The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  The deepest lust?

  The deepest.

  Lips were pursed. Hans Castorp gave a little cough. Wehsal had set his jaw askew. Herr Ferge sighed.

  Settembrini responded with a subtle remark: “It seems some generalizations reflect on the person making them. You feel a desire to kill, do you?”

  “That’s no business of yours. If I did, however, I would laugh right in the face of any ignorant humanitarian who tried to keep me on a diet of pap until I died in my bed. It is nonsense, of course, for a murderer to outlive his victim. The two of them, eye to eye, are alone together in a way that two people are alone in only one other similar circumstance, the one receptive, the other active—and they share a secret that will unite them forever. They belong together.”

  Settembrini confessed coolly that he lacked the requisite organ for this murderous mysticism and that he did not miss it at all. Not that he was denigrating Herr Naphta’s religious talents—they doubtless exceeded his own—he was merely admitting a lack of envy. He felt an insurmountable need for tidiness that kept him out of that realm where a reverence for human misery—as experimental youth had put it earlier—reigned, not only in a physical but also in a psychological sense, a realm where, in short, virtue, reason, and health meant nothing, but where vice and illness were held in extraordinary honor.

  Naphta agreed that virtue and health were not part of the religious condition. Much would be gained by making it clear that religion had absolutely nothing to do with reason and morality. For, he added, religion had nothing to do with life. Life was based on conditions and principles that belonged in part to epistemology and in part to ethics—the former being time, space, and causality; the latter, morality and reason. All such matters were not only foreign and of no significance to religion as such, but also inimical to it; for they were the constituents of life, or so-called health, which was to say, ultraphilistine, utter bourgeois existence—to which the religious world was ordained to be the absolute opposite, indeed the very genius of opposition. Not that he, Naphta, would want to deny the possibility of a certain genius in the sphere of life. There was a “bourgeoisiosity” of life, whose monumental genius was indisputable, a philistine majesty, which one might well consider worthy of respect, as long as one realized that as it stood there in all its dignity, legs astraddle, hands at its back, chest thrust forward, it was the incarnation of irreligiosity.

  Hans Castorp raised a schoolboy forefinger. He did not wish to offend either side, he said, but apparently the subject had now turned to progress, to human progress, and so in a certain sense to politics, the republic of eloquence, the civilization of the educated West; and in that regard he would like to say that the difference, or if Herr Naphta preferred, the opposition between life and religion could be traced to that between time and eternity. Because progress occurred only within time; there was no progress in eternity, no politics or eloquence, either. There one laid one’s head back onto God, so to speak, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the difference between religion and morality—though put in a rather confused fashion.

  The naiveté of his words, Settembrini said, was less problematic than his fear of giving offense and his tendency to make concessions to the Devil.

  Well, as far as the Devil went, he and Herr Settembrini had discussed him over a year ago. “O Satana, O ribellione!” To which Devil was he making concessions, then? The one involved with rebellion, labor, and criticism, or the other one? You were taking your life in your hands—a Devil on the right, a Devil on the left, how in the hell were you supposed to survive?

  That was not a proper characterization, Naphta said, of the way Herr Settembrini wished to see things. The decisive factor in the humanist’s view of the world was that God and the Devil were two different persons or principles and that “life” was the bone of contention between them—very much after the medieval model, by the way. In reality, however, they were one, were united in their opposition to life, to the bourgeoisiosity of life, to ethics, reason, virtue; they were the single religious principle that they represented together.

  “What a revolting hodgepodge—che guazzabuglio proprio stomachevole!” Settembrini cried. God and evil, the holy and the criminal all jumbled together. No judgment, no will, no capacity to reject what was vile. He wondered if Herr Naphta knew just what he was repudiating—and with young people listening—by jumbling up God and the Devil and denying the ethical principle in the name of his depraved Holy Duality. He was repudiating—it made him sick to say it—values, every standard of value. Fine—good and evil did not exist, only a morally chaotic void. The individual, in all the dignity of his critical faculties, did not exist, just an all-devouring, all-leveling community, and a mystical submersion in it. The individual—

  How charming—Herr Settembrini was back to calling himself an individualist. To be that, however, one needed to know the difference between morality and blessedness, which the gentleman, as a good illuminatus and monist, most certainly did not. Wherever life was stupidly regarded as an end in itself, with no questions asked about a meaning or purpose beyond it, what one found were social ethics, species ethics, vertebrate ethics, but not individualism—that resided solely in the realm of the religious and mystical, in that so-called chaotic void. Just what was Herr Settembrini’s morality, what was its point? It was bound to life, and so merely utilitarian—unheroic, miserably so. Its sole objective was for a person to grow old, rich, happy, and healthy—period; he considered a philistine gospel of reason and work to be ethics. But as far as he, Naphta, was concerned, he once again took the liberty of calling that a shabby bourgeoisiosity of life.

  Settembrini begged for moderation here, although his voice was filled with passion, because he found it intolerable that Herr Naphta kept talking about the “bourgeoisiosity of life” in such a—God only knew why—disdainful, aristocratic tone, as if the opposite—and everyone knew what the opposite of life was—was somehow more noble.

  More new catchwords. Now the issue was nobility, aristocracy. Hans Castorp, flushed and weary from the frosty air and all these uncertainties, his mind reeling as he wondered whether the way he was putting things was too feverishly daring or even comprehensible, admitted haltingly that he had always imagined death wearing a starched Spanish ruff, or at least in some sort of semi-uniform with a high stiff collar, whereas life always wore a little, normal, modern collar. And then aghast at his own social blunder, at the drunken dreaminess of his words, he assured them that was not what he had meant to say. But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.

  Herr Settembrini hoped he was not wrong in assuming that Hans Castorp had made such a remark merely so that it could be contradicted. The young man would always find him ready to assist intellectually in warding off such assaults. “Fit for life,” had he said? And had used the term in a pejorative sense? “Worthy of life”—that was the term he should have used instead. And then his thoughts would order themselves in a true and beautiful manner. “Worthy of life”—and at once, by means of the simplest, most legitimate sort of association, one was reminded of the term “worthy of love,” which was so intimately related to the former that one could say that whatever was worthy of life was truly worthy of love. And joined together, the two terms—“worthy of love” and “worthy of life”—became what one called noble.

  Hans Castorp found that charming, well worth listening to. Herr Settembrini had won him over entirely with his graphic theory. Because say what one might, what one would—and several things might be said, for example that illness was a higher level of life and so possessed a kind of solemnity—this much was certain: illness meant an overemphasis on the physical, sent a person back to his own body, cast him back totally upon it, as it were, detracted from the worthiness and dignit
y of man to the point of annihilation by reducing man to mere body. Illness, therefore, was inhuman.

  Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill. Indeed, man was ill by nature, his illness was what made him human, and whoever sought to make him healthy and attempted to get him to make peace with nature, to “return to nature” (whereas he had never been natural), that whole pack of Rousseauian prophets—regenerators, vegetarians, fresh-air freaks, sunbath apostles, and so forth—wanted nothing more than to dehumanize man and turn him into an animal. Humanity? Nobility? The Spirit was what distinguished man—a creature set very much apart from nature, with feelings very much contrary to nature—from the rest of organic life. Therefore, the dignity and nobility of man was based in the Spirit, in illness. In a word, the more ill a man was the more highly human he was, and the genius of illness was more human than that of health. It was astonishing how someone who played the philanthropist could close his eyes to such basic truths of humanity. Herr Settembrini was forever going on about progress. As if progress, to the extent such a thing existed, was not due solely to illness, or better, to creative genius, which was one and the same thing as illness. As if those who were healthy had not always lived from the achievements of illness. There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind—and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice, its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness. That was the true death on the cross.

  “Aha,” Hans Castorp said to himself, “you improper Jesuit with your permutations and interpretations of the crucifixion. It’s clear enough why you did not became a priest, a handsome Jesuit with a little moist spot! Well, lion, roar,” he thought, turning toward Herr Settembrini. And “roar” he did, declaring everything Naphta had said to be chicanery, humbug, confusion. “Admit it,” he shouted at his adversary, “admit it, by your responsibility as a pedagogue, confess it before the ears of impressionable youth, say it straight out: your Spirit is illness. No doubt of it, that will rouse them for your Spirit, that will win them to the faith. Go ahead and explain how illness and death are noble, but health and life are sordid—that’s the surest method for engaging these pupils in the service of humanity. Davvero, è criminoso!” And like a knight entering the lists, he championed the nobility of health and life, the nobility that had been granted by nature and did not need to fear Spirit. “Form!” he said. And Naphta grandiloquently responded, “Logos!” But he who would not hear of the logos, said, “Reason!” And the man of the logos defended “Passion!” Confusion reigned. “Objective reality,” shouted one; “The self!” cried the other. Finally one side was talking about “Art!” and the other about “Criticism!” And both constantly returned to “Nature!” and “Spirit!” and to which of them was more noble, and to the issue of “true aristocracy.” But there was no clarity, no order, not even of a dualistic and militant sort; for it was all not only contradictory, but also topsy-turvy, and the disputants not only contradicted one another, but also themselves. Settembrini had frequently sung the oratorical praises of “criticism,” but now it was its opposite—which he called “art”—that he claimed was the more noble principle. And although Naphta had frequently stepped forward as the defender of “natural instinct” against Settembrini’s contention that nature was merely a “dumb power,” a brutal fact, a stroke of fate, to which reason and human pride dared not submit, he now took up his position on the side of the Spirit and of “illness,” for there alone were to be found nobility and humanity. Settembrini, meanwhile, had become the advocate of nature and its nobility of health, ignoring any previous notions of emancipation. And matters were no less confusing when it came to “objective reality” and the “self”—indeed, the confusion here, which was in fact always the same confusion, was so hopeless and literally confused that no one knew any longer who was the devout soul and who the freethinker. In caustic words, Naphta forbade Herr Settembrini to call himself an “individualist,” because he denied the polarity of God and nature and defined the question of humanity, the problem of man’s interior conflict, as simply the conflict between the individual and larger social units, and so was wedded to a bourgeois morality that was tied to life, understood life as an end in itself, saw its sole purpose in unheroic utility, and viewed all moral law as invested in the state; whereas he, Naphta—well aware that mankind’s inner conflict was based instead on the contradiction between what the senses register and what transcends the senses—represented true, mystical individualism and was in actuality the genuine man of freedom and subjectivity. But if that was the case, Hans Castorp thought, how did that square with “anonymous and communal”—just to select one of the many contradictions? Or, going one step farther, with those striking remarks to which Naphta had treated Pater Unterpertinger in their colloquy about Hegel and the “Catholicity” of that state philosopher, about how “politics” and “Catholicism” were psychologically related and formed a single objective reality? Had not education and statecraft always been the special domain of Naphta’s order? And what an education that was! Herr Settembrini was certainly a zealous pedagogue, zealous to the point of being a tiresome bother; but his principles could not approach Naphta’s when it came to ascetic, self-mortifying objectivity. Absolute authority! An ironclad bond! Coercion! Obedience! Terror! There might be something to it, but it showed very little consideration for the dignity of the individual and his critical faculties. It was a drill book written by Frederick the Prussian and Loyola the Spaniard, so devout and strict that it drew blood—leaving only one question: how did Naphta actually achieve such bloody, unconditional certainty, since he admitted he did not believe in pure knowledge as such, in unbiased research, in short, not even in truth, in objective, scientific truth, the search for which formed the highest law of all human morality for Lodovico Settembrini. In that regard, it was Herr Settembrini who was pious and strict, and Naphta who was lax and slovenly, referring truth back to man and declaring that whatever profited man was true. To make truth that dependent on man’s own interests—was that not itself philistine utilitarianism, a bourgeoisiosity of life? So that you really could not call it ironclad objectivity; there was more freedom and subjectivity to it than Leo Naphta would have been willing to admit—it was in its own way just as “political” as Herr Settembrini’s didactic statement that freedom was the law of brotherly love. And that clearly meant that his freedom, like Naphta’s truth, was tied to just one thing: man. But that made it decidedly more devout than free—yet another juxtaposition of terms that tended to slip away when you began defining things. Oh, this Settembrini! It was not for nothing that he was a man of letters—the grandson of a politician and the son of a humanist. He was so noble-minded about the beauties of emancipation and criticism—and hummed little tunes at girls on the street. And then there was caustic little Naphta, who was bound to strict vows—and such a freethinker that he came close to being a libertine himself, making the Italian look like the dupe of virtue, so to speak. Herr Settembrini was afraid of the “absolute Spirit,” wanted to restrict “spirit” to democratic progress, and nothing else—was horrified by militant Naphta’s religious licentiousness, which made a jumble of God and the Devil, the holy and the criminal, genius and illness, which recognized no values, no judgments of reason, no will. Who, then, was actually free, who was devout? What constituted man’s true state and condition: obliteration in all-devouring, all-leveling community, which was a simultaneously voluptuous and ascetic act; or “critical subjectivity, “ where bombast and strict bourgeois virtue were at loggerheads? Ah, principles and viewpoints were constantly at loggerheads, there was no lack of inner contradictions, making it all extraordinarily difficult for a civilian to exercise responsibility, not merely to decide between opposites, but also to keep them apart as neat, separate specimens—until a civilian was sorely tempted to plunge headlong into Naphta�
�s “morally chaotic void.” Everything was intertwined and at cross-purposes, a great general confusion—and Hans Castorp thought he saw that the disputants would have been less embittered, if during their dispute each had not been the harasser of his own soul.

  They had walked together all the way to the Berghof; and then the three who lived there accompanied the other two back to their little house, where they all stood outside in the snow for a long time while Naphta and Settembrini continued their argument—for pedagogic purposes, as Hans Castorp well knew, in order to shape the impressionable minds of youth in search of light. All these things were much too high for Herr Ferge, however, and Wehsal proved less interested once the subject was no longer flogging or torture. Hans Castorp probed the snow with his cane, hung his head, and pondered the great confusion.

  At last they parted. They could not stand there forever—and their subject was boundless. The three Berghof residents turned homeward, and the two pedagogic rivals were forced to enter their little house, the one climbing to his silken cell, the other to his humanist’s garret with its lectern and water carafe. Hans Castorp, however, retired to his balcony—his ears full of the hubbub and alarums of two armies, one from Jerusalem, the other from Babylon, advancing under the dos banderas and joining now in the confused tumult of battle.

  SNOW

  Five times a day, the diners at all seven tables expressed unanimous dissatisfaction with this year’s winter. They were of the opinion that it was very negligent in fulfilling its duties as an Alpine winter and had failed to provide the meteorological medicine for which these regions were famous, in the quantities promised by the brochure, familiar to long-termers, and envisioned by newcomers. A massive deficit in sunlight—a significant factor in the cure—was noted; without those helpful rays, recuperation was doubtless retarded. And whatever Herr Settembrini might think of the sincerity with which these mountain guests went about getting well so that they could leave “home” and return to the flatlands, they did at any rate demand their rights, wanted full value for the money spent by their parents or spouses; and so they grumbled in the dining hall, the elevator, and the lobby. And management proved quite sensible about accommodating its guests and compensating for their losses. Another apparatus for “artificial sunlight” was purchased, since the two in service could not meet the demands of those who expected electricity to help them get a tan—a color that flattered the young girls and women and gave the men a splendidly, irresistibly athletic look despite their horizontal lifestyle. That look reaped its rewards in reality, too; the women, although fully aware of the purely cosmetic and technical origin of such virility, were foolish—or hardened—enough that they gladly chose to be deceived, to be carried away by the illusion, to let it capture their feminine hearts. “My God,” a red-haired, red-eyed patient from Berlin remarked one evening in the lobby. It was Frau Schönfeld, and she was speaking about a cavalier with long legs and a sunken chest—he had already undergone pneumothorax—whose calling card read “Aviateur diplômé et Enseigne de la Marine allemande” and who always appeared at dinner in formal dress, though never at supper, as per navy regulations, or so he claimed. “My God,” she said, voraciously eyeing the ensign, “what a marvelous tan the fellow has from the sunlamp. Looks as if he’s been out hunting eagles, the devil does.” And in the elevator he gave her goose bumps, bending down to her ear and whispering, “Just wait, you nymph! You’ll pay for that devastating glance you shot my way!” And skirting the glass panels of balconies, the devil and eagle-hunter found his way to the nymph.