The Magic Mountain (53 page)

It seemed permissible, or necessary, to view these developmental stages as finding their logical conclusion in the less-than-humanistic picture presented by the finished product: primitive man. His skin was covered with thick hair and equipped with twitching muscles to ward off insects. The olfactory membranes covered an extensive surface; his ears stuck out and were movable, so that they not only played a role in facial expression but also were more adept at catching sound than at present. In those days, the eyes, protected by a third, blinking lid, were at the sides of the head—except for a third eye, of which the pineal gland was a vestige, that was able to patrol the upper air. Primitive man also had a very long intestine, several sets of milk teeth, and air sacs next to the larynx to enhance his roar; the male sexual glands were carried inside the abdomen.

Anatomy presented our researcher with human limbs skinned and prepared for study; it showed him both the surface and the deeper structure of muscles, tendons, and ligaments, those of the thigh, the foot, and especially the arm, the upper and lower arm; it taught him the Latin names that medicine—that adumbration of the humanist spirit—had nobly and chivalrously supplied to distinguish them; and it allowed him to penetrate to the skeleton, an illustration of which offered him new perspectives, revealing the unity of all things human, the interconnection of all disciplines. For here, in a most remarkable fashion, he found himself reminded of his own—or should one say, his former—profession and of the fact that on his arrival he had presented himself to whomever he met, from Dr. Krokowski to Herr Settembrini, as a member of the scientific caste.

In order to study something—just what had been quite unimportant—he had learned in technical college about statics, flexible supports, and loads, about how good construction was the functional use of mechanical materials. It would surely have been childish to think that the engineering sciences and the laws of mechanics had been applied to organic nature, any more than one could say that they had been derived from it. They were simply repeated and corroborated in it. The principle of the hollow cylinder dominated the structure of tubular bones to such an extent that static requirements were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid material. A structure, Hans Castorp had learned, conformable to the demands of tension and pressure put upon it and constructed of nothing more than rods and braces of a mechanically suitable material, will withstand the same weight as a solid made of the same materials. So, too, one could observe that as tubular bones developed, with each increase in solid surface material, the inner portion, which had become mechanically superfluous, was transformed step by step into fatty tissue, the marrow. The bone of the upper thigh was a crane, and in constructing its bony beam, organic nature had given it precisely the same shape and direction that Hans Castorp would have had to draw as lines of tension and pressure in the blueprint of a mechanism subject to similar stresses. He was delighted to see it, for he now realized that his relationship to the femur, and to organic nature in general, was threefold: lyric, medical, and technical. It came as a great inspiration. And these three relationships, he believed, were a unity within the human mind, were schools of humanist thought, variations of one and the same pressing concern.

And yet, for all that, the accomplishments of protoplasm remained quite inexplicable—it seemed that life was prohibited from understanding itself. Not only were most biochemical processes unknown, but it was also their very nature to avoid examination. Almost nothing was understood about the construction and makeup of the unit of life known as the “cell.” What good did it do to uncover the components of dead muscle? The living tissue did not permit chemical analysis; the very changes that brought about rigor mortis were enough to make all such experimentation futile. No one understood metabolism, no one knew how the nervous system functioned. What made it possible for taste buds to taste? What made it possible for certain olfactory nerves to be stimulated by various odors? What, indeed, made something smell at all? The specific odor of animals or people resulted from the vaporization of substances that no one could identify. The composition of the secretion called sweat was poorly understood. The glands that excreted it also produced aromas that doubtless played an important role among mammals, but whose significance among humans no one was prepared to claim to know much about. The physiological significance of obviously important parts of the body remained shrouded in darkness. One could, of course, simply disregard the appendix, call it a mystery—except that the appendices of rabbits were regularly found filled with a pulpy substance, and no one could explain either how it ever got back out or was replenished. But what about the white and gray matter in the medulla, what about the optic thalamus and its connection to the eye, or the gray matter in the pons? Brain and spinal tissue deteriorated so quickly that there was no hope of determining its structure. What caused the cerebral cortex to shut down as one fell asleep? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself—which occasionally did happen with corpses? The answer people gave was: Life, a special immunity of living protoplasm—and acted as if they did not notice what a mystical explanation that was. The theory behind such a commonplace phenomenon as fever was self-contradictory. An increase in metabolism caused an increase in the production of body heat. But, then, why did the body not compensate, as usual, by releasing that heat? Instead, sweat production was retarded—was that because of a contraction of the skin? But that could be demonstrated only if a chill was also present—otherwise the skin remained hot. “Hot flashes” would indicate that the central nervous system was the seat both of whatever caused catabolism and of a skin condition we are content to call abnormal, simply because we do not know any better way to define it.

But even so, what was such ignorance in comparison with our confusion when confronted by phenomena like memory—or the even more astounding extended memory that allowed acquired characteristics to be inherited? Anything like a mechanical explanation for these achievements of protoplasm was completely out of the question. Sperm, which transferred the countless, complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father to the egg, was visible only under a microscope; and even the most powerful magnification did not suffice to determine its genesis or allow it to be seen as anything but a homogeneous body—for the sperm of one animal looked like that of every other. Such structural factors forced one to assume that a single cell was no different from the higher life-form of which it was a building block, that it, too, was a higher organism, yet another composite made up of discrete units of life, individual living entities. One progressed from the ostensibly smallest unit to something smaller still, one was compelled to split something elemental into yet more basic elements. No doubt just as the animal kingdom consisted of various species of animals, just as the organism of the human animal consisted of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so, too, the cell consisted of a new and diverse animal kingdom of elemental, submicroscopic living entities that grew independently, multiplied independently according to the law that each can only produce its own kind, and cooperated by division of labor to serve the next higher level of life.

Those were the genes, the bioblasts, the biophores—Hans Castorp rejoiced in the frosty night to make their acquaintance by name. But even in his excitement, he asked himself just how elemental they might appear under better light. Since they were bearers of life, they had to be organized, because life was based on organization; but if they were organized, they could not be elemental, because an organism is not elemental, but multiple. They were living entities below the level of the cell that they built and organized. But if that was so, despite their incomprehensible smallness, they, too, as living entities had to be built out of something, had to be organized, structured organically. Because to be a living entity was by definition to be built out of smaller, subordinate entities, or better, out of entities organized to serve the higher form of life. There could be no limit to such division as long as it yielded organic entities—that is, those possessing the characteristics of life, in particular the ability to ingest, grow, and multiply. As long as one spoke of living entities, any discussion of elemental units was dishonest, because the concept of an entity carried with it,
ad infinitum
, the concept of the subordinate, organizing unit. There was no such thing as elemental life—that is, something that was both already life and yet elemental.

But although it could not logically exist, ultimately there had to be something of that sort, because the notion of archebiosis—that is, the slow development of life from inorganic matter—could not be dismissed out of hand; and the gap in external nature between living and nonliving matter, which we vainly attempted to close, had to be filled or bridged somewhere deep within organic nature. At some point the division had to lead to “entities,” which, although composites, were not yet organized and mediated between living and nonliving matter, groups of molecules that formed a transition between mere chemistry and organized life. But when one looked at chemical molecules, one found oneself at the edge of a yawning abyss far more mysterious than the one between organic and inorganic nature—at the edge of the abyss between the material and nonmaterial. Because the molecule was made up of atoms, and the atom was not even close to being large enough to be called extraordinarily small. It was so small, in fact, such a tiny, initial, ephemeral concentration of something immaterial—of something not yet matter, but related to matter—of energy, that one could not yet, or perhaps no longer, think of it as matter, but rather as both the medium and boundary between the material and immaterial. But that posed the question of another kind of spontaneous generation, far more baffling and fantastic than that of organic life: the generation of matter from nonmatter. And indeed, the gap between matter and nonmatter demanded—at least as urgently as the one between organic and inorganic nature—that there be something to fill it. There must of necessity be a chemistry of nonmatter, of unsubstantial compounds, from which matter then arose, just as organisms had come from inorganic compounds, and atoms would then be the microbes and protozoa of matter—substantial by nature, and yet not really. But confronted with the statement that atoms were “so small they were no longer small,” one lost all sense of proportion, because “no longer small” was tantamount to “immense”; and that last step to the atom ultimately proved, without exaggeration, to be a fateful one. For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.

The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike center, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor—any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells.” A city, a state, a social community organized around the division of labor was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade. Was it illicit to think that certain planets of the atomic solar system—among all those hosts of solar systems in all those milky ways that constituted matter—that the state of some planet or other in that inner world might not correspond to the conditions that made the earth an abode of
life
? For a slightly tipsy young master of the muffling art with an “abnormal” skin condition, who was no longer totally lacking in experience when it came to illicit matters, this was a speculation that bore the stamp of logic and truth and, far from being absurd, seemed as perfectly obvious as it was illuminating. Once the cosmic character of the “smallest” bits of matter became apparent, any objection about the “smallness” of these stars in the inner world would have been quite irrelevant—and concepts like inner and outer had now lost their foundation as well. The world of the atom was an outer world, just as it was highly probable that the earthly star on which we lived was a profoundly inner world when regarded organically. Had not one researcher in his visionary boldness spoken of the “beasts of the milky way”—cosmic monsters whose flesh, bones, and brains were formed from solar systems? But if that was so, as Hans Castorp believed it to be, then at the very moment when one thought one had reached the outermost edge, everything began all over again. But that meant, did it not, that perhaps in inner world after inner world within his own nature he was present over and over again—a hundred young Hans Castorps, all wrapped up warmly, but with numbed fingers and flushed face, gazing out from a balcony onto a frosty, moonlit night high in the Alps and studying, out of humanistic and medical interest, the life of the human body?

He learned pathological anatomy from a volume he was now holding to one side to catch the reddish glow of his table lamp; the text, with a series of illustrations, discussed parasitic cell fusion and infectious tumors. These were tissue formations—and very luxuriant formations they were—caused by foreign cells invading an organism that proved receptive to them and for some reason offered favorable conditions (although, one had to admit, rather dissolute conditions at that) for them to flourish. It was not so much that the parasite deprived the surrounding tissue of its nourishment, but rather, in exchanging materials with its host cell, it formed organic compounds that proved amazingly toxic, indeed ultimately destructive, to the cells of the host organism. Researchers had been able to isolate and concentrate the toxins from several such microorganisms and were amazed to find that, if injected into an animal’s bloodstream, even tiny doses of such materials, which could be classified as simple proteins, produced the most acute toxic effects, leading to rapid demise. The external form of this contamination was a rapid growth of tissue, a tumor, pathologically speaking, which was the cells’ reaction to the stimulus of bacilli having taken up residence among them. The cells of the mucuslike tissue between which or in which the bacilli resided formed millet-seed-size nodules, some of which were very large indeed and extraordinarily rich in protoplasm containing numerous nuclei. This riotous living, however, soon led to ruin, because the nuclei of these monster cells began to shrink and break down, their protoplasm began to congeal and decompose; other tissues in the vicinity were affected by the same foreign stimuli. Inflammation spread to adjacent blood vessels; lured to the scene of the accident, white corpuscles now arrived; death by congealing proceeded apace. Meanwhile the soluble toxins from the bacteria had long since intoxicated the nerve centers; the organism was already feverish, and with heaving bosom, so to speak, it reeled toward its disintegration.