The Magic Mountain (21 page)
And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the lovely syllables melt on his tongue, rocking his head back and forth, even closing his eyes now and then, oblivious to the fact that his companions understood not a word. It was evident that he did it to savor both his own powers of memory and the words themselves—and to show them off to his audience.
Finally he said, “But you do not understand. You hear, and yet you do not comprehend the painful meaning. As a cripple—gentlemen, you must grasp the situation in its entirety—Leopardi lacked the love of a woman, and that in fact was what made him incapable of preventing his soul from being stunted. Fame and virtue lost their luster for him, he viewed nature as evil—and she
is
evil, stupid and evil, I agree with him there—and he despaired, horrible to say, he despaired of science and progress. That is tragedy, my good engineer. That is your ‘dilemma for our human emotions.’ It is not the woman at your table—I refuse to tax my memory for her name. Do not speak to me of some ‘spiritual redemption’ that may result from illness—for God’s sake, do not speak of it. A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—whereby the first is the rare exception and the latter the rule. Normally it is the body that grows unchecked, usurping all importance, all life to itself, emancipating itself in the most loathsome fashion. A human being who lives as an invalid is
only
a body, and that is the most inhuman of debasements—in most cases, he is no better than a cadaver. . . .”
“That’s funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, who was walking on the other side of Settembrini. “You said something very similar quite recently, too.”
“I did?” Hans Castorp said. “Yes, it may well be that something similar ran through my mind.”
Settembrini was silent as they strode on for a few paces. Then he said, “All the better, gentlemen. All the better, if that is so. Far be it from me to lecture you with some sort of original philosophy—that is not my calling. If for his part our good engineer has already voiced analogous opinions, that only confirms my surmise that, like so many talented young men, he is playing the intellectual dilettante, temporarily experimenting with possible points of view. The talented young man is no blank page, but is rather a page where everything has already been written, so to speak, in appealing inks, the good with the bad. And it is the educator’s task explicitly to foster the true—and by appropriate practical persuasion forever to eradicate the false when it tries to emerge. The gentlemen have been shopping?” he asked, adopting a lighter tone.
“No, not really,” Hans Castorp said, “that is . . .”
“We bought a couple of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim replied casually.
“For the rest cure, what with this miserable cold weather. I am supposed to join in for these few weeks,” Hans Castorp said with a laugh, looking down at the ground.
“Ah, blankets, rest cure,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes, yes. I see, I see, I see. Indeed:
placet experiri!
” he repeated, pronouncing it with his Italian c; and now he took his leave, for they had arrived at the sanatorium, where they were greeted by the limping concierge. Once they were in the lobby, Settembrini turned off into one of the social rooms to read the papers before dinner, as he said. He apparently intended to play hooky from the second rest cure.
“Heaven help us!” Hans Castorp said, as he took his place beside Joachim in the elevator. “That’s your true pedagogue—he himself said not long ago that he had a pedagogic streak. You have to be awfully careful not to say one word too many, otherwise you’ll get an extensive lecture. But it is worth listening to, just the way he speaks, how each word leaps from his mouth so round and appetizing—listening to him always reminds me of fresh hot buns.”
Joachim laughed. “You’d better not tell him that. I’m sure he’d be disappointed to learn you’re thinking of hot buns when he’s lecturing.”
“Do you think so? Well, I’m not so certain about that. I always have the impression that what is really important to him is not the lecture itself—perhaps that’s only secondary—but more especially the speaking of it, the way he lets his words roll and bounce, like little rubber balls. And that he isn’t at all displeased, in fact, if you pay attention to that, too. Magnus the brewer is certainly a little silly with his ‘beautiful characters,’ but Settembrini should have said what literature is actually about. I didn’t want to ask for fear of leaving myself wide open. I don’t really understand much more about it myself, and I’ve never met a literary man before. But if it’s not a matter of beautiful characters, then evidently it’s a matter of beautiful words, that’s my impression when I’m around Settembrini. And what a vocabulary! He’s not the least embarrassed to use words like ‘virtue’—I mean, really! That word has never passed my lips once in all my life—even in Latin class we always just translated
virtus
as ‘bravery.’ It made me wince deep inside, let me tell you. And besides, it makes me a little nervous the way he squawks about the cold and Behrens and Frau Magnus, who’s losing protein—about almost everything in fact. He’s a professional naysayer, that much was clear to me right off. He hacks away at everything around him, and I can’t help it—that always makes things rather untidy and disorderly.”
“You could say that,” Joachim said, musing. “But then again, there’s a kind of pride about him, with no hint of anything disorderly, quite the contrary. He’s a man with a lot of self-respect, or better, respect for people in general, and I like that about him, there’s something decent about that, as I see it.”
“You’re right,” Hans Castorp said. “There’s even something
rigorous
about him. It often makes you quite uneasy because you feel, let’s call it, controlled—controlled, that’s not a bad word for it. Would you believe that I had the definite feeling that he didn’t approve of my having bought those blankets for the rest cure, was against it and ridiculed it somehow?”
“No,” Joachim replied in composed surprise. “How could that be? I really can’t imagine it.” And then he headed off for his rest cure, lock, stock, and thermometer, while Hans Castorp began to wash and change for dinner—it was less than an hour away.
When they came back up from their meal, the package of blankets was lying on a chair in Hans Castorp’s room, and he made use of them that day for the first time. Joachim, as the expert, gave him lessons in the art of wrapping oneself the way they all did it up here, something every novice had to learn right off. You spread the blankets, first one, then the other, over the frame of the lounge chair, but so that a long piece was left dangling to the floor at the foot. Then you sat down and began to wrap the top one around you, first flinging it lengthwise all the way up to under the armpit, then tucking the bottom up over the feet—and for that you had to sit up, bend forward, and grab the fold with both hands—and finally tugging the other side over, making sure that the double foot-tuck fit tight against both sides to form the smoothest and most regular package possible. And then you followed the same procedure with the second blanket—but it was more difficult to handle, and as a bungling beginner Hans Castorp groaned quite a bit while he bent forward and reached out to practice the moves as he was taught them. Only a very few old veterans, Joachim said, were able to fling both blankets around them at once in three deft motions, but that was a rare and coveted skill, which demanded not only years of practice, but also a natural predisposition. And Hans Castorp had to laugh at that word as he leaned back with aching muscles.
Joachim did not understand what was so funny and gazed at him uncertainly, but then joined in the laughter. “So then,” he said—as Hans Castorp, exhausted from all these gymnastics, lay there a solid, unbroken cylinder, the pliant roll tucked behind his neck—“it could be five below now and it wouldn’t matter.” And then he ducked behind the glass partition to wrap himself up as well.
Hans Castorp doubted what he had said about five below, because he was definitely freezing, and he kept shivering as he gazed through the wooden arches into the damp, trickling drizzle out there, which seemed to threaten to turn to snow again at any moment. How strange, too, that despite the wet, his cheeks still felt so hot and dry, as if he were sitting in an overheated room. And he felt absurdly frazzled from the practice session with his blankets—in fact, when he now looked down at
Ocean Steamships
, it lay trembling in his hands. He was not so terribly healthy after all—totally anemic, just as Director Behrens had said, and that was probably why he tended to chill so easily. These unpleasant sensations, however, were counterbalanced by the comfortable position furnished by the lounge chair and its almost mysterious properties, which Hans Castorp found difficult to analyze but which had found his highest approval from the very first and had stood the test again and again. Whether it was the texture of the cushions, the perfect slant of the back support, the proper height and width of the armrests, or simply the practical consistency of the neck roll—whatever it was, nothing could possibly have offered more humane benefits for a body at rest than this splendid lounge chair. And so Hans Castorp’s heart was filled with contentment at the thought that before him lay two empty, safely serene hours: the main rest cure, sacred to the rules of the house. Although he was only a visiting guest up here, he, too, found it to be a very suitable arrangement. For he was a patient man by nature, who could spend long hours doing nothing in particular and loved, as we recall, his leisure time, with no numbing activity to demolish, banish, or overwhelm it. At four there would be afternoon tea with cake and preserves, followed by a little exercise outdoors, and then he would come back up here to rest in the lounge chair again, with supper at seven—which, like all the meals, brought with it certain sights and tensions that he looked forward to—and afterward a peep or two into the stereoscopic viewer, the kaleidoscopic tube, or the cinematographic drum. Hans Castorp had the daily schedule down pat, though it would perhaps be too much to say that he had now “settled in,” as the expression goes.
Ultimately, there is something odd about settling in somewhere new—about the perhaps laborious process of getting used to new surroundings and fitting in, a task we undertake almost for its own sake and with the definite intention of abandoning the place again as soon as it is accomplished, or shortly thereafter, and returning to our previous state. We insert that sort of thing into the mainstream of our lives as a kind of interruption or interlude, for the purpose of “recreation,” which is to say: a refreshing, revitalizing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life, of languishing and growing indifferent. And what is the cause of the enervation and apathy that arise when the rules of life are not abrogated from time to time? It is not so much the physical and mental exhaustion and abrasion that come with the challenges of life (for these, in fact, simple rest would be the best medicine); the cause is, rather, something psychological, our very sense of time itself—which, if it flows with uninterrupted regularity, threatens to elude us and which is so closely related to and bound up with our sense of life that the one sense cannot be weakened without the second’s experiencing pain and injury. A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it “boring,” but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone. What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air, for a trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes. The first few days in a new place have a youthful swing to them, a kind of sturdy, long stride—that lasts for about six to eight days. Then, to the extent that we “settle in,” the gradual shortening becomes noticeable. Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week—of, let us say, four—is uncanny in its fleeting transience. To be sure, this refreshment of our sense of time extends beyond the interlude; its effect is noticeable again when we return to our daily routine. The first few days at home after a change of scene are likewise experienced in a new, broad, more youthful fashion—but only a very few, for we are quicker to grow accustomed to the old rules than to their abrogation. And if our sense of time has grown weary with age or was never all that strongly developed—a sign of an inborn lack of vitality—it very soon falls asleep again, and within twenty-four hours it is as if we were never gone and our journey were merely last night’s dream.