The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  The waves of the ocean of time, in their eternal monotone rhythm, washed Easter ashore, and the Berghof celebrated it, just as it took note of all time’s stages and turning points in order to avoid undifferentiated tedium. At early breakfast, each guest found a nosegay of violets beside his place setting; at second breakfast, a dyed egg; and at the festive dinner, a little chocolate rabbit decorated with sugar.

  “Have you ever taken an ocean voyage, tenente—or you, my good engineer?” Herr Settembrini asked, stepping up to the cousins’ table after the meal, his toothpick in his mouth. Like most of the guests, they were shaving fifteen minutes from the main rest cure by lingering over coffee and cognac. “These rabbits and dyed eggs remind me of life on a great steamer, when for weeks on end you stare at an empty horizon and a briny desert, under conditions of deluxe comfort that only superficially help you forget the enormity of the situation, an awareness of which lives on as a secret horror gnawing in the deeper regions of your mind. I recognize today’s mood; it is the same mood that reigns when the holidays of terra firma are religiously observed on those great arks—as reminders of a world outside, nostalgia as per calendar. Today would be Easter on terra firma, right? Today’s the king’s birthday on terra firma—and so we celebrate it, too, as best we can, we’re only human. Isn’t that right?”

  The cousins agreed. It really was true. Touched by having been spoken to and spurred on by his own bad conscience, Hans Castorp had high praise for these sentiments, found them witty, choice, and literary, and made every effort to say what he thought Herr Settembrini wanted to hear. To be sure, just as Herr Settembrini had put it so graphically, the comforts on an ocean liner allowed one only superficially to forget the real situation and its dangers, and there was, if he might be permitted to add a comment of his own, even a kind of frivolous provocation about that perfect comfort, somewhat like what the ancients called hubris (in his desire to please, he was even citing the classics)—“I am the king of Babylon,” and that sort of thing—in a word, sacrilege. On the other hand, however, the luxury on board manifested (“manifested”!) a great triumph of the human spirit and human dignity—for in bearing luxury and comfort out onto the briny, foamy deep and boldly maintaining it there, man was, so to speak, setting his boot on the neck of the elements, of savage forces, and that manifested the triumph of human civilization over chaos, if he might be permitted the phrase.

  Herr Settembrini listened attentively, his ankles crossed, his arms ditto, all the while daintily stroking the sweep of his moustache with his toothpick. “It is remarkable,” he said, “how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in an allegory the basic themes and problems of his life. The same thing has just happened with you, my good engineer. What you just said came from the very depths of your personality, and even the present state of your personality found poetic expression. And as before, it is the experimental state.”

  “Placet experiri!” Hans Castorp said nodding and laughing—and with a soft Italian c.

  “Sicuro—when it is a matter of a respectable passion to explore the world and not a matter of depravity. You spoke of ‘hubris,’ used that very word. But the hubris of reason set against the dark powers is the highest form of humanity, and as such it evokes the rage of the envious gods; per esempio, when such a luxury ark founders and plummets to the depths, that is a downfall with honor. Prometheus’s deed was one of hubris as well, and his torments on the Scythian cliffs are for us a sacred martyrdom. But what about the other kind of hubris, when a man perishes in wanton experiments with the powers of unreason, with forces hostile to the human race? Is there honor in that? Can that ever be honorable? Sì o no!”

  Hans Castorp stirred his spoon in his cup, although there was nothing in it.

  “My good engineer, my good engineer,” the Italian said, bending his head forward thoughtfully and letting his black eyes “set.” “Are you not afraid of the second circle of hell and the cyclone that tosses and whirls the sinners of the flesh about, those unhappy souls who sacrificed reason for lust? Gran Dio, when I picture you being blown and blasted about, tumbling head over heels, it worries me until I could simply topple over myself, like a tumbling corpse.”

  They laughed, happy to hear him joking and speaking poetically. But then Settembrini added, “Over a glass of wine, on the evening of Mardi Gras, my good engineer, you will recall that you more or less took your leave of me—yes, it was very like a good-bye. And so today it is now my turn. You see me standing here before you, gentlemen, about to say my farewells. I am leaving the sanatorium.”

  They were both totally taken aback.

  “It’s not possible! You’re joking!” Hans Castorp cried, just as he had on another, similar occasion. He was almost as shocked as he had been then.

  But Settembrini replied, “Most certainly not. It is just as I’ve said. Nor should you be all that surprised by my news. I’ve already explained to you that the moment my hopes of being able to return to the world of work in the foreseeable future should prove untenable, I was determined to fold my tents here and set myself up for the duration somewhere else in the valley. Well, what would you have me do? The moment has come. I cannot get well, that is settled. I can eke out an existence here—but only here. My sentence, my final sentence has been spoken—and it is life. It has been pronounced by Director Behrens, in that special cheerful way of his. Fine, then I shall accept the consequences. I have rented lodgings, and my few worldly goods and the tools of my literary trade are about to be transported there. It’s in Dorf, not very far from here at all. We’re sure to meet, I’ll not lose sight of you. But as your fellow resident, I now take my leave of you.”

  This was Settembrini’s Easter disclosure. The cousins were plainly extraordinarily moved by it all. They spoke repeatedly and at length with the literary man about his decision: whether he would be able to follow the rules of rest cure on his own; how he would continue the complex, encyclopedic task he had taken upon himself—that survey of literary masterpieces from the perspective of human sufferings and their eradication; and finally, about his future quarters in a building belonging to a “retailer of foodstuffs,” as Herr Settembrini put it. The retailer, he reported, had rented the upper floors of his property to a Bohemian ladies’ tailor, who was now subletting some of the space.

  But these conversations now lay in the past. Time had swept onward, bringing forth more than one change. No longer a resident of the International Sanatorium Berghof, Settembrini had been living with Lukaček, the ladies’ tailor, for several weeks. His departure had not been by sleigh, but on foot. Wearing his short yellow overcoat, with a bit of fur trim at the collar and sleeves, and accompanied by a man who transported the writer’s earthly and literary baggage in a wheelbarrow, he had been seen walking off, swinging his cane—but only after first stopping at the front door to give a dining attendant’s cheek a little pinch with the backs of two fingers. As noted, a good part of April, three-quarters of it, already lay in the shadows of the past, but it was still deepest winter, with room temperatures of barely forty-two degrees each morning, and of twelve degrees outside; and if you left an inkwell out on the balcony overnight, it would be a clump of ice the next morning, a piece of hard coal. But spring was coming, they knew that; on days when the sun shone, there was an occasional, gentle hint of it in the air. Longer periods of thaw could be expected soon, and with them would come inevitable changes at the Berghof—changes that not even the authority of the director’s word could hold back, although every day, in the dining hall, in patients’ rooms, at every checkup, at every meal, he vigorously combated the prejudice that prevailed against the season of thaw.

  Was he dealing with winter athletes, he asked, or patients, people who were ill? Why in the world did they have to have snow, frozen snow? The coming period of thaw, an unhealthy season? It was the healthiest of all. It could be
proven that during thaw there were relatively fewer bedridden patients throughout the valley than during any other time. At this point in the year, the weather everywhere else in the world was worse for patients with lung disease. Anyone with a scintilla of common sense would remain here and make good use of the bracing effects of local conditions. After that, a person would be immune to the effects of any climate anywhere, could stand firm against every onslaught—provided, of course, he waited for healing to take hold completely, and so forth. But that was easy for the director to say—the prejudice against the thaw was firmly entrenched in their minds, and the resort was emptying out. It may well have been that approaching spring was stirring in their bones and making even sedentary folk restless and eager for change—in any case the number of “wild” and “fraudulent” departures from the Berghof was increasing to acute levels. Frau Salomon from Amsterdam, for example—despite the pleasure she took in checkups that allowed her to show off her best lace undergarments—departed on a totally wild and fraudulent basis, without permission of any kind, and not because she was getting better but because she was doing worse and worse. Her stay up here went back to long before Hans Castorp’s arrival; it was more than a year since she had first come here—with a slight infection for which she had been sentenced to three months. After four months she was then told she would “be cured inside of four weeks,” but six weeks later, any talk of being cured was simply out of the question—she would have to stay at least another four months. And so it went—after all, this was no prison ship, no Siberian salt mine; and Frau Salomon stayed on and used the time to show off her finest lingerie. But when, with thaw looming up ahead, she had been sentenced to an additional five months—as a result of her latest checkup, revealing a whistle in her left upper lobe and unmistakably harsh tones under her left shoulder—she lost all patience, raised loud protests, and, cursing Dorf and Platz, the famous air, the International Sanatorium Berghof, and its doctors, departed for home, for windy, wet Amsterdam.

  Was that a wise thing to do? Director Behrens threw his arms above his shoulders and let them fall, noisily slapping his thighs. By autumn at the latest, he said, Frau Salomon would be back again—but then for good. Would he be proved right? We shall see—for we are bound to this cozy resort for many earthly days yet. But Frau Salomon’s case was certainly not the only one of its kind. Time brought forth changes—just as it always had, but those changes had been more gradual, not so striking. There were gaps now in the dining hall, at all seven tables, at both the Good and Bad Russian tables, at those set both lengthwise and crosswise. One could not, however, have gained from this fact a complete picture of the hotel’s occupancy rate; there had been arrivals as well, just as at any time of the year; rooms might very well be occupied, but by guests whose freedom of movement was limited by the final stages of their condition. But in the dining hall, as we have said, some persons were missing because they still had such freedom of movement. And others left a gap, a void, much more profound—like Dr. Blumenkohl, who was dead. That look on his face, as if he had something foul-tasting in his mouth, had become more and more pronounced; then he had been confined to his bed, and then he died—no one knew exactly when; the matter was handled with customary tact and discretion. A gap. Frau Stöhr sat next to the gap, and it made her shudder. And so she moved to the other side of young Ziemssen, to the place previously belonging to Miss Robinson, who had been released as cured; across from her now was the teacher, who still sat on Hans Castorp’s left, having held faithfully to her post. She was all alone on her side of the table, where three more places were now free. Rasmussen the student, who had daily grown thinner and more listless, was now bedridden and considered moribund; and the great-aunt had gone on a trip with her niece and Marusya of the prominent breasts. We say “on a trip,” because that is what everyone said, since it was understood that they would be returning soon enough. They would be back by autumn at the latest—how could one call that a departure? And how very near Midsummer Night already was, especially with Pentecost just around the corner; and once the longest day had come and gone, the year raced downhill from there, toward winter—so that in a way the great-aunt and Marusya were as good as back again. And that was a fine thing, because laughter-loving Marusya was not cured and detoxified by any means; Fräulein Engelhart knew all about some tubercular tumors brown-eyed Marusya had on her full bosom, which had been operated on several times already. And when the teacher shared this information, Hans Castorp glanced furtively at Joachim, whose face had turned blotchy and was bent down over his plate.

  The chipper great-aunt had invited her tablemates—that is, the cousins, the teacher, and Frau Stöhr—to a farewell dinner in the restaurant, a lavish feast with caviar, champagne, and liqueurs, during which Joachim had been very quiet, speaking only a few words in almost a whisper, so that the great-aunt, being the benevolent soul she was, told him to cheer up and, suspending the rules of civilized discourse, even addressed him with informal pronouns. “Never mind, old fellow, don’t worry. Eat, drink, talk—we’ll be coming back soon,” she said. “Let us all eat, drink, and chat, and let sorrow take care of itself. God will bring autumn before we even know what’s happened. So you be the judge—is there any reason to be sad?” The next morning she gave almost everyone in the dining hall a colorful box of konfekti as a memento and then left on her little trip with the two girls.

  And Joachim, how was he doing? Did he feel liberated, was his mind easier—or did his spirit suffer great privation when he saw one whole side of the table empty? And his uncharacteristic, rebellious impatience, including his threat to carry out a wild departure of his own if they kept on leading him around by the nose—did that have anything to do with Marusya’s being gone? Or was the fact that he did not leave, at least for now, and instead lent an ear to the director’s testimonials on the thaw, traceable to full-bosomed Marusya’s not having departed for good, to her certain return after only five of the smallest units of local time? Ah, it was probably all true at once, and in equal measure. Hans Castorp could well imagine that was the case, without ever speaking to Joachim. For he refrained from mentioning anything about the matter, just as Joachim avoided the name of someone else who had departed for a while.

  But meanwhile at Settembrini’s table, who had recently taken the Italian’s place?—amid Dutch guests whose appetites were so immense that they all ordered three extra fried eggs before starting on their soup at each five-course midday meal? It was Anton Karlovitch Ferge, the man who had gone through the hell of pleural shock. Yes, Herr Ferge was up and out of bed, his condition so improved, even without pneumothorax, that he spent most of the day dressed and walking about and appeared for meals with his bushy, good-natured moustache and his prominent Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured. The cousins chatted sometimes with him in the dining hall and lobby, and, as chance dictated, took constitutionals with him now and again, for they had a soft spot in their hearts for this simple martyr, who claimed to know nothing about higher things, but once that was settled, could chat easily about the manufacture of galoshes and the far reaches of the Russian Empire—Samara, Georgia, and such—while they trudged on through fog and slush.

  The paths were really barely passable now, were simply melting away, and fogs brewed all around. To be sure, the director claimed it wasn’t fog, only clouds; but that was merely verbal chicanery in Hans Castorp’s opinion. Spring had to fight a difficult battle for months, all the way to June, with a hundred setbacks into bitterest winter. On sunny days in March, it got so hot out on the balcony that it was almost impossible to lie in a lounge chair, even with light clothes and a sunshade; and there were ladies who pretended it was already summer and appeared at first breakfast in muslin dresses. They could be excused to some extent, given the peculiar nature of the climate up here, which encouraged confusion by throwing the seasons into a meteorological jumble; but there was also a great deal of shortsightedness and lack of imagination in their impertinence
—theirs was the foolishness of creatures of the moment, incapable of thinking that things may change again, craving constant variety, and devouring time in their impatience. The date was March, it was spring, that was practically summer, and you got out your muslin dresses so that you could show them off before autumn came. Which it did, so to speak. In April, a series of gloomy, chilly, damp days set in, with steady showers that then turned to snow, flurries of new, wet snow. Fingers grew numb as you lay on the balcony—both camel-hair blankets had to be put back into service, and fur-lined sleeping bags were almost required again; management decided to turn on the heat, and people complained they had been cheated out of spring. By the end of the month, everything lay under a heavy blanket of snow; but then foehn winds set in—just as predicted by experienced, impressionable guests, who had scented it in the air: Frau Stöhr, Fräulein Levi of the ivory complexion, even the widow Hessenfeld—they were unanimous in claiming they felt it before even the smallest cloud appeared above the granite peaks to the south.Frau Hessenfeld tended to crying jags, Fräulein Levi took to her bed, and Frau Stöhr, obstinately baring her rabbitlike teeth, announced almost hourly her superstitious fear of a sudden hemorrhage, for it was said foehn winds hastened and caused such things. It was now unbelievably warm, the heat was turned off, people left balcony doors open at night and it would still be fifty-seven degrees in their rooms the next morning; the snow was melting fast—turned ice-gray, became porous and honeycombed; great drifts of it sagged now, seemed to creep back into the earth. Water seeped, trickled, dribbled everywhere—it dripped, then gushed in the forests. The shoveled piles of snow along the streets and the pallid carpets on the meadows disappeared, although the masses of white had been far too thick to vanish quickly. And the strangest things could happen—vernal surprises on a walk to the valley, things you had never seen before, straight out of a fairy tale. Before you lay a wide meadow—the snow-clad cone of Schwarzhorn towered in the background, the snowbound Scaletta Glacier just to its right, and even the wider terrain, with its hayshed hidden somewhere, still lay under a cover of snow, though it was thin and sparse now, interrupted here and there by rough, dark mounds of earth, with tufts of dry grasses sticking up everywhere. But that meadow there, the cousins noticed—what a peculiar sort of snow-cover it had: thicker farther back up near the wooded slope, but nearer in the foreground, where the grass was discolored and ravaged by winter, there was only a sprinkling of snow, like polka dots, like little flowers. They took a closer look, bent down in astonishment—that wasn’t snow, those were flowers, snowdrops, blossoming snow, no doubt of it, little chalices on short stems, white or whitish-blue, a kind of crocus, millions of them, growing so thick you could easily have taken them for snow, into which they blended indiscernibly.