Page 151
Chapter
Fourteen
The Number 10 8
0
"On the south wall of St Mary's Chapel, Glastonbury, the
words Jesu Maria are carved into the stone. If these words
are written in Greek,.." "...their value is 1080. In the
crypt beneath the chapel there is an ancient well. There is
also a well in the pre - historic buried chamber on which
Chartres Cathedral is built, and the same feature is
commonly found at other sites of sanctity.
The area of the Stonehenge sarsen circle with diameter 100.8
feet is 1080 square megalithic yards. Guy Underwood, the
dowser, in his The Pattern of the Past shows plans of
the remarkable pattern of underground water lines he
detected below Stonehenge. He found that the site was an
important centre of convergence for under-ground streams and
fault lines from the surrounding area, and he located a
powerful buried spring near the centre. Other dowsers who
have investigated the site of Stonehenge are in general
aggree-ment with Underwood's conclusions.
Mr B Smithett, Secretary of the Socxiety of Dowsers, writes
that many practising dowsers, members of the Society and
others, report the presence of underground water below old
churches and other sacred sites. In fact, it is now believed
by dowsers that not only churches, but all prehistoric stone
circles, standing stones, chambered mounds and dolmens are
placed above buried springs or at the junction of
underground streams, and that their sites may have been
determined by these considerations. Over the years a number
of articles on this subject have appeared in the Society's
Journal, and research among the records of local antiquarian
societies reveal several others, the results in all cases
being independently obtained. For example, in the 1933
Transactions of the Woolhope Club of Hereford an article by
Mr Walter Pritchard describes how he watched a dowser trace
the passage of a stream beneath Arthur's
/ Page 152 /
Stone, a dolmen at
Dorstone, Hereford; he later investigated the megalithic
Four Stones near Old Radnor, finding it to mark the
intersection of two buried water courses. Underwood's
observation, which has been confirmed by others, is that the
current associated with sacred and megalithic sites reverses
the direction of its flow in accordance with a monthly lunar
cycle.
Here, the Zed Aliz Zed, had the scribe darken the door of
an
emphasize.
"...that the
current associated with sacred and megalithic sites reverses
the direction of its flow in accordance with a monthly lunar
cycle."
"These results are obtained in many cases by professional
men, engaged by local councils and building contractors to
locate under-ground faults, lost waterpipes, drains, etc.,
who have developed a justifiable confidence in their own
accuracy. On the subject of the connection between ancient
sites and underground water they are in general agreement.
Some important principle of ancient science and civilization
is involved here, of which virtually nothing is now known.
The solution of the mystery lies in the complete
understanding of all the correspondences of the number 1080
and of the others that re-late to it, for they illuminate an
aspect of reality which, for the lack of an adequate
language, has for too long been allowed to remain beyond the
comprehension of science.
In Revelation and in the apocalyptic works of the Old
Testament particular emphasis is placed on the waters that
flow beneath the holy city or temple. They play an active
part both in the destruction of the old city and in the
creation of the new. Wherever there is a legend of the
Temple, it is said that the waters of the world spring from
beneath it. Old maps show the four rivers of paradise as a
cross within a circle with the holy city at the centre. Jung
finds the arche-type of the New Jerusalem expressed in the
cloister with a fountain at the centre. The formal gardens
of Persia, which are laid out as figures of cosmic geometry,
always surround a central spring of water. In a dry country
this water is conveyed with great labour and in-genuity in
culverts, often several miles in length from the lower
slopes of the hillls. All known ancient cosmic temples, at
Jerusalem, Hieropolis, Cnossos and elsewhere are found to
have been built over extensive labyrinths of chambers and
watercourses. F. Bligh Bond discovered a curious system of
tunnels and culverts below Glaston-bury Abbey. Plato's
Atlantis, which is a cosmic model, Carthage and other cities
were arranged in concentric rings of land and water-ways. In
Egypt, Babylon and China elaborate systems of canals were
constructed on a geometrical pattern, particularly in the
areas surrounding the great temples. The carefully contrived
balance between areas of land and water was reflected in the
pattern of waterpipes beneath the temple itself. The monks
of Glastonbury made and maintained a wonderful canal system
alongside the prehistoric
/ Page 153 /
causeways of the country
around the abbey, and these waterways have a mystical
association with King Arthur's legend.
In the third chapter of Man and Temple Dr Patai gives
an exellent account of the legends and rituals referring to
the waters beneath the Temple of Jerusalem and at other
cosmic centres. They were conceived as the female partner in
the annually celebrated marriage between the waters of the
earth and of the heavens. When fertilised, they conveyed
benefits to all the world.
Quite a number of legends tell in an interesting variety of
versions about this subterranean network of irrigation
canals that issue from underneath the Temple and bring to
each country its proper power to grow its particular
assortment of fruits. If a tree were planted in the Temple
over a spot whence the water-vein issued forth to a
certain country, it would grow fruit peculiar to that
country; this was known to King Solomon, who accordingly
planted in the Temple specimens of fruit trees of the whole
earth.
The waters that issued forth from the Temple had the
wonderful property of bestowing fertility and health.
Legends have it that as in days of old so again in the days
of the Messiah "all the waters of creation" will again
spring up from under the threshold of the Temple, will
increase and grow mighty as they pour forth all over the
land.'
The stone at the centre of the earth in the Temple of
Jerusalem was supposed to press down the surging waters of
the earth, and the Altar stone at Stonhenge, which could at
one time have stood erect, may have had a similar function.
The waters beneath the Temple were not mythical, nor are the
stories of the advantages to be gained from their proper
union with the cosmic element in any way exagerated. These
legends are poetically true, they have a deep philosophical
and psychological meaning and they recall a vanished world
order founded on cosmic principles. But more than that, they
record a former system of natural science, practised by men
who understood the earth as a living creature, the mother of
all her inhabitants, not only in a poetic sense but
literally as a fact of nature. The prosperity of all life on
the planet was considered to be a reflection of the earths
own state of health and morale, which was naturally of the
greatest concern to men, the intelligent parasites.
According to the philosophy on which the forgotten science
of antiquity is based, the earth must be regarded as an
essentially female organism, being particu-larly susceptible
to the influence of the moon, and craving seasonal
intercourse with the fertilising solar shaft.
Every year therefore, the earth was made the bride of the
heavens, the terrestrial flow was animated by the radiant
power of the sun,
/ Page 154 /
all the correspondences
of 1080 were brought together with those of 666; the
opposites were united in the Temple as in Noah's Ark. At
Jerusalem the great ceremony of the year, attended by vast,
excited crowds, took place at the start of the rainy season,
and was intended by vast, to promote the union between the
upper and the lower waters. But its purpose was not simply
to invoke the fertilising autumn rains, for the marriage of
the elewments prompted a similar desire among the
congregation at the Temple, which spread along the chain of
magical correspondences, infecting all nature with the urge
for union.
Evidently the Temple functioned as the generator and
transmitter of a form of energy which was beneficial to the
earth and all its in-habitants. This was not the belief of
idiots or degenerate savages. To the Jews and to all the
civilised people who possessed the institution of the Temple
it was a self evident fact, which they percieved with their
own eyes. A spirit was generated at the Temple; they saw the
operation, felt its power and observed its effect in the
increased fertility of the countryside. We may speak of
sympathetic magic, mass delusion and invent other names for
phenomena which we are not able to explain, but the fact is
that the performances at the Temple led to the actual
invocation of a spirit that provoked a physical reaction
throughout nature.
The numbers with which we are dealing were once the
instruments of elemental control. Their first and most
essential reference is to the natural forces of the cosmos,
to the spirits that are behind all manifestations of
movement in wind and water, as well as in the less
perceptible electro-magnetic currents of the earth and
atmosphere, The earliest passage in the I Ching express the
relationship between the principles in terms of cosmic
forces. So it is in the oldest forms of myth and in the
basic traditions of the cabala. The most ancient art,
architecture, mythology is always more impersonal and
funda-mental than that which came later . In the case of the
I Ching, suc-cessive generations of scholars widened the
interpretation of the symbols to provide canons of
deportment and etiquette, their original elemental
significance becoming obscure in the process.
The Temple was not merely a symbol of the cosmic order; it
was an instrument designed to fuse the spirit of the sun,
666, with the soul of the earth, 1080. In the same way the
waters and catcombs beneath the Temple were not intended
simply to represent the water of inspiration as a monument
to the sanctity of the spot, or for any other such
picturesque purpose. They played a physical part in the
process of fusion as the medium through which the current of
fertility, raised in the Temple, was transmitted across the
landscape.
/ Page 155 /
As the waters beneath the
Temple nourish the earth, so the spiritual water of
revelation rises within the human mind. These two aspects of
fertility were formerly linked with the power of the moon
and classified under the number 1080. But this number, like
all others has its dark side. The spirit of the waters..."
"...1007), known to the cabalists as the bride..." "...=
1006, is also the mother of a hideous, elemental brood, the
atavistic gods of the underworld, represented by St John as
the beast from the bottomless pit (1081). In Ezekiel 8, the
prophet descends through a secret door into a chamber below
the Temple of Jerusalem 'and behold every form of creeping
things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the
house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about'. He
hears a voice, 'Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients
of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the
chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us
not.' Here the sinister cavern beneath the Temple represents
the deep recesses of the mind, inhabited by the carefully
nurtured monsters of individual fantasy. But the beast in
the Cretan labyrinth was no less real than the crocodiles
that inhabited the subterranean vaults of Egyptian temples.
That these creatures are also natives of the imagination is
proved by the rumour, endemic in New York, that the city's
sewers are haunted by giant alligators, a notion which is
poetically true of all drains and tunnels, if not physically
so in this particular case.
Under the regime of the Temple poetic or psychological
reality was reproduced on the physical plane in a series of
magical correspondences which we now find scarcely
conceivable, for we are yet infants in the study of the
mind, impeded by the linear and materialistic habits of
thought to which we have been con-ditioned. Within each man
lies the hidden city, the ideal model of the cosmos, a
standard of reference in every department of life, com-posed
of all the numbers in creation. This is the city of Plato's
Republic:
'But perhaps there is a pattern set up in the heavens for
one who desires to see it and, having seen it to have found
one in himself,' "
The scribe here added the word herself.
Hearuponin, Alizzed took a left right, back to front,
momentary aside.
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