The Magic Mountain (52 page)

Perhaps there were exceptions, people who spent the hours of their rest cure with some sort of serious intellectual pursuit, some rewarding study of one topic or another, even if they did so only to maintain contact with life on the plains or to give a little weight to time, a deeper draft to its keel, and prevent it from becoming pure time and nothing else. Perhaps besides Herr Settembrini struggling to eradicate suffering and honor-loving Joachim poring over his Russian textbooks, there were here and there people who did likewise, if not among the denizens of the common lounging areas—which was indeed very unlikely—then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp, at least, was inclined to believe it was so. As for himself, once he found that
Ocean Steamships
no longer had anything to say to him, he had requested that, along with his winter gear, his family send him a few books pertinent to his profession, works on engineering science and the technology of shipbuilding. These volumes, however, now lay neglected, replaced by others from quite a different department, textbooks from a field of study in which young Hans Castorp had developed a sudden interest. These were books on anatomy, physiology, and biology, written in various languages—German, French, and English—and sent him one day by the local bookdealer; evidently he had ordered them, on his own and without a word to anyone, while taking a walk down in Platz alone. (Joachim had had an appointment for an injection or was getting weighed that day.) His cousin was surprised to see them in Hans Castorp’s hands. They were expensive books, as scientific works always are. The prices were written both inside the cover and on the jackets. He asked Hans Castorp why, if he really wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them from the director, who surely had a fine selection of that sort of literature. But Hans Castorp replied that he wanted to own them himself—it was different reading a book that you owned. And besides, he loved to take his pencil and underline at will. Joachim listened for hours to the sound coming from his cousin’s balcony: a paper knife slipping through uncut pages.

The volumes were heavy, cumbersome. When reclining, Hans Castorp propped the lower edge on his chest or stomach, which hurt a little but was simply part of the bargain. His mouth hanging half-open, he would let his eyes glide down each learned page illuminated by the reddish light from his shaded lamp, though, if it had come to that, he could just as easily have read by the bright moonlight. His head would lower until his chin lay on his chest, and he would hold that pose awhile—lost in thought perhaps or musing in a doze—half-asleep, before lifting his head for the next page. While the moon followed its prescribed path across the high mountain valley glistening like crystal below, he would read, pursue his study of organized matter, of the characteristics of protoplasm, that self-sustaining, delicate substance that hovers intriguingly between synthesis and dissolution and whose basic forms have remained the same as when it first assumed rudimentary shape. He read with burning interest about life and its sacred, yet impure mystery.

What was life? No one knew. It was aware of itself the moment it became life, that much was certain—and yet did not know what it was. Consciousness, as sensitivity to stimuli, was undoubtedly aroused to some extent at even the lowest, most undeveloped stages of its occurrence; it was impossible to tie the emergence of consciousness to any particular point in life’s general or individual history—to link it, for instance, to the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animals had no nervous systems, let alone a cerebral cortex, and yet no one dared deny that they were capable of responding to stimuli. And you could anesthetize life, life itself, not just the special organs capable of the response that informs life, not just the nerves. You could temporarily suspend the responses of every speck of living matter, in both the plant and animal kingdoms, narcotize eggs and sperm with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself—ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.

What was life? No one knew. No one could pinpoint when it had emerged from nature and struck fire. Nothing in the realm of life was self-actuated or even poorly actuated from that point on. And yet life seemed to have actuated itself. If anything could be said about it, then, it was this: life’s structure had to be so highly developed that nothing like it could occur in the inanimate world. The distance between an amoeba—a pseudopod—and a vertebrate was minor, insignificant in comparison to that between the simplest form of life and inorganic nature, which did not even deserve to be called dead—because death was merely the logical negation of life. Between life and inanimate nature, however, was a yawning abyss, which research sought in vain to bridge. People endeavored to close that abyss with theories—it swallowed them whole, and was still not an inch less broad or deep. In the search for some link, scientists had stooped to the absurdity of hypothesizing living material with no structure, unorganized organisms, which if placed in a solution of protein would grow like crystals in a nutrient solution—whereas, in fact, organic differentiation was simultaneously the prerequisite and expression of all life, and no life-form could be proved that did not owe its existence to propagation by a parent. What jubilation had greeted the first primal slime fished from the sea’s deepest deeps—and what humiliation had followed. It turned out that they had mistaken a precipitate of gypsum for protoplasm. But to avoid one miracle (because it would be a miracle for life spontaneously to arise out of and return to the same stuff as inorganic matter), scientists had found it necessary to believe in another: archebiosis, that is, the slow formation of organic life from inorganic matter. And so they went about inventing transitional and intermediate stages, assuming the existence of organisms lower than any known form, but which themselves were the result of even more primal attempts by nature to create life—attempts that no one would ever see, that were submicroscopic in size, and whose hypothesized formation presupposed a previous synthesis of protein.

What was life, really? It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction. It was the existence of what, in actuality, has no inherent ability to exist, but only balances with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair. It was not matter, it was not spirit. It was something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above a waterfall, like a flame. But although it was not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and revulsion, it was matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without—existence in its lewd form. It was a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space. It was furtive, lascivious, sordid—nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature. Out of overcompensation for its own instability, yet governed by its own inherent laws of formation, a bloated concoction of water, protein, salt, and fats—what we call flesh—ran riot, unfolded, and took shape, achieving form, ideality, beauty, and yet all the while was the quintessence of sensuality and desire. This form and this beauty were not derived from the spirit, as in works of poetry and music, nor derived from some neutral material both consumed by spirit and innocently embodying it, as is the case with the form and beauty of the visual arts. Rather, they were derived from and perfected by substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh.

This was the image of life revealed to young Hans Castorp as he lay there preserving his body warmth in furs and woolens, looking down on the valley glistening in the frosty night, bright beneath the luster of a dead star. The image hovered out there in space, remote and yet as near as his senses—it was a body: dull, whitish flesh, steaming, redolent, sticky; its skin blemished with natural defects, blotches, pimples, discolorations, cracks, and hard, scaly spots, and covered with the delicate currents and whorls of rudimentary, downy lanugo. The body was leaning back, wrapped in the aura of its own vapors, detached from the coldness of the inanimate world, its head crowned with a cool, keratinous, pigmented substance that was a product of its own skin, its hands clasped behind the neck. Gazing out from under lowered lids, the eyes had a slanted look because of a racial variation in the formation of the lid; its mouth was half-open, its lips pouted slightly. Its weight was on one leg, so that flesh protruded where the bone of the supporting hip stuck out, while the relaxed leg was raised so that the knee bent a little to nestle against the inside of the supporting leg and the foot rested on just the toes. There the body stood, leaning charmingly, turning to smile at him, its radiant elbows spread wide in the dual symmetry of its limbs, of its corporeality. The night of its pubic region built a mystic triangle with the steaming pungent darkness of the armpits, just as the red epithelial mouth did with the eyes, or the red buds of the breast with the vertically elongated navel. Under the impetus of brain and of motor nerves extending from the spine, belly and rib cage stirred, the pleuroperitoneal cavity swelled and contracted; the breath, warmed and moistened by mucous membranes along the trachea and laden with secreted material, streamed out between the lips, now that oxygen had bonded with the hemoglobin in the blood deep in the air sacs of the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body—with its mysterious symmetry of limbs, nourished by blood through a network of nerves, veins, arteries, capillaries, all oozing lymph; with its scaffold of bones, some of them tubes filled with marrow, some like blades, some like bulbs, some torqued vertebrae, but all originating in a gelatinous base that with the help of calcium salts and lime had grown firm enough to support the rest; with its joints made of tendons, cartilage, and slippery, well-oiled balls and sockets; with its more than two hundred muscles; with its central system of organs for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli; with its protective membranes, serous cavities, and glands pumping secretions; with its complicated interior, a network of pipes and crevices, including openings onto the world outside—understood that this self was a living entity of a higher order, far removed from those simple organisms that breathed, fed, even thought, with just the surface of their bodies, that it was constructed, rather, out of a myriad of small organized units, which all shared a common origin, but had multiplied by constantly dividing, had adapted and combined for various functions, and had then separated to develop on their own and germinated new forms that were both the prerequisite and the effect of its growth.

The body hovering before him, this individual, living self was therefore a huge multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing entities, which in the course of organic integration and specialization had forfeited their existence as selves to become anatomical elements, but with such a total loss of freedom and direct connection to life that some functioned only in response to stimuli like light, sound, touch, or warmth, whereas others could only cluster in new shapes or secrete digestive juices, and still others had been trained to function solely for defense, support, transport of fluids, or procreation. Relaxation of the rules unifying this organic multiplicity into a single higher self was permitted in some cases, and then a multitude of subordinate individuals would be collected in a loose, muddled way to form a higher living unit. The student brooded over the phenomenon of cell colonies; he learned about transitional organisms, algae, whose individual cells, wrapped in a coating of gelatin, were often widely dispersed, but nevertheless built multicelled formations, which, had they been asked, would not have known if they should be regarded as a settlement of single-celled individuals or as a single living entity, and in providing their answer would have vacillated strangely between the use of “I” and “we.” Nature here exhibited an intermediate state between the free individual existence of simple units and the highly social organization of countless elemental individuals such as tissues and organs within a dominant self—the multicelled organism being only one possible form life might take as it passed through the cyclical process leading from procreation to procreation. The act of fertilization, the sexual union of two cells, marked the beginning of the formation of each pluralistic individual, just as it marked the beginning of each successive generation of more elemental forms, and so always led back to itself. The effects of this act lasted through many generations, which could then multiply all on their own in constant repetition, until the moment came when these asexually produced offspring once again found they required renewal by means of copulation, and the circle was closed. A complex living entity, born from the merged nuclei of two parental cells, was in fact a cooperative venture of many generations of individual cells produced asexually; it grew as they multiplied, and the circle of procreation was closed only when sexual cells, individual units specialized for procreation, had been produced within it and now found their way to a new fusion that would propel life onward.

With a volume on embryology propped at the bottom of his sternum, our young adventurer followed the development of the organism from the moment when the sperm, out in front of many just like itself and driven onward by the whipping motion of its tail, crashed headfirst into the gelatin coating of the egg and bored its way through to what is called the mount of conception, a conical protrusion in the outer rim of the egg’s protoplasm formed in reaction to the approach of the sperm. In its serious pursuit of variations on this standard procedure, nature had employed every conceivable farce and grotesquerie. In some animal species the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. There were others where the male placed his arm down the gullet of the female to lay his sperm inside her; the arm, bitten off and vomited back up, now ran away on its fingers, long fooling scientists into believing it to be an independent life-form deserving a Greek and Latin name of its own. Hans Castorp listened to the learned argument between the ovists and animalculists, the former asserting that the egg contains a perfect little frog, dog, or human being and the sperm merely stimulates it to grow, the latter seeing the sperm as a living creature with preformed head, arms, and legs, which then found in the egg a medium on which to feed—until everyone finally agreed to grant equal merit in the process to egg and sperm, both of which had arisen out of what were originally undifferentiated reproductive cells. He watched the single cell of the fertilized egg transform itself into a multicelled organism that grew by cleavage and division, saw the cellular ball nestle up against the lamellae of the mucous membrane, saw the blastula fold in on itself to form a basin or cavity, which then assumed the task of receiving and digesting nourishment. This was the gastrula, the protozoon, the primal form of all animal life, the primal form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and inner, ectoderm and endoderm, turned out to be primitive organs, from whose folds and protrusions were formed glands, tissues, sense organs, the body’s appendages. One layer of the ectoderm thickened, folded to form a groove, then closed to build a nerve canal, became the spinal column, the brain. When gelatinous cells began to produce glutens in place of mucin, the fetal fluid solidified into fibrous connective tissue, to cartilage; and he watched as calcium salts and fats were extracted from the surrounding liquid to form bone. The human embryo lay there crouched and cowering, it had a tail—and with its monstrous abdomen, stubby shapeless extremities, and larval face bent down over a bloated belly, it was indistinguishable from an embryonic pig. And according to one branch of science, whose notions of reality were equally unflattering and lurid, the embryo’s development seemed to be a hasty recapitulation of zoological genealogy. It even temporarily had gill flaps, like a skate’s.