The Magic Mountain (99 page)

How long had Joachim actually lived up here with him, whether measured until his wild departure or taken as a whole? What had been the date on the calendar of his first defiant departure? How long had he been gone, when had he returned, and how long had Hans Castorp himself been here when he did return and then took leave of time? How long, to set Joachim aside for now, had Frau Chauchat not been present? How long, purely in terms of years, was it now since she was
back again
(because she was back again); and how much earthly time had Hans Castorp spent at the Berghof until the day she came back? In response to all such questions—assuming someone had posed them to him, which, however, no one did, not even he to himself, for he was probably afraid of posing them—Hans Castorp would have drummed his fingertips on his brow and most assuredly known no definite answer: a phenomenon no less disquieting than the temporary inability to tell Herr Settembrini his own age on his first evening here; indeed, it represented a worsening of that incapacity, for he now seriously no longer knew at any time just how old he was.

That may sound bizarre, but it is far from improbable or unprecedented, and given certain conditions it can happen to any of us at any time; under such conditions, nothing could prevent us from sinking into profound ignorance about the passage of time and so about our own age. The phenomenon is possible because we lack an internal organ for time, because, that is, if left on our own without external clues, we are totally incapable of even approximate reliability when estimating elapsed time. A group of miners buried by a cave-in, and cut off from observing the sequence of day and night, were rescued at last and guessed the period of time they had spent in the dark, between hope and despair, at three days. And it had been ten. One would think that in such an agonizing situation time would have had to have seemed longer to them. And yet it had shrunk to less than a third of its objective proportions. And judging from that, it appears that under confusing conditions, man in his helplessness tends to experience time in a greatly diminished form rather than to overestimate it.

No one disputes, of course, that it would have been no great burden for Hans Castorp, had he truly wanted, to reckon his way out of ignorance and into clarity, just as any reader can do with no great difficulty if he should feel that this blurred, tangled web offends his common sense. As for Hans Castorp, he did not feel all that at ease with the blurry tangle, perhaps; but he was not about to waste any exertion wrestling himself free in order to determine how old he had now become up here. What held him back were scruples of conscience—although it was patently most unconscionable to pay no attention to time.

We do not know if he should be exonerated because circumstances favored his lack of good intentions—that is, if one chooses not to speak of his bad intentions. Frau Chauchat’s return (and her return had been very different from anything Hans Castorp had dreamed—but of that at the appropriate time) had coincided with a return of the season of Advent and the year’s shortest days; the beginning of winter, astronomically speaking, had been imminent. In reality, however—that is, apart from any theoretical system—in terms of snow and cold, it had been winter now for God knew how long; winter had been interrupted, as always, only very briefly by scorching summer days with a sky whose blue was so inordinately deep that it verged on black—by summer days, then, that could occur in the midst of winter, too, if you ignored the snow, which, by the by, could also fall at any time during summer. How often Hans Castorp had chatted with the late Joachim about the grand confusion that mixed up the seasons higgledy-piggledy, robbing the year of its divisions and making it diverting in a boring sort of way, or boring in a diverting sort of way, until, as the late Joachim had put it out of pure disgust early on, there was no time as such. What got mixed up so higgledy-piggledy in this grand confusion were those emotional concepts and states of consciousness that define “still” and “again”—which is one of the most bewildering, perplexing, and bewitching experiences there is. And from his very first day up here Hans Castorp had felt an immoral appetite to taste that experience—in particular at the five prodigious meals in the cheerfully stenciled dining hall, where he had had his first slight, and relatively innocent, dizzy spell of this sort.

Since then, this deception of mind and senses had assumed much larger dimensions. Time, although the subjective experience of it may be weakened or even abrogated, is an objective reality to the extent that it is active and “brings forth.” Are hermetically sealed preserves on the shelf outside of time? That is a question for the professional philosopher—and it was only out of youthful presumption that Hans Castorp had got himself mixed up in the topic. We do know that time does its work even on a hibernating dormouse. A physician has attested to the case of a twelve-year-old girl who fell asleep one day, and remained asleep for thirteen years—during that time, however, she did not remain a twelve-year-old girl, but grew into an adult female. How could it be otherwise? The dead man is dead and has left our temporal world behind; he has a lot of time, which is to say, he has none at all—personally speaking. That does not prevent his nails and hair from growing, or that all in all—but we shall not repeat the slang idiom that Joachim once used in this same context and that at the time offended Hans Castorp’s flatland sensitivities. His hair and nails were growing, too, growing quickly it seemed, because a fringe of hair kept overlapping the edges of the ears; and he frequently sat, a white cape wrapped around him, in the adjustable chair in the barber shop on the main street of Dorf and had his hair cut—he was forever sitting there, it seemed. Or rather, when Hans Castorp sat there and chatted away with the fawning barber deftly doing his work, after time had done its, or when he stood at his balcony door and cut his nails with the shears and file he had taken from a pretty velvet etui, he was suddenly overcome with the old dizziness that was mixed with a scary sense of curious delight, an ambiguous dizziness that made him feel not only unsteady, but also beguiled by his whirling inability to differentiate between “still” and “again,” out of whose blurred jumble emerge the timeless “always” and “ever.”

We have often declared that we do not wish to make him any better or any worse than he was, and so we do not want to hide the fact that he frequently took countermeasures to try to atone for the reprehensible pleasure he found in mystic disturbances that he quite consciously and intentionally elicited himself. He would sit, his watch open in his hand—his flat, smooth gold pocket watch with his monogram engraved on its spring case—and look down at its round porcelain surface encircled with a double row of black and red Arabic numerals, at the two splendid delicately ornamented golden hands spreading in different directions, and at the slender second hand busily pecking its way around its own special circle. Hans Castorp would gaze steadily at it, trying to slow and expand a few minutes, to hold time by the tail. The little hand tripped along paying no heed to the numerals as it came up on them, touched and passed them, left them behind, far behind, and returned to come up on them again. It had no sense of goals, segments, measurements. It could have stopped at the 60 for a moment or at least given some tiny signal that something had been accomplished. But from the way it quickly moved past it, treating it no differently than any unnumbered mark, it was evident that the whole set of numerals and strokes had only been
laid under
its path, and that it just kept going, and going. And so Hans Castorp would slip this product of the jeweler’s art back into his vest pocket and let time take care of itself.

How can we help principled flatlanders understand the changes taking place in our young adventurer’s interior economy? The scope of his dizzying equations grew. Where previously, by yielding just slightly, he had not found it easy to separate the “now” of today from that of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or the day before that, when all were alike as peas in a pod, of late that same “now” was apt, even likely, to muddle its present with a present that had prevailed a month or a year before, and to fuse into an “always.” But since his moral states of consciousness kept “still,” “again,” and “next” separate to some extent, the temptation grew to expand relational terms like “yesterday” and “tomorrow”—words by which “today” holds the past and the future at arm’s length—and to apply them to still larger contexts. It is not difficult to imagine creatures, on smaller planets perhaps, who administer a miniaturized time and for whose “short” life the nimble, mincing steps of our second hand possess the dogged spatial frugality of an hour hand. But it is also possible to imagine creatures whose space requires time to move at a pace so monumental that in their experience our terms for describing intervals like “just now” and “in a bit” acquire the vastly expanded meaning of “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” That would be, we repeat, not only possible, but when viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativism a la “when in Rome,” it might also be considered legitimate, healthy, and respectable. But what should one think of a son of this earth—at an age, moreover, when a day, a week, a month, a semester should play an important role in life and bring a great many changes and much progress—who one day acquires the disgraceful habit, or at least yields occasionally to the pleasure, of saying “yesterday” for “a year ago” and “tomorrow” for “a year from now”? There is no doubt that it would be appropriate to judge him as “lost and confused” and worthy of our gravest concern.

There are situations in life on earth, or circumstances of landscape (if one can speak of “landscape” in this case), in which a confusion and obliteration of temporal and spatial distances, ending in total dizzying monotony, is more or less natural and legitimate, so that immersion into its magic during a vacation, for instance, might likewise be considered legitimate. We are talking about a stroll by the shore—a state of being for which Hans Castorp always felt a great partiality; and, as we know, he gratefully enjoyed thinking of life in the snow as reminiscent of the rolling dunes of his homeland. We assume that our reader’s experiences and memories will join us as we expand on this marvelous state of lostness. You walk and walk, and you never get back home on time, because you are lost to time and it to you. O sea—we sit here telling our story far from you, but our eyes and heart turn toward you now, and we explicitly invoke you, speak your name aloud, making you as present as you constantly have been, are, always will be, in our silent thoughts . . .Blustering wasteland, spanned by pale, bright gray, drenched with a dry, salty tang that clings to our lips. We walk and walk along the light springy beach strewn with seaweed and tiny shells, our ears swathed by the wind, by the great, ample, mild wind that passes freely through space, unencumbered and without malice, filling our heads with a gentle numbness—we wander, wander and watch the roiling sea send tongues of onrushing foam to lick our feet and fall back again. The surf seethes, wave upon silken wave crashes with a bright thud against the level beach—here, there, on sandbars farther out. And the universal turmoil, the tenderly booming din closes our ears against every other voice in the world. Profound contentment, knowing forgetfulness. Sheltered in eternity, let us close our eyes. No, look, there in the foamy gray-green expanse as it loses itself, diminishing vastly against the horizon, there is a sail. There? What sort of there? How far? How near? You do not know. It dizzyingly evades all certainty. To say how far the boat is from the shore you would have to know its size. Small and near, or large and distant? And in your ignorance, your gaze falters, for no organ, no internal sense, can tell you for sure. We walk and walk—how long has it been now? How far? It does not matter. And at every step, nothing changes—“there” is “here,” “before” is both “now” and “then.” Time drowns in the unmeasured monotony of space. Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time.

The scholastics of the Middle Ages claimed to know that time is an illusion, its flow toward objective consequences due solely to our sensory apparatus, and that the true state of things is a permanent now. Was he walking by the sea, that professor who was first struck by this notion, the faint bitter taste of eternity on his lips? In any case, we repeat that we are speaking of vacation scenes, of fantasies in moments of leisure, of which the moral intellect quickly has its fill, like a vigorous man who has rested long enough in the warm sand. For us to criticize the methods and forms by which human beings come to know things, to question their validity per se, would be absurd, dishonorable, antagonistic, if we did so for any other purpose than to point out those limits to reason that reason can never overstep without being guilty of neglecting its own tasks. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settembrini for characterizing metaphysics as “evil” as he once did when speaking, with his usual pedagogic decisiveness, to the young man with whose fate we are concerned and whom on one occasion he very aptly called a “problem child of life.” And we can best honor the memory of a young man, who though departed is still dear to us, by saying that the critical principle can and must have only one meaning, purpose, and goal: the idea of duty, the command given by life itself. Yes, when law-giving wisdom critically staked out the limits of reason, it also planted the flag of life at those same boundaries and proclaimed that it is man’s soldierly duty to serve beneath that banner. But Hans Castorp’s military cousin had been a “zealot”—as a melancholic show-off once said—and that had led to a fatal outcome. Might we perhaps find some excuse for our young hero’s behavior in assuming that such an outcome encouraged him in his disgraceful management of time, in his wicked dawdling with eternity?

Mynheer Peeperkorn, an elderly Dutchman, had for some time been a guest of the Sanatorium Berghof, which quite rightly appended the adjective “international” to its name. Peeperkorn’s nationality and color—for he was a colonial Dutchman, a man from Java, a coffee-planter—would hardly be an incentive, or better, would not of itself be sufficient cause for us to introduce Pieter Peeperkorn (for that was what he called himself, saying, “Pieter Peeperkorn will now regale himself with a schnapps”) at this late juncture in our story; for, good Lord, what shades and hues were not to be found in the society of the successful institution under the medical management of
Hofrat
Doctor Behrens, that polyglot of the idiomatic phrase. An Egyptian princess, for instance, had also recently become a guest, the same woman who had once given the director his remarkable coffee service and those sphinx cigarettes, a sensational lady with heavily ringed, nicotine-stained fingers and bobbed hair, who except for the main meal of the day, for which she dressed in finest Parisian fashion, went about clad in a man’s jacket and pleated trousers, but otherwise wanted nothing to do with men and devoted her equally indolent and fierce favors exclusively to a Jewish woman from Romania, with the very plain name of Frau Landauer, even though Prosecutor Paravant was so taken by Her Royal Highness that he neglected his mathematics and practically played the fool for love; and not only was there the lady herself, but included in her small retinue was a castrated Moor, a sickly, frail fellow, who despite his fundamental defect, which Karoline Stöhr loved to deride, clung more tightly to life than anyone else and proved inconsolable when presented with the picture taken of the interior that lay beneath his dusky skin.