PLATO

THE REPUBLIC

Translated with an introduction by

Desmond Lee

1953

Page 462

APPENDIX II
THE SPINDLE OF NECESSITY

"THIS passage has been much discussed, but the following points are generally agreed:
(1) The' Spindle of Necessity' is intended, however imper-fectly, to give a picture of the working of the Universe.
(2) Plato thought that the universe was geocentric, with the fixed stars on a sphere or band at the outside, the earth at ,the centre, and the orbits of the sun, moon, and planets between earth and stars.
(3) The rims of the whorl are intended to represent these orbits, and have the following equivalences:
1. The fixed stars 

2. Saturn

3. Jupiter

4. Mars

5. Mercury

6. Venus

7. Sun

8. Moon

Thus, for example, we are told that 'the fourth (Mars)was reddish' and 'the eighth (Moon) was illuminated by the seventh (Sun)'.
(4) The breadth and relative motion of the rims represent the distances and relative speeds of the planets, though it is difficult to be certain about details (cf. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology, p.88).
(5) The singing sirens are Plato's version of the Pythagorean doctrine of the' harmony of the spheres', which Aristotle de-scribes as follows:
'It seems to some thinkers that bodies so great must inevitably produce a sound by their movement: even bodies on the earth do so, although they are neither so great in bulk nor movng at so high a speed, and as for the sun and the moon, and the stars, so many in number and enormous in size, all moving at a tremendous speed, it is incredible that they should fail to produce a noise of surpassing loudness. Taking this as their hypothesis, and also that the speeds of the stars, judged by their distances, are in the ratios of the musical consonances, they affirm that the sound of the stars as they revolve is concordant. To meet the difficulty that none of us is aware of this sound, they account for it by saying that the sound is with us right from birth and has thus no contrasting silence to show it up; for voice and silence are perceived by / Page 463 / contrast with each other, and so all mankind is undergoing an experience like that of a coppersmith, who becomes by long habit indifferent to the din around him' (De Caela, II, 9, trans. Guthrie, Loeb edition).
In the more detailed interpretation of the passage there is much uncertainty, and the Greek itself is far from unambiguous. There are those (e.g. J. S. Morrison,1 JHS, 1955, p. 59f.; Parmenides and Er) who prefer to translate the word here rendered' through' by 'across', and to suppose that the phrase refers to a straight band of light running across the heavens. This makes it more difficult to understand what is meant by 'from above'; but in any case it is not easy to see quite where the souls are and what it is they see 'in the middle of the light' (or 'down the middle of the light').
The 'pillar' and 'rainbow' do not help much. Though the natural meaning of 'pillar' is something standing upright, it could be used to illustrate a straight band of light; the reference to the rainbow appears to be to its colour, but the rainbow is also a band of light running across the sky. We are left with the two other illustrations, the swifter and the spindle.
Morrison and Williams, Greek Oared Ships, pp. 294-8, have shown pretty conclusively what a 'swifter' (Greek hypozoma) is. It is a rope running longitudinally round a ship, from stem to stern, whose purpose was' to subject the outside skin to a constricting tension which would keep the structure from work-ing loose under the stress of navigation under oar and sail' (p. 298). There is a clear parallel with the light which 'holds the circumference together'. In addition the ends of the swifter were brought inboard at the stern where there was a device for tighten-ing them. Similarly the ends of the' bands of heaven' are brought in, though exactly where or how is not clear. But the illustration certainly seems, so far, to indicate that there is a band of light running round the heaven, whose ends are brought in and some-how fastened, and which holds the whole heaven together.
But Plato proceeds at once to the second illustration of the spindle. Fig. 1(Figure omitted) shows a spindle. Essentially it consists of shaft and weight or whorl. The function of the weight is to keep the thread spinning: the shaft is needed not only as an axis of revolu-tion but also for winding the thread when it has become too long. To hold the thread while the next length is spun there must be something to which to fasten it, the function of the hook in this / Page 464 / passage. The primary purpose of the comparison is to illustrate, from a familiar object, a system in which the heavenly bodies go round the earth in rings. The description of the whorl makes this fairly clear, and the main weakness of the comparison is that it makes no provision for the inclination of the axis of the ecliptic, in which sun, moon and planets move, to that of the fixed stars. The armillary sphere in the Timaeus (Plato: Timaeus and Critias (Penguin)) is a more satisfactory illustration. But there are further problems. Nothing is said about the position or shape of the earth. It must be at the centre of the system, with the heavenly bodies revolving round it. Once the heavenly bodies have been thought of as three dimensional, it is a fairly obvious step to think of them as spheres: if the moon is not a disc it must be a ball. And it is plausible therefore to suppose the earth to be spherical, as it undoubtedly is in the Timaeus and as it is commonly supposed to be in the Phaedo (though Mr Morrison has challenged the sup-position and holds that the earth is a hemisphere with flat surface in both Phaedo and The Republic: Phronesis IV, 1959, pp. 101-9; Classical Quarterly lxii, 1964, pp. 46 ff.). Granted a central earth of spherical or other shape there remains the problem of the spindle shaft. Does it correspond to anything in the physical universe? If the spindle of. Necessity 'hangs from the ends of the band of heaven' one would suppose that it does. It is true that the spindle is only a model; but a good model reproduces the main features of its original, and in the Timaeus there is an axis' stretched through the whole' (40 B.C.). Though this in turn may be a reflection of the more sophisticated model in that dialogue, it is none the less a not unreasonable inference that Plato thought of the universe as turning on some sort of axis.
We are left therefore with a rather unsatisfactory inconsistency between the two illustrations. The swifter suggests a band of light running round the heavens, the spindle an axis round which they pivot. If the ends of the band when brought in could form a pillar of light that was also an axis it would reconcile the two illustrations, but the evidence hardly allows one to speak with certainty. In any event there are still obscurities. If the band (or pillar) of light is a feature of the physical universe, why do we not see it? Or can it be the Milky Way, as some have suggested? Where are the souls when they see and then reach the light, whether it be band or column? There is nothing to suggest that they are ever anywhere but on the surface of the earth. The de-scription of the meadow, with the chasms leading up into heaven / Page 465 / and down into earth, beneath which the unjust soul's journey takes place, leaves no doubt that it is on the earth's surface, though at some remote point on it (like the grove of Persephone and the Elysian plain, where incidentally Rhadamanthus is, in the Odyssey). If the earth were spherical then they might well be at a point from which they could see features of the universe which we cannot. But even so, just where and how are the' ends' of the bands brought inboard (to use the nautical metaphor) and tied to the spindle? At a later point we are suddenly told, after a descrip-tion which appears to relate to the physical universe, that the spindle is on the 'lap of Necessity' (617b). But this is an incon- sistency that follows the introduction of the Fates and their traditional occupation of spinning; it is good symbolism to put the universe on the lap of Necessity, and so the inconsistency of making her sit within the system on her lap is overlooked. It is, indeed, well to remember that this passage occurs in a myth, that in his myths Plato often gives symbolic meaning precedence over precision of detail, and that there are therefore likely in the detail to be features that are strictly speaking irreconcilable.
Hilda Richardson's article The Myth of Er, C.Q. xx, 1926, p. 119, is perhaps still as good a treatment as any of the whole section (Part XI, Section 3). Further references are given in the Bibliography.

Note page 463 1. I am grateful to Mr Morrison for several discussions on this passage, in which we could never reach an agreed solution.

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 465 / 466

They talked of "humanity," of nobility - but it was / the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. 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: was he aware that all progress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atone- ment."

THE TRUE AT ONE

MENT

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 3

CHAPTER ONE
Arrival

"AN UNASSUMING young man was travelling, in midsummer, from his native city of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Canton of the Grisons, on a three weeks: visit.
From Hamburg to Davos is a long journey - too long, indeed, for so brief a stay. It crosses all sorts of country; goes up hill and down dale, descends from the plateau of Southern Germany to the shore of Lake Constance, over its bounding waves and on across mars

At this point the route, which has been.so far over trunk-lines, gets cut up. There are stops and formalIties. At Rorschach, m Swiss territory, you take train again, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station, where you have to change. Here, after a long and windy wait in a spot devoid of charm, you mount a nar-row-gauge train; and as the small but very powerful engine gets under way, there begins the thrilling part of the journey, a steep and steady climb that seems never to come to an end. For the sta-tion of Landquart lies at a relatively low altitude, but now the wild and rocky route pushes grimly onward into the Alps themselves.
Hans Castorp -such was the young man's name - sat alone in his little grey-upholstered. compartment with his alligator-skin hand-bag, a present from his uncle and guardian, Consul Tienappel - let us get the introductions over with at once - his travelling- rug, and his winter overcoat swinging on its hook. The window was down, the afternoon grew cool, and he, a tender product of the sheltered life, had turned up the collar of his fashionably cut, silk-lined summer overcoat. Near him on the seat lay a paper-bound volume entitled Ocean Steamships; earlier in the journey he had studied it off and on, but now it lay neglected, and the breath of the panting engine, streaming in, defiled its cover with particles of soot.
Two days' travel separated the youth - he was still too young to have thrust his roots down firmly into life from his own / Page 4 / world, from all that he thought of as his own duties, interests, cares and prospects; far more than he had dreamed it would when he sat in the carriage on the way to the station. Space, rolling and re-volving 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 it 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; but to get it over quickly, .since it had to be made, to return as he had gone, and to take up his life at the pomt where, for the mo-ment, he had had to lay it down. Only yesterday he had been en-compassed in the wonted circle of his thoughts, and entirely taken up by two matters: the examination he had just passed, and his approaching entrance into the firm of Tunder and Wilms, ship-builders, smelters; and machinists. With as much impatience as lay in his temperament to feel, he had discounted the next three weeks; but now it began to seem as though present circumstances required his entire attention, that it would not be at all the thing to take them too lightly.
This being carried upward into regions where he had never be-fore drawn breath, and where he knew that unusual living condi-tions prevailed, such as could only be described as sparse or scanty - it began to work upon him, to fill him with a certain concern. Home and regular livmg lay not only far behind, they lay fathoms deep beneath him, and he continued to mount above them. Poised between them and the unknown, he asked himself how he was going to fare. Perhaps it had been ill-advised of him, born as he was a few feet above sea-level, to come immediately to these great heights, without stopping at least a day or so at some point in be-tween. He wished he were at the end of his journey; for once there he could begin to live as he would anywhere else, and not be re-minded by this continual climbing of the incongruous situation he found himself in. He looked out. The train wound in curves along the narrow pass; he could see the front carriages and the labouring engine vomiting great masses of brown, black, and greenish smoke, that floated away.Water roared in the abysses on the right; on the / Page 5 / left, among rocks, dark fir-trees aspired toward a stone grey sky. The train passed through pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight came again it showed wide chasms, with villages nestled in their depths: Then the pass closed in again; they wound along narrow defiles, with traces of snow in chinks and crannies. There were halts at wretched little shanties of stations; also at more important ones, which the train left in the opposite direction, making one lose the points of the compass. A magnificent succession of vistas opened before the awed eye, of the solemn, phantasmagorical world of towering peaks, into which their route wove and wormed itself: vistas that appeared and disappeared with each new winding of the path. Hans Castorp reflected that they must have got above the zone of shade-trees, also probably of song-birds; whereupon he felt such a sense of the impoverishment of life as gave him a slight attack of giddiness and nausea and made him put his hand over his eyes for a few seconds. It passed. He perceived that they had stopped climbing. The top of the col was reached; the train rolled smoothly along the level valley floor.
It was about eight o'clock, and still daylight. A lake was visible in the distant landscape, its waters grey, its shores covered with black fir-forests that climbed the surrounding heights, thinned out, and gave place to bare, mist-wreathed rock. They stopped at a small station. Hans Castorp heard the name called out: it was "Davos-Dorf." Soon he would be at his journey's end. And sud-denly, close to him, he heard a voice, the comfortable Hamburg voice of his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, saying "Hullo, there you! Here's where you get out! "and peering through the window saw his cousin himself, standing below on the platform, in a brown ulster, bare-headed, and looking more robust than ever in his life before. He laughed and said again: "Come along out, it's all right! "
"But I'm not there yet!" said Hans Castorp, taken aback, and still seated.
Oh, yes, you are. This is the village. It is nearer to the sana-torium from here. I have a carriage. Just give us your things."
And laughing, confused, in the excitement of arrival and meet-ing, Hans Castorp reached bag, overcoat, the roll with stick and umbrella, and finally Ocean Steamships out of the window. Then he ran down the narrow corridor and sprang out upon the plat- form to greet his cousin properly. The meeting took place With-out exuberance, as between people of traditional coolness and re- serve. Strange to say, the cousins had always avoided calling each other by their first names, simply because they were afraid of / Page 6 / showing too much feeling. And, as they could not well address each other by their last names, they confined themselves, by estab-lished custom, to the thou.
A man in livery with a braided cap looked on while they shook hands, quickly, not without embarrassment, young Ziemssen in military position, heels together. Then he came forward to ask for Hans Castorp's luggage ticket; he was the concierge of the Inter- national Sanatorium Berghof, and would fetch the guest's large trunk from the other station while the gentlemen drove directly up to supper. This man limped noticeably; and so, curiously enough, the first thing Hans Castorp said to his cousin was: "Is that a war veteran? What makes him limp like that? "
"War veteran,! No fear! " said Joachiin; with some bitterness. " He's got it in his knee - or, rather, he had it - the knee-pan has been removed."
Hans Castorp bethought himself hastily.
"So that's it? " he said, and as he walked on turned his head and gave a quick glance back. "But you can't make me believe you've still got anything like that the matter with you! Why, you look as if you had just come from manoeuvres! " And he looked sidelong at his cousin.
Joachim was taller and broader than he, a picture of' youthful vigour, and made for a uniform. He was of the very dark type which his blond-peopled country not seldom produces, and his ulready nut-brown skin was tanned almost to bronze. With his large, black eyes and small, dark moustache over the full, well-shaped mouth, he would have been distinctly handsome if his ears had not stood out. Up to a certain period they had been his only trouble in life. Now, however, he had others.
Hans Castorp went on; "You're coming back down with me, aren't you? I see no reason why not."
"Back down with you? " asked his cousin, and turned his large eyes full upon him. They had always been gentle, but in these five
months they had taken on a tired, almost sad expression.

"When?

Why, in three weeks"
"Oh, yes, you are already on the way back home in your thoughts;" answered Joachim. "Wait a bit. You've only Just come. Three weeks are nothing at all, to us up here.- they look like a lot of time to you, because you are only up here on a visit, and three weeks is all you have. Get acclimatized first - it isn't so easy, you'll see. And the climate isn't the only queer thing about us. You're going to see some things you've never dreamed of - just / Page 7 / wait. About me - it isn't such smooth sailing as you think, you with your' going home in three weeks.' That's the class of ideas you have down below. Yes, I am brown, I know, but it is mostly snow-burning. It doesn't mean much, as Behrens always says; he told me at the last regular examination it would take another half year, pretty certainly."
"Half a year? Are you crazy? " shouted Hans Castorp. They had climbed into the yellow cabriolet that stood in the stone-paved square in front of the shed-like station, and as the pair of brown horses started up, he flounced indignantly on the hard cushions. "Half a year! You've been up here half a year already! Who's got so much time to spend -'
"Oh, time:-!' said Joachim, and nodded repeatedly, straight In front of him, payIng his cousin's honest indignation no heed. "They make pretty free with a human being's idea of time, up here. You wouldn't believe it. Three weeks are just like a day to them. You'll learn all about it," he said, and added: "One's ideas get changed."
Hans Castorp regarded him earnestly as they drove. " But seems to me you've made a splendid recovery," he said, shaking his head.
"You really think so, don't you? " answered Joachim;" I think I have too." He drew himself up straighter against the cushions, but immediately relaxed again. ' Yes, I am better," he explained, " but I am not cured yet. In the left lobe, where there were rales, it only sounds harsh now, and that is not so bad; but lower down it is still very harsh, and there are rhonchi in the second intercostal space."
" How learned you've got," said Hans Castorp-
"Fine sort of learning! God knows I wish I'd had it sweated out of my system in the service," responded Joachim. " But I still have sputum," he said, with a shoulder-shrug that was somehow indif-ferent and vehement both at once, and became him but ill. He half pulled out and showed to his cousin something he carried in the side pocket of his overcoat, next to Hans Castorp. It was a flat, curving bome of bluish glass, with a metal cap.
"Most of us up here carry it," he said, shoving it back. " It even has a nickname; they make quite a joke of it. You are looking at the landscape? "
Hans Castorp was. " Magnificent! "he said.
"Think so? 'asked Joachim.
They had driven for a space straight up the axis. of the valley along an irregularly built street that followed the line of the rail-way; then, turning to the left, they crossed the narrow tracks and / Page 8 / a watercourse, and now trotted up a high-road that mounted gently toward the wooded slopes. Before them rose a low, pro-jecting, meadow-like plateau, on which, facing south-west, stood a long building, with a cupola and so many balconieses that from a distance it looked porous, like a sponge. In this building lights were beginning to show. It was rapidly growing dusk. The faint rose-colour that had briefly enlivened the overcast heavens was faded now, and there reigned the colourless, soulless, melancholy transi-tion-period that comes just before the onset of night. The popu-lous valley, extended and rather winding, now began to show lights everywhere, not only in the middle, but here and there on the slopes at either hand, particularly on the projecting right side, upon which buildings mounted in terrace formation. Paths ran up the sloping meadows to the left and lost themselves in the vague blackness of the pine forest. Behind them, where the valley nar-rowed to its entrance, the more distant ranges showed a cold. slaty blue. A wind had sprung up, and made perceptible the chill of evenmg.
"No, to speak frankly, I don't find it so overpowering," said Hans Castorp. "Where are the glaciers, and the snow peaks and the gigantic heights you hear about? These things aren't very high, it seems to me."
" Oh, yes, they are," answered Joachim. " You can see: the tree line almost everywhere, it is very sharply defined; the fir-trees leave
off, and after that there are absolutely nothing but bare rock. And up there to the right of the Schwarzhorn, that tooth-shaped peak, there is a glacier - can't you see the blue? It is not very large, but it is a glacier right enough, the Skaletta. Piz Michel and Tinzen- horn, in the notch - you can't see. them from here - have snow all the year round." .
"Eternal snow," said Hans Castorp.
"Eternal snow,if you like. Yes, that's all very high. But we are frightfully high ourselves: sixteen hundred metres above sea-level. That's why the peaks don't seem any higher."
"Yes, what a climb that was! I was scared to death, I can tell you. Sixteen hundred metres - that is over five thousand feet, as I reckon it. I've never been so high up in my life." And Hans Ca-storp took in a deep, experirnental breath of the strange air. It was fresh, and that was all. It had no perfume, no content, no humidity; it breathed in easily; and held for him no associations.

" Wonderful air," he remarked, politely.
Yes, the atmosphere is famous. But the place doesn't look its best to~night. Sometimes it makes a much better impression-es / Page 9 / pecially when there is snow. But you can get sick of looking at it. All of us up here are frightfully fed up, you can imagine," said Joachim, and twisted his mouth into an expression of disgust that was as unlike him as the shoulder-shrug. It looked irritable, dis- proportionate.
You have such a queer way of talking." said Hans Castorp. Have I? " said Joachim, concerned, and turned to look at his
cousin.
"Oh, no, of course I don't mean you really have - I suppose it just seemed so to me for the moment," Hans Castorp hastened to assure him. It was the expression all of us up here, ' which Joa-chim had used several tlmes, that had somehow-struck him as strange and given him an uneasy feeling.
Our sanatorium is higher up than the village, as you see," went on Joachim. "Fifty metres higher. In the prospectus it says a hun-dred, but it is really only fifty. The highest of the sanatoriums is the Schatzalp - you can't see it from here. They have to bring their bodies down on bob-sleds in the winter, because the roads are blocked."
"Their bodies? Oh, I see. Imagine! " said Hans Castorp. And suddenly he burst out laughing, a violent, irrepressible laugh, which shook him all over and distorted his face, that was stiff with the cold wind, until it almost hurt."On bob-sleds! And you can tell it me just like that, in cold blood! You've certainly got pretty cynical in these five months."
"Not at all," answered Joachim, shrugging again. "Why not? It's all the same to them, isn't it? But maybe we do get cynical up here~ Behrens is a cynic himself - but he's a great old bird after all, an old corps-student. He is a brilliant operator, they say. You will like him. Krokowski is the assistant - devilishly clever article. They mention his activities specially, in the prospectus. He psy-cho-analyses the patients."
"He what? Psycho-analyses - how disgusting! " cried Hans Castorp; and now his hilarity altogether got the better of him. He could not stop. The psycho-analysis had been the finishing touch. He laughed so hard that the tears ran down his cheeks; he put up his hands to his face and rocked with laughter. Joachim laughed just as heartily - it seemed to do him good; and thus, in great good spirits, the young people climbed out of the wagon, which had slowly mounted the steep, winding drive and deposited them be..
fore the portal of the International Sanatorium Berghof."

Page 439

"Thus ended the campaign of the flat-land to recover its lost Hans Castorp"

Page 56

Satana
 

HIS age would have been hard to say, probably between thirty and forty; for though he gave an impression of youthfulness, yet the hair on his temples was sprinkled a with silver and gone quite thin on his head. Two bald bays ran along the narrow scanty parting, and added to the height of his forehead. His clothing, loose trousers in light yellowish checks, and too long, double- breasted pilot coat, with very wide lapels, made no slightest claim to elegance; and his stand-up collar, with rounding comers, was rough on the edges from frequent washing. His black cravat showed wear, and he wore no cuffs, as Hans Castorp saw at once from the lax way the sleeve hung round the wrist. But despite all that, he knew he had a gentleman before him: the stranger easy, even charming pose and cultured expression left no doubt of that. Yet by this mingling of shabbiness and grace, by the black eyes and softly waving moustaches, Hans Castorp was irresistibly re-minded of certain foreign musicians who used to come to Ham-burg at Christmas to play in the streets before people's doors. He could see them rolling up their velvet eyes and holding out their soft hats for the coins tossed from the windows. "A hand-organ man," he thought. Thus he was not suprised at the name he heard, as Joachim rose from the bench and in some em-barrassment presented him: "My cousin Castorp, Herr Settem-brini."
Hans Castorp had got up at the same time, the traces of his burst of hilarity still on his face. But the Italian courteously bade them both not to disturb themsdves. and made them sit down / Page 57 / again, while he maintained his easy pose before them. He smiled,  standing there and looking at the cousins, in particular at Hans Castorp; a smile that was a fine, almost mocking deepening and crisping of one comer of the mouth, just at the point where the full moustache made its beautiful upward curve. It had upon the cousins a singular effect: it somehow constrained them to mental alertness and clarity; it sobered the reeling Hans Castorp in a
twinkling, and made him ashamed.
Settembrini said: "You are in good spirits - and with reason too, with excellent.reason. What a splendid morning! A blue sky,
- a smiling sun " - with an easy, adequate motion of the arm he raised a small, yellowish-skinned hand to the heavens, and sent a lively glance upward after it - " one could almost forget where one is."
He spoke without accent, only the precise enunciation be- trayed the foreigner. His lips seemed to take a certain pleasure in forming the words. It was most agreeable to hear him.
You had a pleasant journey hither, I hope? " he turned to Hans Castorp. "And do you already know your fate - I mean has the mournful ceremony of the first examination taken place? " Here, if he had really been expecting a reply he should have paused; he had put his question, and Hans Castorp prepared to answer. But he went on: Did you get off easily? One might put - " here he paused a second, and the crisping at the comer of his mouth grew crisper - "more than one interpretation upon your laughter. How many months have our Minos and Rhada-manthus knocked you down for? " The slang phrase sounded droll on his lips."Shall I guess? Six? Nine? You know we are free with the time up here - "
Hans Castorp laughed, astonished, at the same time racking his brains to remember who Minos and Rhadamanthus were. He answered: Not at all- no, really, you are under a misappre- hension, Herr Septem - " .
"Settembrini," corrected the Italian, clearly and with empha-sis, making as he spoke a mocking bow.
"Herr Settembrini - beg your pardon. No; you are mistaken. Really I am not ill. I have only come on a visit to my cousin Ziemssen for a few weeks, and shall take advantage of the oppor-tunity to get a good rest - "
"Zounds! You don't say? Then you are not one of us? You are well, you are but a guest here, like Odysseus in the kingdom of the shades? You are bold indeed, thus to descend into these depths peopled by the vacant and idle dead - "

Page 58

"Descend, Herr Settembrini? I protest. Here I have climbed up some five thousand feet to get here - "
That was only seeming. Upon my honour, it was an illusion," the Italian said, with a decisive wave of the hand. We are sunk enough here, aren't we, Lieutenant? " he said to Joachim, who, no little gratified at this method of address, sought to hide his satisfaction, and answered reflectively:
I suppose we do get rather one-sided. But we can pull our-selves together, afterwards, if we try."
"At least, you can, I'm sure - you are an upright man," Set-tembrini said. ,. Yes, yes, yes," he said, repeating the word three times, with a sharp s, turning to Hans Castorp again as he spoke, and then, in the same measured way, clucking three times with his tongue against his palate. ., I see, I see, I see," he said again, giving the s the same sharp sound as before. He looked the new- comer so steadfastly in the face that his eyes grew fixed in a stare; then, becoming lively again, he went on: "So you come up quite of your own free will to us sunken ones, and mean to bestow upon us the pleasure of your company for some little while? That is delightful. And what term had you thought of putting to your stay? I don't mean precisely. I am merely inter-ested to know what the length of a man's sojourn would be when it is himself and not Rhadamanthus who prescribes the limit."
"Three weeks," Hans Castorp said, rather pridefully, as he saw himself the object of envy.
O dio! Three weeks! Do you hear, Lieutenant? Does it not sound to you impertinent to hear a person say 'I am stopping for three weeks and then I am going away again ? We up here are not acquainted with such an unit of time as the week - if I may be permitted to instruct you, my dear sir. Our smallest unit is the month. We reckon in the grand style - that is a privilege we shadows have. We possess other such; they are all of the same quality. May I ask what profession you practise down below? Or, more probably, for what profession are you preparing your-self? You see we set no bounds to our thirst for information-curiosity is another of the prescriptive rights of shadows." "Pray don't mention it,' said Hans Castorp. And told him.
" A ship-builder! Magnificent! " cried Settembrini. "I assure you, I find that magnificent - though my own talents lie in quite another direction."
"Herr Settembrini is a literary man," Joachim explained, rather self-consciously. He wrote the obituary notices of Car-ducci for the German papers-Carducci, you know." He got / Page 59 / more self-conscious still, for his cousin looked at him in amaze-ment, as though to say: "Carducci? What do you know about him? Not any more than I do, I'll wager."
" Yes," the Italian said, nodding. "I had the honour of telling your countrymen the story of our great poet and free-thinker, when his life had drawn to a close. I knew him, I can count myself among his pupils. I sat at his feet in Bologna. I may thank him for what culture I can call my own- and for what joyousness of life as well. But we were speaking of you. A ship-builder! Do you know you have sensibly risen in my estimation? You represent now, in my eyes, the world of labour and practi-cal genius."
"Herr Settembrini, I am only a student as yet, I am just beginning." .
" Certainly. It is the beginning that is hard. But all work is hard, isn't it, that deserves the name? "
"That's true enough, God knows - or the Devil does," Hans Castorp said, and the words came from his heart.
Settembrini's eyebrows went up.
" Oh," he said, " so you call on the Devil to witness that senti- ment - the Devil incarnate, Satan himself? Did you know that my great master wrote a hymn to him? "
"I beg your pardon," Hans Castorp said, "a hymn to the Devil? "
"The very Devil himself, and no other. It is sometimes sung, in my native land, on festal occasions. 'O salute, O Santana, O
ribellione, Oforza vindice della ragione! . . .' It is a magnificent
song. But it was hardly Carducci's Devil you had in mind when you spoke; for he is on the very best of terms with hard work; whereas yours, who is afraid of work and hates it like poison, is probably the same of whom we are told that we may not hold out even the little finger to him."
All this was making the very oddest impression on our good Hans Castorp. He knew no Italian, and the rest of it sounded no less uncomfortable, and reminded him of Sunday sermons, though delivered quite casually, in a light, even jesting tone. He looked
at his cousin, who kept his eyes cast down; then he said: ' You take my words far two literally, Herr Settembrini. When I spoke of the Devil, It was Just a manner of speaking, I assure you.'
".Somebody must have some esprit," Settembrini said, looking straight ahead, with a melancholy air. Then recovering himself, he skilfully got back to their former subject, and went on blithely: " At all events, I am probably right in concluding from / Page 60 / your words that the calling you have embraced is as strenuous as It is honourable. As for myself, I am a humanist, a homo humanus. I have no mechanical ingenuity however sincere my respect for it. But I can well understand that the theory of your craft re-quires a clear and keen mind, and its practice not less than the entire man. Am I right? " ,
"You certainly are, I can go all the way with you there," Hans Castorp answered. Unconsciously he made an effort to reply with eloquence. " The demands made to-day on a man in my profession are simply enormous. It is better not to have too clear an idea of their magnitude, it might take away one's courage: no, it's no joke. And if one isn't the strongest in the world - It is true that I am here only on a visit; but I am not very robust, and I cannot with truth assert that my work agrees with me so wonderfully well. It would be a great deal truer to say that it rather takes It out of me. I only feel really fit when I am doing nothing at all."
" As now, for example? "
"Now? Oh, now I am so new up here, I am still rather bewildered - you can imagine."
" Ah - bewildered."
" Yes, and I did not sleep so very well, and the early breakfast was really too solid. - I am accustomed to a fair breakfast, but
this was a little too rich for my blood, as the saying goes. In short, I feel a sense of oppression - and for some reason or other, my cigar this morning hasn't the right taste, something that as good as never happens to me, or only when I am seriously upset- and to-day it is like leather. I had to throw it away, there was no use forcing it. Are you a smoker, may: I ask? No? Then you cannot imagine the annoyance and disappointment it is lor anyone like me, who have smoked from my youth up, and taken such pleasure in it."
"I am without experience in the field," Settembrini answered, "but I find that my lack of it is in no poor company. So many fine, self-denying spirits have refrained. Carducci had no use for the practice. But you will find our Rhadamanthus a kindred spirit.
He is a devotee of your vice." "Vice, Herr Settembrini? "
"Why not? One must call things by their right names; life is enriched and ennobled thereby. I too have my vices..."

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Excursus on the Sense of Time

Page 102
"WHEN they came upstairs after the meal, the parcel containing the blankets lay on a chair in Hans Castorp's room; and that after. noon 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 pos-sible 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 arrns 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. "

Page 103

"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 repeatealy as he lay look-ing 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 anaemic, as Hofrat Behrens had said; this, no doubt, was why he was so susceptible to cold. But such unpleasing sensations were out-weighed 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 experence of it, and which re-asserted 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 re-laxed limbs could be conceived than that purveyed by this ex-cellent 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 mea 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 stereo-scope, 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 habit- / Page104 / uating 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 percep-tion 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 interesting-ness 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 time-units, 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 te-dium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uni-formity 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. Habitu-ation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which ex-plains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon Its course. We are aware that the intertercala-tion of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuve-nate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is / Page 105 / 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 ex- pressed, 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 I being bored; on the contrary, I might say that I am royally enter-tained. But when I look back - in retrospect, that is, you under-stand - 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.' "
"Yes," Joachim answered, thermometer in mouth, I profit by it too; while you are here, I can sort of hang on by you, as it were." Hans Castorp laughed, to hear his cousin speak thus, quite simply, without explanation."

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 145

MOUNTING MISGIVINGS 

"He had never seen Frau Chauchat's face so close, so clear in all its details. He could have counted the tiny / Page 146 / hairs that stood up from the braid she wore wreathed round her head - they were reddish-blond, with a metallic sheen. No more than a hands-breadth or so of space had been between his face and hers, whose outline and features, peculiar though they were, had been familiar to him as long as he could remember, and spoke to his very soul as nothing else could in all the world. It was an un-usual face, and full of character (for only the unusual seems to us to have character); its mystery and strangeness spoke of the un- known north, and it teased the curiosity because its proportions and characteristics were somehow not very easy to determine. Its keynote, probably, was the high, bony structure of the prominent cheek-bones; they seemed to compress the eyes - which were un-usually far apart and unusually level with the face - and squeeze them into a slightly oblique position; while at the same time they appeared responsible for the soft concavity of the cheek, and this, in turn, to result in the full curve of the slightly pouting lips. Then there were the eyes themselves: the narrow" Kirghiz" eyes, whose shape was yet to Hans Castorp a simple enchantment and whose colour was the grey-blue or blue-grey of distant moun-tains; they had the trick of sidewise, unseeing glance, which could sometimes melt them into the very hue of mystery and darkness - these eyes of Clavdia, which had gazed so forbiddingly into his very face, and which so awfully resembled Pribislav Hippe's in shape, expression, and colour that they fairly frightened him. Resembled was not the word: they were the same eyes. The breadth, too, of the upper part of the face, the flattened nose, everything, even to the flush in the white skin, the healthy colour of the cheek - which in Frau Chauchat's case, as in so many others, merely counterfeited health and was a superficial,effect of the open-air cure - everything was precisely Pribislav, and no differently would he have looked at Hans Castorp were they to meet again as of old in the school court-yard.
It had been staggering in the extreme. Hans Castorp thrilled at the encounter, yet experienced a mounting uneasiness like that he felt when he realized how narrow was the proximity that en-closed him and the fair Russian. That the long-forgotten Pribislav Hippe should appear to him in the guise of Frau Chauchat and look at him with those " Kirghiz " eyes - this was to be immured, not with opportunity, but with the inevitable, the unescapable, to such an extent as to fill him with conflicting emotions. It was a situation rich in hope, yet heavy with dread - it gave our young friend a feeling of helplessness, and set motion a vague instinct to cast about, to grope and feel for help or counsel. One after an /  Page 147 / other he mentally summoned up various people, the thought of whom might serve him as some sort of mental support.
There was the good, the upright Joachim, firm as a rock - yet whose eyes in these past months had come to hold such a tragic shadow, and who had never used to shrug his shoulders, as he did so often now. Joachim, with the "Blue Peter" in his pocket, as Frau Stohr called the receptacle. When Hans Castorp thought of her hard, crabbed face it made him shiver. Yes, there was Joa-chim - who kept constantly at Hofrat Behrens to let him get away and go down to the longed-for service in the " plain " - the " flat. land," as the healthy, normal world was called up here, with a faint yet perceptible nuance of contempt. Joachim served the cure single-mindedly, to the end that he might arrive sooner at his goal and save some of the time which "those up here" so wantonly flung away; served it unquestioningly for the sake of speedy recovery - but also, Hans Castorp detected, for the sake of the cure itself, which, after all, was a service, like another; and was not duty duty, wherever performed? Joachim invariably went upstairs after only a quarter-hour in the drawing-rooms; and this mlitary precision of his was a prop to the civilian laxity of his cousin, who would otherwise be likely to loiter unprofitably below, with his eye on the company in the small salon. But Hans Castorp was con-vinced there was another and private reason why Joachim with-drew so early; he had known it since the time he saw his cousin's face take on the mottled pallor, and his mouth assume the pathetic twist. He perfectly understood. For Marusja was almost always there in the evening -laughter-loving Marusja, with the little ruby on her charming hand, the handkerchief with the orange
scent, and the swelling bosom, tainted within - Hans Castorp com-prehended that it was her presence which drove Joachim away, precisely because it so strongly, so fearfully drew him toward her.
Was Joachim too "immured" - and even worse off than him-self, in that he had five times a day to sit at the same table with Marusja and her orange-scented handkerchief? However that might be, it was clear that Joachim was preoccupied with his own troubles; the thought of him could afford his cousin no mental support. That he took refuge in daily flight was a credit to him; .but that he had to flee was anything but reassuring to Hans Ca-storp, who even began to feel that Joachim's good example of faithful service of the cure and the initiation which he owed to his cousin's experience might have also their bad side.
Hans Castorp had not been up here three weeks. But it seemed 'longer; and the daily routine which Joachim so piously observed /Page 148 / had begun to take on, in his eyes, a character of sanctity. When from the point of view of " those up here," he considered life lived down in the flat-land, it seemed somehow queer and un-natural. He had grown skilled in the handling of his rugs and the art of making a proper bundle, a sort of mummy, of himself, when lying on his balcony on cold days. He was almost as skilful as Joa-chim - and yet, down below, there was no soul who knew aught of such an art or the practice of it! How strange, he thought; yet at the same moment wondered at himself for finding it strange- and there surged up again that uneasy sensation of groping for support.
He thought of Hofrat Behrens and his professional advice, be-stowed " sine pecunia," that he should, while he was up here, or his life like the other patients, even to the taking of his temper-ature. He thought of Settembrini, and of how he had laughed .that same advice, and quoted something out of The Magic Flute. Did thinking of either of these two afford him any moral support Hofrat Behrens was a white-haired man, old enough to be Hans Castorp's father. He was the head of the establishment, the high authority And it was of fatherly authority that the young now felt an uneasy need. But no, it would not do: he could not think with childlike confidingness of the Hofrat. The physician had buried his wife up here, and been brought so low by grief. almost to lose his mind; then he had stopped on, to be near her grave and because he himself was somewhat infected. Was he sound again? Was he single-mindedly bent on making his patients whole, so they could go back to service in the world below? His cheeks had a purple hue, he looked fevered. That might be only the effect of the air up here; Hans Castorp, without fever, so far as he could judge without a thermometer, felt the same dry heat in his face, day in, day out. Of course, when one heard the Hofrat talk, one might easily conclude he had fever. There was some thing not quite right about it; it all sounded very jovial and lively but on the whole forced, particularly when one thought of purple cheeks and the watery eyes, which seemed to be still weeping for his wife. Hans Castorp recalled what Settembrini had about the Hofrat's vices and chronic depression - that might have been malicious; it might have been sheer windiness. But he did find it sustained or fortified him to think of Hofrat Behrens.
Then there was Settembrini himself, of course - the chronic oppositionist, the windbag, the "homo humanus," as he styled himself. Hans Castorp thought him well over, with his gift of the gab, his florid harangue on the combination of dullness and dis / Page 149 / and how he, Hans Castorp, had been taken to task for calling a "dilemma for the human intelligence." What about him?
would the thought of him be anyway efficacious? Hans Castorp recalled how several times, in the extraordinarily vivid dreams visited his sleep in this place, he had taken umbrage at the dry subtle smile curling the Italian's lip beneath the flowing mous-e; how he had railed at him for a hand-organ man, and tried to shove him away because he was a disturbing influence. But that in his dreams - the waking Hans Castorp was no such matter, but a much less untrammelled person; not disinclined, either, on the whole, to try out the influence upon himself of this novel type, with its critical animus and acumen, despite the fact that he found the Italian, both carping and garrulous. After all, Settembrini had called himself a pedagogue; obviously he was anxious to exercise influence; and Hans Castorp, for his part, fairly yearned to be influenced-though of course, not to an extent which should cause him to pack his trunk and leave before his time, as Settembrini had in all seriousness proposed.
" Placet experiri," he thought to himself; wIth a smile. So much Latin he had, without calling himself a homo humanus. The up-shot was that he kept his eye on Settembrini, listened keenly and critically to what he had to say when they met on their prescribed walks to the bench on the mountam-slde, or down to the Platz, or wherever and whenever opportunity offered. Other occasions
there were, too: for instance, at the end of a meal Settembrini would rise from table before anyone else and saunter across among the seven tables, in his check trousers, a toothpick between his lips to where the cousins sat. He did this in defiance of law and custom, standing there in a graceful attitude, with his legs crossed, talking and gesticulating with the toothpick. Or he would draw up a chair and sit down at the corner of the table, between Hans Castorp and the schoolmistress, or between Hans Castorp and Miss Robinson, and look on while they ate their pudding. which he seemed to have forgone.
" May I beg for admission into this charmed circle? " he would say, shaking hands with the cousins, and comprehending the rest
 of the table in a sweeping bow. "My brewer over there - not to mention the despairing gaze of the breweress! - But, really, this Herr Magnus! Just now he has been delivering a discourse on folk.psychology. Shall I tell you what he said? . The Fatherland, it is true, is one enormous barracks. But all the same it's got a lot of solid capacity, it's genuine. I wouldn't change it for the fine manners of the rest of them. What good are fine manners to me if / Page 150 /  I'm cheated right and left? ' And more of the same kind. I am at the: , end of my patience. And opposite me I have a poor creature, with churchyard roses blooming in her cheeks, an old maid from Sieben-burgen, who never stops talking about her brother-in-law, a man we none of us either know or wish to know. I could stand it no longer, I shook their dust from my feet, I bolted."
"You raised your flag and took to your heels," Frau Stohr stated.
" Pre - cisely," shouted Settembrini. "I fled with my flag. All, what an apt phrase! I see I have come to the right place; nobody else here knows how to coin phrases like that. - May I be per- mitted to inquire after the state of your health, Frau Stohr?
It was frightful to see Frau Stohr preen herself.
" Good land! "she said. " It is always the same, you know your-self: two steps forward and three back. When you have been sit-ting here five months, along comes the old man and tucks on an-other six. It is like the torment of Tantalus: you shove and shove, and think you are getting to the top - "
   " Ah, how deligntful of you, to give poor old Tantalus a new job, and let him roll the stone uphill for a change! I call that true
 benevolence. - But what are these mysterious reports I have been hearing of you, Frau Stohr? There are tales going about - tales about doubles, astral bodies, and the like. Up to now I have lent them no credence - but this latest story puzzles me, I confess."
" I know you are poking fun at me."
" Not for an instant. I beg you to set my mind at rest about this dark side of your life; after that it will be time to jest. Last night, between half past nine and ten, I was taking a little exercise in the garden; I looked up at the row of balconies; there was your light gleaming through the dark; you were performing your cure, led by the dictates of duty and reason. ' Ah,' thought I, , there lies our charming invalid, obeying the rules of the house, for the sake of an early return to the arms of her waiting husband.'-And now what do I hear? That you were seen at that very hour at the Kurhaus, in the cinematografo " (Herr Settembrini gave the word the Italian pronunciation, with the accent on the fourth syllable) " and afterwards in the cafe, enjoying punch and kisses, and -" 
Frau Stohr wriggled and giggled into her serviette, nudged Joa-chim and the silent Dr. Blumenkohl in the ribs, winked with coy confidingness, and altogether gave a perfect exhibition of fatuous complacency. She was in the habit of leaving the light burning on her balcony and stealing off to seek distraction in the quarter be-low. Her husband, meanwhile, in Cannstadt, awaited her return.

Page 151

"She was not the only patient. who practised this duplicity.
And," went on Settembrini, that you were enjoying those kisses m the company of - whom, do you think? In the company
of Captain Miklosich from Bucharest. They say he wears a corset -but that is little to the point. I conjure you, madame, to tell me! Have you a double? Was it your earthly part which lay there alone on your balcony, while your spirit revelled below with Captain Miklosich and his kisses? " '
Frau Stohr wreathed and bridled as though she were being ticked..
" One asks oneself, had it not.be:n better the other way about, " Settembrini went on; 'you enjoying the kisses by yourself, and the rest-cure with Captain MikIosich - "
"Tehee! " tittered Frau Stohr..."

WHIMS OF MERCURIUS

Page 232

"...But to return, by way of example, to some of those strains and stresses to which Hans Castorp s state was prone. Our young man was sitting on a painted garden chair, with his back against the wan, talking with his cousin, whom he had forced, against his will, to come outside; in front of him; by the balustrade, Frau Chauchat stood smoking with her table-mates. He talked for her benefit; she turned her back. His thirst for conversation was not satisfied by Joachim; he must needs make an acquaint- ance - and whose? No other than Hermine Kleefeld's. He di-rected a casual word toward that young lady, then presented, himself and his cousin by name, and drew up another chair, in order to carry on the game. Did she know, he asked, what a deuce of a fright she had put him in, at their first encounter, when she had whistled him such an inspiriting welcome? He did not mind owning that she had accomplished her purpose; he had felt as though someone had hit him on the head - she / Page 233 / might ask his cousin! He called it an outrage, frightening harm-less strangers like that, piping at them with her pneumothorax! And so forth and so on. Joachim, quite aware of the role that was being forced upon him, sat with his eyes on the ground; even Fraulein Kleefeld gradually perceIved, from Hans Ca- storp's distraught and wandering eye, that she was being made a tool of, and felt piqued accordingly. And still the poor youth went on smirking and turning phrases and modulating his voice, until at last he actually succeeded in making Frau Chauchat turn round and look him in the face. But only for a moment. Her Pribislav eyes glided rapidly down his figure, as he sat there one knee over the other, with a deliberate insouciance which had all the effect of scorn; they paused for a space upon his yellow boots, and then carelessly, with perhaps a smiile in their depths, withdrew.
It was a bitter, bitter blow. Hans Castorp. talked on awhile, feverishly. Then, inwardly smitten by the power of that gaze
upon his boots, he fell silent almost in the middle of a word, and lapsed into deep dejection. Fraulein Kleefeld, bored and of-fended, went her way. Joachim remarked, not without irrita-tion, that perhaps they might go up to the rest-cure now. And a broken spirit answered feebly that they might.
Hans Castorp anguished piteously for two days. Nothing oc-curred in that time to be balsam for his smarting wound. What had she meant by her look? Why, in the name of reason, had she visited him with her scorn? Did she regard him merely as a healthy young noodle from down in the flat-land, whose rece-ptivity was sure to be of the harmless sort; as a guileless, ordi-nary chap, who went about laughing and earning his daily bread and filling his belly full; as a model pupil in the school of life, with no comprehension of anything but the tedious ad-vantages of a respectable career? Was he, he asked himself, a mere freckless tourist and three-weeks' guest, or was he a man who had made his profession on the score of a moist spot, a member of the order, one of those up here, with a good two months to his credit-and had not Mercurius only yesterday evening climbed up to 100^o? Ah, here, even here, lay me bitter drop that overflowed his cup: Mercurius had ceased to mount! The fearful depression of these days had a chilling, sobering,
relaxing effect upon Hans CastofF's system, which, to his pro-found chagrin, aisplayed itself in a reduced degree of fever, scarcely higher than normal. He had the cruel experience of / Page 234 / proving to himself that all his anguish, all his dejection, had no other result than to separate him still further from Clavdia, and from that which was significant in her existence.
The third day brought the blessed releif. It was early upon a magnificent October morning, sunny and fresh. The meadows were covered with silvery-grey webs. The sun and the waning moon both hung high up in a lucent heaven. The cousins were abroad earlier than usual, meaning to honour the fine weather, by extending their morning walk a little further than the pre-scribed limits, and continuing the forest path beyond the bench by the watercourse. Joachim's curve, too, had lately shown a gratifying decrease; he had accordingly suggested this refreshing irregularity, and Hans Castorp had not said no.
"We seem to be cured," he said, "no fever, free of infection, as good as ripe for the world again. Why shouldn't we have our fling? " They set out with walking-sticks, and hatless - for since his "profession" Hans Castorp had resigned himself to the pre-vailing custom, despite the original assertion of his own contrary- minded conventions. But they had not yet covered the initial ascent of the reddish path, had arrived only at about that point where the novice had once encountered the pneumatic crew, when they saw at some distance ahead of them, slowly mount-ing, Frau Chauchat; Frau Chauchat in white, a white sweater and white flannel skirt, even white shoes. Her red-blond hair gleamed in the morning sun. To be precise, Hans Castorp saw her; Joa-chim was made aware of her presence by an' unpleasant sensa-tion of being dragged and pulled along by his cousin, who had started up at a great pace, after having suddenly checked and almost stood still on the path. Joachim found the compulsion exceedingly annoying. His breath came shorter, he began to cough, Hans Castorp, with his eyes on his goal, and his breath-ing apparatus apparently in splendid trim, gave little heed; and Joachim, having recognized the situation for what it was, drew his brows together and kept step for step, feeling it out of the question to let his cousin go on alone.
The lovely morning made Hans Castorp sprightly. And his soul, in that period of black depression, had secretly assembled its powers. He felt a sure intuition that the moment was come to break the ban. He strode on, dragging the panting and re- luctant  Joachim in his train, and they had as good as overtaken Frau Chauchat, at the point where the path grew level and turned to the right along the wooded hillock. Here the young man slackened his pace, not to be breathless with exertion in the / Page 235 / moment of carrying out his purpose. And just beyond the bend in the path, between mountain and precipice, where the sunlight
slipped athwart the boughs of the rust-coloured firs, it actually fell out, the wonder came to pass, that Hans Castorp, on Joa-chim's left, overtook the fragile fair one, he went by her with a manly stride, and then, at the moment when he was beside her, on her .right, greeted her with a profoundly respectful! hatless inclinatlon of the head, and a murmured "good-mornmg," to which she answered by a friendly bow, that showed no trace of surprise, and a good-morning in her turn. She said it in Hans Castorp's mother-tongue, and smiled with her eyes. And all that was something different, something fundamentally and blessedly other than that look she had bent upon his boots - it was a gift of fortune, an unexampled turn in affairs, a joy well-nigh beyond comprehending, it was the blessed release.
Transported by that word, look, and smile, half blinded by his senseless joy, Hans Castorp trod oil winged feet, hurrying the misused Joachim with him, who uttered not a word, and gazed away down the steep. It had been a manoeuvre of a rather unscrupulous sort; in Joachim's eyes, as Hans Castorp well knew, it looked very like treachery. Yet it was not the same thing as borrowing a lead-pencil of a perfect stranger; one might even say it would have been ill-bred to pass by a lady with whom one had been for months under the same roof and not salute her. They had even been in conversation with her, that time in the waiting-room. That was why Joachim could say nothing; but Hans Castorp well knew another reason that made his honour-loving cousin walk on in silence with averted head, while he himself was so supremely happy, so glad all over, at the suc-cess of his manreuvre. Never a man down in the flat-land who had "given his heart" to some healthy, commonplace little goose, been successful in his suit, and experienced all the ortho-dox and anticipatory gratifications proper to his state, never could such a man be blissfuller, no, not half so blissful, as Hans Castorp
now over this momentary joy which he had snatched. - And so, after a while, he clarped his cousin heartily on the shoulder and said: "Hullo, what's the matter with you? Isn't it magnificent to-day? Let's go down to the Kurhaus afterwards, there will  probably be music. Perhaps they'll play that thing from Carmen. -
What's the matter? Has anything got under your skin? "
"No," Joachim answered. "But you look so hot, I'm afraid your curve has gone up again."
It had. The greeting he had exchanged with Clavdia Chau- / Page 236 / chat had overcome the mortifying depression; it was at bottom the consciousness of this which had lay at the root of Hans Castorp's gratification. Yes, yes, Joachim was right, Mercurius was mounting again: when Hans Castorp consulted him, on their return from their walk, he had climbed up to 104°..."

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 236

ENCYCLOPAEDIC 

"IF certain insinuations on Herr Settembrini's part had angered Hans Castorp, the annoyance was quite unjustified, as also his feeling that the schoolmaster had been spying on him. A blind man must have seen how it stood with the youth; he himself did nothing to conceal his state, being prevented by a certain native and lofty simplicity. He inclined rather to wear his heart upon his sleeve, in contrast - if you like, favourable contrast - to the devotee from Mannheim, with his thin hair and furtive mien. But in general we would emphasize the fact that people in Hans Castorp's state regularly feel a craving for self-revelation, an impulse to confess themselves, a blind preoccupation with self, and a thirst to possess the world of their own emotions, which is the more offensive to the sober onlooker, the less sense, reason-ableness, or hope there lies in the whole affair.
How people in this state go about to betray themselves is hard to define; but it seems they can neither do nor leave undone anything which would not have that effect - doubly so, then, in a society like that of the Berghof, where, as the critically minded Herr Settembrini once expressed it, people were pos-sessed of two ideas, and only two temperature - and then again temperature. By the second temperature he meant preoccupa- tion with such questions as, for instance, with whom Frau Consul-General Wurmbrandt from Vienna consoled herself for the de-fection of Captain Miklosich - whether with the Swedish minion, or Lawyer Paravant from Dortmund, or both. Everybody knew that the bond between the lawyer and Frau Salomon from Am-sterdam, after subsisting for several months, had been broken by common consent, and that Frau Salomon had followed the lean-ings of her time of life and taken up with callow youth. The thick-lipped Ganser from Hermine Kleefeld's table was for the present under her wing; she had taken him " to have and to hold," as Frau Stohr, in legal parlance, yet not without perspicuity, had put it-and thus Lawyer Paravant was free either to quarrel or to compound with the Swede over the favours of the Frau Consul- General, as seemed to him advisable.

Page237

"These affairs then - in which, of - course, the passage along the balconies, at the end of the glass partitions, played a considerable role -were rife in Berghof society, particularly among the fevered youth. They occupied people's minds, they were a salient
feature of life up here - and even in saying thus much we are far from having precisely defined the position with regard to them. Hans Castorp, on this subject, received a singular impression: it was that a certain fundamental fact of life, which is conceded the world over to be of great importance, and is the fertile theme of constant allusion, both in jest and earnest, that this fundamental fact of life bore up here an entirely altered emphasis. It was weighty with a new weight; it had an accent, a value, and a sig-nificance which were utterly novel- and which set the fact itself in a light to make it look much more alarming than it bad been before. Tbus far, whenever we have referred to any questionable performances at the Berghof, we have done so in what may have a seemed a light and jesting tone; this without prejudice to our a real opinion as to the levity, or otherwise, of the performances, and solely for the usual obscure reasons which prompt other peo-ple to adopt the same, But as a matter of fact, that tone was far less usual in our present sphere than it is elsewhere in the world.
Hans Castorp had considered himself pretty well-informed on the subject of the above-named " fact of life " which has always and everywhere been such a favourite target for shafts of wit. And he may have been right in so considering. But now he found that the
knowledge be bad bad down in the flat-land had been most inade-quate, that be had actually been in a state of simple ignorance. For his personal emotions in the time of his stay up here - upon the nature of which we have been at some pains to enlighten the reader, and which bad been at moments so acute as to wring from the young man that cry of "Oh, my God! " - had opened his eyes, had made him capable of hearing and comprehending the wild, the overstrained, the namelessly extravagant key in which all the " affairs " up here were set. Not that, even up here, they did not make jests on the subject. But up here, far more than down below jests seemed out of place.They made one's teeth to chat-ter, an took away one's breath, they betrayed themselves too plainly for what they were, a thin and obvious disguise for a hid-den extremity - or rather, an extremity impossible to hide. Hans
Castorp well remembered the mottled pallor of Joachim's skin when, for the first and only time, he had innocently alluded to Marusja's physical charms in the light tone he might have assumed at home. He remembered the chill withdrawal of the blood from / Page 238 / his own face, the time he had drawn the curtain to shield Madame Chauchat from the sun; he knew that he had seen the same look on other faces up here, both before and since - he usually marked it in pairs, as, for example, on the faces of Frau Salomon and young Ganser, in the beginning of that relation between them so happily described by Frau Stohr. Hans Castorp, we say, re-called all this, and realized that under such circumstances it would not only have been very hard for him not to " betray himself," but that the effort would not have been worth his pains. In othe words, not alone the noble simplicity which did him honour, but also a certain sympathetic something in the air urged him not to do violence to his feelings or make any secret of his condition.
Joachim had, as we know, early spoken of the difficulty of forming acquaintances up here. In reality this arose chiefly from the fact that the cousins formed a miniature group by themselves in the society of the cure; but also because the soldierly Joachim was bent on nothing else but speedy recovery, and hence objected on principle to any closer contact or more social relations with fellow sufferers. It was a good deal this attitude of his that pre-vented his cousin from exposing his feelings more freely to th world at large. Even so, there came an evening when Joachim might behold his cousin the centre of a group composed of Her-mine Kleefeld, Ganser, Rasmussen, and the youth of the monocle and the finger-nail, making an impromptu speech on the subject of Frau Chauchat's peculiar and exotic facial structure, and be-traying himself by his unsteady voice and the excited glitter of' " eyes, until his listeners exchanged glances, nudged each other, and tittered.
This was painful for Joachim; but the object of their mirth seemed insensible to his own self-betrayal; perhaps he felt that his state, if concealed and unregarded, would never come to any proof. He might count, however, on a general understanding ot it, and as for the inevitable malice that went with it, he took that for granted. People, not only at his own table, but at neighbour-ing ones as well, enjoyed seeing him flush and pale when the glass door slammed. And even this gratified him; it was like an outward confirmation and assertion of his inner frenzy, which seemed to any him calculated to forward his affair, and encourage his vague an
senseless hopes. And so it too made him happy. It came to this: that people actually stood about in groups to observe the infatu-ated youth - after dinner, on the terrace, or on a Sunday after-noon before the porter's lodge, when the letters were distributed, for on that day they were not carried to the patients' rooms. He / Page 239 / was quite generally known to be very far gone, drunk as a lord and not caring who knew it. Frau Stonr, Fraulein Engelhart, Her-mine Kleefeld and her friend the tapir-faced girl, Herr Albin, the young man with the finger-nail, and perhaps others among the guests - would stand together and watch him, with the comers of their mouths drawn down, fairly chortling, whilst he, poor wight, his face aglow with the heat that from the first had never left him, with the glittering eye the gentleman rider's cough had kindled, would gaze, forlornly and frantically smiling, in one certain direc-tion.
It was really splendid of Herr Settembrini, under these circum-stances, to go up to Hans Castorp, engage him in conversation, and ask him how he did. But it is doubtful whether the young man knew how to value and to be grateful for such benevolence and freedom from prejudice. One Sunday afternoon the guests were thronging about the porter's lodge, sttetching out their hands for letters. Joachim was among the foremost; but Hans Castorp had stopped in the rear, angling, in the fashion we have described, for a look from Clavdia Chauchat. She was 'standing near by, among a group of her table-mates, waiting until the press about the lodge should be lightened. It was an hour when all the patients mingled, an hour rich in opportunity, and for that reason beloved of our young man. The week before, he had stood at the window so close to Madame Chauchat that she had in fact jostled him, and then, with a litde bow, had said: "Pardon." Whereat he, with a feverish presence of mind for which he thanked his stars, had re- sponded: " Pas de quoi, madame."
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 ob-struction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting, we say, is long. We might just as well - or more accurately - say it is short, since it con-sumes whole spaces of time without our living them or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system. We might almost go so far as to say that, as undigested food makes man no stronger, so time spent in waiting makes him no older. But in practice, of course, there is hardly such a thing as pure and unadulterated waiting."

Page 240

"Well, the week had been somehow devoured, and the hour for the Sunday afternoon post came round again, so like the other it seemed never to have changed. Like to that other, what thrilling opportunities it offered, what prospects lay concealed within it of coming into social relations with Frau Chauchat! Prospects that made the heart of young Hans Castorp leap and contract, yet without actually issuing in action; for against their doing so lay certain obstacles of a nature partly military, partly civil. In other words, they were in part the fruit of Joachim's presence, in part the result of Hans Castorp's own moral compunctions; but also, in part, they rested upon his sure intuition that social relations with Frau Chauchat, conventional relations, in which one made bows and addressed her as madame, and spoke French as far as possible, were not the thing at all, were neither necessary nor desirable. He stood and watched her laugh as she spoke, precisely as Pribislav Hippe had laughed as he spoke, that time In the school yard: she opened her mouth rather wide, and her slanting, grey-green eyes narrowed themselves to slits above the cheek~bones. That was, to be sure, not "beautiful "; but when one is in love, the aesthetic judgment counts for as little as the moral.
" You are expecting dispatches, Engineer? "
Only one person could talk like that - and he a disturber of Hans Castorp's peace. The young man started and turned toward Herr Settembrini, who stood there smiling the same fine, human-istic smile that had sat upon his features when he greeted the new-comer, at the bench by the watercourse. Now, as then, it mortified Hans Castorp. We know how often, in his dreams, he had sought . to drive away the organ-grinder as an element offensive to his peace; but the waking man is more moral than the sleeping, and, as before, the sight of that smile not only had a sobering effect upon Hans Castorp, but gave him a sense of gratitude, as though it
had responded to his need.

"Dispatches, Herr Settembrini? Good Lord; I'm no ambassa-dor! There might be a postcard there for one of us. My cousin is
just asking." . .
" That devil on two sticks in there has handed mine out to me already," Herr Settembrini said, and carried his hand to the side pocket of the inevitable pilot coat. "Interesting matter, I must confess, of literary and social import. It is about an encyclopaedic publication, to which a philanthropic institution has considered me worthy to contribute. Beautiful work, in short - ". Herr Set-tembrini interrupted hiimself. "But how about you? " he asked. "How are your affairs going? For: instance, how far has the / Page 241/ process of acclimatization  gone? You have .not been so long among us but that one may still put the question."
"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."
"A complicate4 process," laughed the Italian. " An odd way of settling down in a place. But of course youth is capable of any-thing. It doesn't. get used to things, but it stikes roots."
" And after all, this in't a Siberian penal settlement."
No ah, you have a fancy for oriental simile. Natural enough. Asia surrounds us - wherever one's glance rests, a Tartar physiog- nomy." Herr Settembrini gave a discreet glance over his shoulder. " Genghis Khan," he said. " Wolves of the steppes, snow, vodka, the knout, Schlusselburg, Holy Russia. They ought to set up an altar to Pallas Athene, here in the vestibule - to ward off the evil spell. Look yonder - there is a species of Ivan Ivanovitch without a shirt-front, having a disagreement with Lawyer Paravant. Botn of them want to be in the front rank to receive their letters. I can't tell which of them is in the right, but, for my part, Lawyer Para-vant fights under the aegis of the goddess. He is an ass, of course; but at least he knows some Latin."
Hans Castorp laughed - a thing Herr Settembrini never did. One could not imagine him laughing heartily; he never got fur-ther than ,the fine, dry crisping of the comer of his mouth. He looked at the laughing young man, and presently asked: "Have you received your diapositive? "
"I have received it," Hans Castorp weightily affirmed. "Just the other day. Here it is," and he felt for it in his inner breast pocket.
"Ah, you carry it in a case. Like a certificate, as it were - a sort of membership card. Very good. let me see it." And Herr Settem- brini held it against the light, betweeh the thumb and forefinger of his left hand; a little glass plate framed in strips of black paper. The gesture was a common one up here, one often saw it. His face, with the black almond-shaped eyes, displayed a slight grimace as he did so, but whether this happened in the effort to see more clearly or for other causes, he did not permit it to appear.
"Yes, yes," he said, after a while. "Here is your identity card. Thanks very much," and he handed the plate back to Hans Castorp over his shoulder, without looking.
"Did you see the strands? " asked Hans Castorp. "And the nodules?"

Page 242 

" You know," Herr Settembrini answered him very deliber-ately, " my opinion of these productions. You know too that those spots and shadows there are very largely of physiological origin. I have seen a hundred such pictures, looking very like this of yours; the decision as to whether they offered definite proof or not was left more or less to the discretion of the person looking at them I speak as a layman, but a layman of a good many years' experience."
" Does your own look much worse than this one? "
" Rather worse. I am aware, however, that our lords and mas-ters do not base any diagnosis on the evidence of these toys alone. Then you purpose stopping the winter up here with us? "
" Yes - Lord knows - I am beginning to get used to the idea of not going back until my cousin does." .
" Getting used, that is, to not getting used - you put that very wittily. I hope you have received supplies from home - winter clothing, stout foot-gear? " .
" Everything - all in the proper order. I informed my relatives,' jand our housekeeper sent me everything by express delivery. I shall do nicely now."
" I am relieved. But hold - you need a bag, a fur sack! What are we thinking of? This late summer is treacherous - it can turn to winter inside an hour. You will be spending the coldest months up here."
" Yes, the sleeping-sack," Hans Castorp said. "That is a requi-site, I suppose. It had crossed my mind that we must be going down to the Platz one of these days soon to buy one. One never needs the thing again, of course - but even for the five or six months it is worth while."
" It is, it is. - Engineer," said Herr Settembrini in a low voice, coming close to the young man as he addressed him, " don't you know there is something frightful in the war you fling the months about? Frightful because unnatural, inconsistent with your char-acter; it is due solely to the facility of your time of life. Ah, the fatal facility of youth! It is the despair of the teacher, for its proneness to display itself in the wrong direction. I beg you, my young friend, not to adopt the phrases current up here, but to speak the language of the European culture native to you. Up here there is too much Asia. It is not without significance that the place is full of Muscovite and Mongolian types. These people - " Herr Settembrini motioned with his chin over his shoulder - "do not put yourself in tune with them, do not be infected with their ideas; rather set yourself against them, oppose your nature, your higher / Page 243 / nature against them; cling to everything which to you is by nature and tradition holy, as a son of the godlike West, a son of civiliza-tion: and, for example, time. This barbaric lavishness with time is in the Asiatic style; it may be a reason why the children of the East feel so much at home up here. Have you never remarked that when a Russian says four hours, he means what we do when we say one? It is easy to see that the recklessness of these people where time is concerned may have to do with the space concep-tions proper to people of such endless territory. Great space, much time - they say, in fact, that they are the nation that has time and can wait.We Europeans, we cannot; We have as little time as our great and finely articulated continent has space, we must be as economical of the one as of the other, we must husband them, En-gineer! Take our great cities, the centres and foci of civilization, the crucibles of thought! Just as the soil there increases in value, and space becomes more and more precious, so, in the same meas-ure, does time. Carpe diem! That was the song of a dweller in a great city. Time'is a gift of God, given to man that he might use it - use it, Engineer, to serve the advancement of humanity."
Whatever difficulty, if any, his phrases offered Herr Settem-brini's Mediterranean palate, he brought them out with a clarity, a euphony, one might almost say a plasticity; that was truly re-freshing. Hans Castorp made no answer save the short, stiff, em- barrassed bow of a pupil receiving a reprimand. What could he have said? Herr Settembrini had delivered a private lecture, almost whispered it into his ear, with his back to the rest of the people in the room; it had been so pointed, so unsocial, so little conversable in its nature, "that merely to commend its eloquence seemed lack- ing in tact. One does not tell a schoolmaster that he has expressed himself well. HansCastorp, indeed, had done so once or twice in the early days of their aquaintance, probably from an instinct to preserve the social equilibrium; but the humanist's utterances had never before reached quite such a didactic pitch. There was noth- ing for it but to pocket the admonition, feeling as embarrassed as a schoolboy at so much moral,izing. Moreover, one could see by Herr Settembrini's expression that he had not finished his train of thought. He still stood so close to Hans Castorp that the young man was constrained to bend a little backwards; and his black eyes gazed fixedly into the other's face.
"You suffer, Engineer," he went on. "You are like one dis-traught - who could help seeing it? But your attitude toward suf-fering can be a European attitude; it should not be the oriental, which in its soft abandonment inclines so readily to seek this spot./ Page 244/ 
The oriental attitude toward suffering is one of pity and a bound- less patience - that cannot, it ought not to be ours, to be yours! - Look - we were speaking of what the post had brought us, look at these! Or better, come with me, it is impossible here -let us withdraw, and I will disclose to you certain matters. Come with me! "And turning, he drew Hans Castorp away, and they entered one of the small reception-rooms, the first on the right next the vestibule, which stood empty. It was furnished as a reading- and writing-room, with oak panelling and a light, vaulted ceiling, book- cases, a centre table covered with newspapers in holders and sur- rounded with seats, and writing appurtenances arranged in the bay-windows. Herr Settembrini advanced as far as the neighbour- hood of one of the windows, Hans Castorp followed. The door remained open.
The Italian sought the baggy side pocket of his pilot coat, and drew thence with impetuous hand a bundle of papers in a large, already opened envelope. Its contents - various printed matter, and a sheet of writing - he ran through his fingers under Hans Castorp's eye.
"These papers," he said, "bear the stamp, in French, of the International League for the Organization of Progress. I have them from Lugano, where there is an office of a branch of the League. You inquire after its principles, its scope? I will define them for you, in two words. The League, for the Organization of Progress deduces from Darwinian theory the-philosophic concept that man's profoundest natural impulse is in the direction of self-realization. From this it follows that all those who seek satisfaction of this impulse must become co-labourers in the cause of human progress. Many are those who have responded to the call; there is a considerable membership, in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and in Germany itself, I myself have the honour of having my name inscribed on the roll. A comprehensive and scientifically executed programme has been drawn up, embracing all the projects for human improvement conceivable at the moment. We are study-ing the problem of our health as a race, and the means for com-bating the degeneration which is a regrettable accompanying phenomenon of our increasing industrialization. The League envis-ages the founding of universities for the people, the resolution of the class conflict by means of all the social ameliorations which recommend themselves for the purpose, and finally the doing away with national conflicts, the abolition of war through the de-velopment of international law. You perceive that the objects toward which the League directs its efforts are ambitious and / Page 245 / broad in their scope, Several international periodicals are evidence of its activities - monthly reviews, which contain articles in three or four languages on the subject of the progressive evolution of civilized humanity. Numerous local groups have been established in the various countries; it is expected that they will exert an edify-ing and enlightening influence by means of discussion evenings and appropriate Sunday observances, Above all, the League will strive its utmost to aid with the material at its disposal the political party of progress in every country, You follow me, Engineer?"
"Absolutely," Hans Castorp replied, with precipitation. He had, as he spoke, the feeling of a man who finds himself slipping, but for the moment contrives to keep his feet.
Herr Set:tembrini appeared satisfied. " I assume that these are new and surprising ideas to you? "
"Yes, I confess this is the first time I have heard of these - these
endeavours."
" Ah;" Settembrini murmured, "ah, if you had only heard of them earlier! But perhaps it is not yet too late. These circulars - you would like to know what they say? Listen. Last spring a formal meeting of the League was called, at Barcelona. You are aware that that city can boast of a quite special affinity with pro-gressive political ideas. The congress sat for a week, with ban-quets and festivities. I wanted to go - good God, I yearned to be there and take pa:rt in the deliberations. But that scurvy rascal of a Hofrat forbade me on pam of death, so - well, I was afraid I should die, and I didn't go. I was in despair, as you may imagine, over the trick my unreliable health had played me. Nothing is more painful than to be prevented by our physical our animal nature from being of service to reason. My sansfaction, therefore, over this communication from Lugano is the more lively. You are curious to know what it says? I can imagine. But first, a few brief explanations: the League for the Organization of Progress, mind-ful of its task of furthering human happiness - in other words, of combating human suffering by the available social methods; to the end of finally eliminatmg it altogether; mindful also of the fact that this lofty task can only be accomplished by the aid of so-ciology, the end and aim of which is the perfect State, the League, in session at Barcelona, determined upon the publication of a series of volumes bearing the general title: The Sociology of Suffering. It should be the aim of the series to classify human suffering ac-cording to classes and categories, and to treat it systematically and exhaustively. You ask what is the use of classification, arrange-ment, systematization? I answer you: order and simplification are / Page 246 / the first steps toward the mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown. We must lead the human race up out of the primi-tive stages of fear and patient stupidity, and set its feet on the path of conscious activity. We must enlighten it upon two points: first, that given effects become void when one first recognizes and then removes their causes; and second, that almost all individual suffer-ing is due to disease of the social organism. Very well; this is the object of the Sociological Pathology. It will be issued in some twenty folio volumes, treating every species of human suffering, from the most personal and intimate to the great collective strug-gles arising from the conflicting interests of classes and nations; it will, in short, exhibit the chemical elements whose combination in various proportions results in all the ills to which our human flesh.is heir. The publication will in every case take as its norm the dignity and happiness of mankind, and seek to indicate the meas-ures and remedies calculated to remove the cause of each devia-tion. Famous European specialists, physicians, psychologists, and economists will share in the compostion of this encyclopaedia of suffering, and the general editorial bureau at Lugano will act as the reservoir to collect all the articles which shall flow into it. I can read in your eyes the questions to what my share is to be in all these activities. Hear me to the end. This great work will not neglect the belletrist in so far as he deals with human suffering: a volume is projected which shall contain a compilation and brief analysis of such masterpieces of the world's literature as come into question by depicting one or other kind of conflict - for the con-solation and instruction of the suffering. This, then, is the task entrusted to your humble servant, in the letter you see here."
"You don t say, Herr Settembrini! Allow me to offer you my heartiest congratulations! That is a magnificent commissIon, just in your line, I should think. No wonder the League thought of you! And what joy you must feel to aid in the elimination of human suffering! "
"It is a work very broad in its scope," Herr Settembrini said thoughtfully," and will require much consideration and wide reading. Especially," .he added and.his gaze seemed to lose itself in the immensity of his task, " since literature has regularly chosen to depict suffering, and even second - and third rate masterpieces treat of it in one form or another. But what of that? So much the better! However comprehensive the work may be, it is at least of a nature that will permit me to carry it on, if needs must, even in this accursed place - though I hope I need not be here long enough to bring it to a conclusion. That is something." he said, / Page 247 / moving closer to Hans Castorp, and subduing his voice nearly to a whisper, "that is something which can hardly be said of the duties nature lays upon you, Engineer! This is what I wanted to bring out, this is the word of warning I have been trying to utter. You know what admiration I feel for your profession. But as it is a practical, not an intellectual calling, you are differently situated from myself, in that you can only pursue it down in the world - only there can you be a true European, only there can you actively fight suffering, improve the time, further progress, with your own weapons and in your own way. If I have told you of the task that has fallen to my lot, it was only to remind you, only to recall you to yourself, only to clarify certain conceptions of yours which the atmospheric conditions up here were obviously beginning to becloud. I would urge it upon you: hold yourself upright, preserve your self-respect, do not give ground to the un-known. Flee from this sink of iniquity, this island of Circe, whereon you are not Odysseus enough to dwell in safety. You will be going on all fours - already you are glancing toward your forward extremities, and presently you will begin to grunt - have a care! "
The humanist had uttered these admonitions in the same low voice, shaking his head impressively. He finished with drawn brows and eyes directed toward the ground. To answer him slightly or jestingly, as Hans Castorp would once have done, was out of the question.The young man weighed that possibility for a second, standing with lowered lids. Then he lifted his shoulders and spoke, no louder than Herr Settembrini: "What shall I do? "
"What I told you."
"You mean-go away? "
Herr Settembrini was silent.
"What you mean to say is that I should leave for home? "
"It was the advice I gave you on the first evening, Engineer."
" Yes - and then I was free to do so, though it seemed to me silly to throw up the sponge just because the air up here put me about a bit. But now it is a rather different state of affairs: I have been examined, and Hofrat Behrens told me in so many words that it would be no good my going home, I should only have to come back again; and that if I stopped down there, the whole lobe would be at the devil before you could say Jack Robinson."
"I know; and now you have the evidence in your pocket."
"You say that so ironically - with the right kind of irony, of course, that cannot for a moment be misunderstood, the direct and classic device of oratory - you see, I remember the things you say. But do you mean that after you have seen this photograph, / Page 248 / after the x-ray and Behrens's diagnosis, you take it upon your-self to advise me to go home?"
Settembrini hesitated for a second. Then he drew himself up and directed the gaze of his black eyes full upon Hans Castorp's
face. He answered, with an emphasis not quite without theatrical effect: "Yes, Engineer, I take it upon myself."
But Hans Castorp's bearing too had stiffened. He stood with his heels together, and looked straight at Herr Settembrini in his turn. This time it was a duel, Hans Castorp stood his ground, Influences from not far off gave him strength. Here was a school-master - but yonder was a woman with narrow eyes He made no apologies for his words, he did not beg Herr Settembrini not to take offence; he answered: "Then you are more prudent for your self than for others. You did not go to Barcelona in the face of the doctor's orders. You were afraid of death, and you stopped up here."
To a certain point Herr Settembrini's pose was undeniably shaken; his smile, as he answered, was slightly forced.
"I know how to value a ready answer - even though your logic smacks of sophistry. It would disgust me to enter the lists in the sort of rivalry that is too current up here; otherwise I might reply that my case is far more serious than yours - so much more, in fact, that it is only by artificial means, almost by deliberate self deception, that I can keep alive the hope of leaving this place and having sight of the world below before I die. In the moment when that hope can no longer be decently sustained, in that moment I shall turn my back on this establishment, and take private lodgings somewhere in the valley. That will be sad; but as the sphere of my labours is the freest, the least material in the world, the change cannot prevent me from resisting the forces of disease and serving the cause of humanity, up to my latest breath. The difference between us, in this respect, I have already pointed out to you.. Engineer, you are not the man to assert your better self in these surroundings. I saw it at our first meeting. You reproach me with not having gone to Barcelona. I submitted to the prohibition, not to destroy myself untimely. But I did so with the most stringent reservations; my spirit protested in pride and anguish against the dictates of my wretched body, Whether that protest survives in you, as you comply with the behests of our powers that be - whether it is not rather the body, the body and its evil propensities, to which you lend a ready ear - "
"What have you against the body? " interrupted Hans Castorp suddenly, and looked at him with wide blue eyes, the whites of / Page 249 /  which" were veined with blood. He was giddy with his own temerity and showed as much. - Whatever am I saying? he thought. I'm getting out of my depth. But I won't give way; now I have begun, I won't give him the lastword if I can help it. Of course he will have it anyhow, but never mind, I will make"the most of it while I can. - He enlarged upon his objection: "But you are a humanist, are you not? What can you have to say against the body? " -
Settembrini's smile this time was unforced and confident. " 'What have you against analysis? ' " he quoted, with his head on one side. "Are you down on analysis? You will always find me ready to answer you, Engineer," he said, with a bow and a sweeping downward motion of the hand, "particularly when your opposition is spirited; and you parry not without elegance. Human-ist-yes, certainly, I am a humanist. You could never convict me of ascetic inclinations. I affirm, honour, and love the body, as I protest I affirm, honour, and love form, beauty, freedom, gaiety, the enjoyment of life. I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism. I think my position is unequivocal. But there is one power, one principle, which commands my deepest assent, my highest and fullest allegiance and love; and this power, this principle, is the intellect. However much I "dislike hearing that conception of moonshine and cobwebs people call 'the soul' played off against the body, yet, within the antithesis of body and mind, the body is the evil, the devilish principle, for the body is nature, and nature - within the sphere, I repeat, of her antagonism to the mind, and to reason - is evil, mystical and evil. ' You are a humanist? ' By all means I am a humanist, because I am a friend of mankind, like Prometheus, a lover of humanity and human no-bility. That nobility is comprehended in the mind, in the reason, and therefore you will level against me in vain the reproach of Christian obscurantism -"
Hans Castorp demurred.
"You will," Herr Settembrini persisted, "level this reproach in vain, if humanistic pride one day learns to feel as a debasement and disgrace the fact that the intellect is bound up with the body and with nature. Did you know that the great Plotinus is said to have made the remark that he was ashamed to have a body? "asked Settembrini. He seemed eager for a reply, and Hans Castorp was - constrained to confess that this was the first he had heard of it.
"We have it from Porphyrius. An absurd remark, if you like. But the absurd is the intellectually honourable; and nothing can / Page 250 / be more pitiable than the reproach of absurdity, levelled against the mind as it asserts its dignity against nature, and refuses to abdicate before her. - Have you heard of the Lisbon earthquake, Engineer? "
"An earthquake? No - I see no newspapers up here -"
"You misunderstand me. En passant, let me say it is a pity, and very indicative of the spirit of this place, that you neglect to read the papers. But you misunderstand me, the convulsion of nature to which I refer is not modern. It took place some hundred and fifty years ago."
"I see. Oh, wait - I have it. I have read that Goethe said to his servant, that night in his bedchamber - "
"No, it was not of that I was speaking," Settembrini interrupted him, closing his eyes, and shaking his small sallow hand in the air. " Besides, you are confusing two catastrophes. You are think-ing of the earthquake of Messina. I have in mind the one that visited Lisbon in the year 1755."
"Pardon. "
"Well, Voltaire was outraged by it."
"Outraged? That is - how do you mean? "
"He rebelled. Yes. He declined to accept that brutal fatum et factum. His spirit refused to abdicate before it. He protested in the name of reason and the intellect against that scandalous dere-liction of nature, to which were sacrificed thousands of human lives, and three-quarters of a flourishing city. You are astonished? You smile? You may well be astonished; but as for smiling, give me leave to tell you it is out of place. Voltaire's attitude was that of a worthy descendant of those old Gauls that shot their arrows against the heavens. There, Engineer, you have the hostility the intellect feels against nature, its proud mistrust, its high-hearted in- sistence upon the right to criticize her and her evil, reason-denying power. Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it - to abdicate, that is,inwardly. And there too you have the humanistic position which runs not the slightest risk of in-volving itself in contradictions, or of relapsing into churchly hy-pocrisy, when it sees in the body the antagonist, the representative of the evil principle. The contradiction you imagine you see is at bottom always the same. ' What have you against analysis? 'Noth-ing - when it serves the cause of enlightenment, freedom, prog-ress. Everything when it is pervaded by the horrible haut gout of the grave. And thus too wIth the body. We are to honour and uphold the body when it is a question of emancipation, of beauty, of freedom of thought, of joy, of desire. We must despise it in so / Page 251 / far as it sets itself up as the principle of gravity and inertia, when it obstructs .the movement towards light; we must despise it in so far as it represents the principle of disease and death, in so far as its specific essence is the essence of perversity, of decay; sensuality, and shame."
These last words Settembrini had uttered standing close to Hans Castorp, very rapidly and tonelessly, as though to make an end of the subject. Succour was nigh for the youth: Joachim entered the reading-room, with two postcards in his hand. The Italian broke off; and the dexterity with which he altered his tone for one in a lighter and fitting social key was not lost upon his pupil- if so Hans Castorp may be called.
"There you are, Lieutenant! Have you been looking for your cousin? I must apologize; we had fallen into conversation - if I am not mistaken, we have even had a slight disagreement He is not a bad reasoner, your cousin, a by no means contemptible an-tagonist in an argument - when he takes the notion."..."