by Thomas Mann
“What a pretty mess,” Hans Castorp said. Dressed in his winter overcoat and galoshes, he was walking down into town with his cousin to buy some blankets for his rest cure, because it was obvious that in this weather his old plaid one would not suffice. He even briefly considered whether he ought not to buy a sleeping bag, but backed off from that—indeed felt somewhat frightened by the idea.
“No, no,” he said, “we’ll just stick to blankets. I’ll find some use for them again down below—people have blankets everywhere. There’s nothing so special or sensational about blankets. But a fur-lined sleeping bag is much too distinctive—you see what I mean? I’d feel as if I were planning to make myself at home here for good, as if I’d become one of you, so to speak. So then, I’ll not say anything more about it, except that there would be absolutely no point in my buying a sleeping bag for just these few weeks.”
Joachim agreed, and so they found a lovely, well-stocked shop in the English quarter, where they purchased two camel-hair blankets like the ones Joachim had—extra long and wide, in a natural beige fabric that was delightfully soft to the touch. They left orders for them to be delivered to the sanatorium at once: International Sanatorium Berghof, Room 34. Hans Castorp intended to put them to use for the first time that afternoon.
This occurred, of course, after second breakfast, because that was the only opportunity the schedule offered for going down into town. It was raining now, and the snow on the streets had turned to slush that splashed up on them. On the way home, they caught up with Settembrini, who was also headed for the sanatorium; although bareheaded, he was carrying an umbrella. The Italian looked yellow somehow, and was evidently in an elegiac mood. In exquisite, perfectly enunciated words, he deplored the cold and damp, which were a bitter affliction for him. If only they would heat the rooms. But their wretched overseers let the fire go out the moment it stopped snowing—an idiotic rule that mocked all reason. And when Hans Castorp objected that he assumed a lowered room temperature was part of the regimen for the cure and presumably a way of keeping the patients from getting too spoiled, Settembrini responded with fierce scorn. Ah yes, indeed. The cure regimen—the exalted and inviolable rules. Hans Castorp had indeed adopted the right tone in speaking of them—that of religious submission. It was, however, striking—in the best sense of the word—that precisely those rules that corresponded exactly to their overseers’ economic interests enjoyed unconditional veneration, whereas rules for which said correspondence was less applicable were more likely to be winked at. And while the cousins laughed, Settembrini moved on from the topic of the warmth for which he so yearned, to the subject of his deceased father.
“My father,” he said, protracting the words with relish, “was such a refined man, sensitive equally in body and soul! How he loved his warm little study in winter, loved it with all his heart, and demanded that the temperature be kept at a constant seventy-seven degrees, by means of a little stove that glowed warm and red. And on cold damp days, or those on which the biting tramontana was blowing, one would enter the room from the hallway of his cottage—and warmth draped itself about one’s shoulders like a soft cape, and one’s eyes filled with happy tears. His study was crammed full with books and manuscripts, rarest treasures among them; there he stood dressed in his blue flannel dressing gown, behind a little lectern, and amid all those intellectual riches, he abandoned himself to literature. A short, slight man, a good head shorter even than I, just imagine! With great tufts of gray hair at his temples—and with a long, finely chiseled nose. What a scholar of Romance letters, gentlemen. One of the finest of the age, a master of our tongue, few could match him, and a stylist in Latin, the like of which there is none today, a uomo letterato to warm Boccaccio’s heart. Learned men came from far and wide to consult with him, from Haparanda and from Krakow, expressly to visit Padua, our town, and pay their respects—and were received with cordial dignity. He was likewise a poet of distinction, who in his leisure hours penned narratives in the most elegant Tuscan prose—a virtuoso in the idioma gentile,” Settembrini said, rocking his head back and forth and taking utmost pleasure in letting the native syllables melt on his tongue. “He designed his little garden after Virgil’s models,” he continued, “and his words were robust and beautiful. But it had to be warm, warm in his study, otherwise he would shiver and could weep tears of rage if anyone allowed him to freeze. And now just imagine, my good engineer, and you my fine lieutenant, what I, the son of such a father, must suffer in this damnable and barbaric place, where my body shivers with cold at the height of summer, even as my soul is constantly tortured by debasing sights. Ah, it is hard, surrounded by such creatures. Our director, the Hofrat, a buffoon, an imp of Satan. And Krokowski”—and Settembrini pretended the name was a tongue twister—“Krokowski, our shameless father confessor, who hates me because my dignity as a man will not permit me to subject myself to his monkish excesses. And then at my table—the society in which I am forced to dine! To my right sits a brewer from Halle, Magnus is his name, with a moustache like a wisp of straw. ‘You can forget the literature,’ he says. ‘What’s in it for me? Beautiful characters. What am I supposed to do with beautiful characters? I’m a practical man, and beautiful characters almost never occur in real life.’ That’s his notion of literature. Beautiful characters . . . O Mother of God! His wife sits across from him, sits there and wastes away, losing protein and sinking deeper and deeper into dim-wittedness. It is a filthy, wretched state of affairs . . .”
Without exchanging a word or a sign, Joachim and Hans Castorp were in complete agreement about this little speech: they found it petulant and unsettlingly seditious—but entertaining as well, of course, indeed edifying in its brazen rebelliousness. Hans Castorp laughed genially at the “wisp of straw,” and at the bit about “beautiful characters,” too, or rather, at the droll, despondent way Settembrini related it.
And then he said, “Good Lord, yes, it is a rather mixed society at our establishment here. One cannot choose one’s tablemates—goodness knows what that would lead to. There’s a lady like that at our table, too—Frau Stöhr, I presume you know her, don’t you? She’s gruesomely ignorant, I must say, and sometimes one doesn’t know where to look when she’s babbling on like that. And she complains constantly about her temperature, and that she’s so listless, and unfortunately it’s probably a rather serious case. That is so strange—sick and stupid. I don’t know whether I’m putting it quite right, but it seems to me very peculiar for someone to be stupid and sick besides, and when the two are joined it’s surely the most pitiful thing in the world. One absolutely doesn’t know what sort of face to put on, because for someone who’s ill one wants to express a certain seriousness and deference, doesn’t one? Illness has something more or less venerable about it, if I may put it that way. But when stupidity keeps coming up with things like ‘eighty camp’ and ‘cosmological salon’ and other such gaffes, one truly no longer knows whether to laugh or cry. What a dilemma for our human emotions—and so sad that I can’t even begin to express it. I mean, there’s no rhyme or reason to it—they don’t belong together, one is not used to picturing them together. One assumes stupid people must be healthy and vulgar, and that illness must ennoble people and make them wise and special. At least that’s what one normally thinks, is it not? I’ve probably said more than I can defend,” he concluded. “It was merely because we just happened to stumble on the subject . . .” And he was completely muddled now.
Joachim, too, was somewhat embarrassed. Settembrini said nothing, just raised his eyebrows, which left the impression that he was waiting out of politeness for the end of the speech. In reality, he was simply allowing Hans Castorp to lose his train of thought completely, before he answered.
“Sapristi, my good engineer,” he said now, “you exhibit philosophical talents that I would never have expected of you. According to your theory, you would have to be less healthy than you give the appearance of being, since you apparently possess an intellect. Permit me
to observe, however, that I cannot follow your deductions, that I reject them, indeed, that I stand in positive opposition to them. I am, as you see, a little impatient in matters intellectual and would prefer to be denounced as a pedant rather than to leave uncontested views I consider to be as deserving of refutation as those that you have formulated here.”
“But, Herr Settembrini . . .”
“Per-mit me, please, to continue. I know what you wish to say. You wish to say that you did not mean to be taken so seriously, that the view you have advocated is not yours per se, but rather merely one possible view out of many hovering in the air, as it were, which you then seized upon in order to have an irresponsible go at it. It is characteristic of your years to eschew manly resolve in favor of temporary experimentation with all sorts of standpoints. Placet experiri,” he said, pronouncing the c of placet with the soft Italian ch. “A fine maxim. But what disconcerts me is simply that your experiment has taken precisely the direction it has. I doubt this is purely accidental. I fear the presence of a tendency that threatens to become an indelible trait of character unless one opposes it head-on. Which is why I feel it my duty to correct you. You suggested that the combination of sickness and stupidity is the most pitiful thing in the world. I will grant you that much. I, too, prefer a clever invalid to a consumptive idiot. But my protest begins at the point where you regard the conjunction of illness and stupidity as a kind of stylistic blunder, as an aberration of taste on the part of nature and a ‘dilemma for our human emotions’—as you chose to express it. At the point where, or so it appears, you consider illness to be so elegant or—as you put it—so ‘venerable’ that there is absolutely ‘no rhyme or reason’ why it and stupidity should belong together. Those, too, are your words. In that case, no! Illness is definitely not elegant, and certainly not venerable—such a view is itself a sickness, or leads to it. Perhaps I can best arouse your abhorrence of that idea by telling you that it is outdated and ugly. It comes from an era of superstitious contrition, when the idea of humanity was demeaned and distorted into a caricature, a fearful era, when harmony and health were considered suspicious and devilish, whereas infirmity in those days was as good as a passport to heaven. Reason and enlightenment, however, have banished those shadows, which once lay encamped in the human soul—not entirely, however, for even today the battle is still being waged. That battle, however, is called work, sir, earthly labor, work for the earth, for the honor and interests of humankind. And steeled by each new day in battle, the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race entirely and lead it forth on paths of progress and civilization toward an ever brighter, milder, and purer light.”
“Damnation,” Hans Castorp thought, both bewildered and abashed, “that was a regular aria! How did I provoke that? Although it all seems a little dry to me. And what is this fixation he has about work? He’s always going on about work, although it really does not fit all that well here.” And aloud he said, “Very fine, Herr Settembrini. Definitely worth listening to—the way you put it. It could not be expressed more . . . more graphically, I mean.”
“Backsliding,” Settembrini began again, lifting his umbrella high to avoid the head of a passerby, “intellectual backsliding, a return to the views of that dark, tormented age—and believe me, my good engineer, that is itself a sickness, a sickness that has been abundantly researched and for which science has provided various names—one from the language of aesthetics and psychology, another from that of politics, both of them academic terms of no consequence, which you may happily eschew. But since in the life of the mind all things cohere and one idea emanates from another, since one cannot give the Devil an inch but that he takes a mile, and you along with it—and since, on the other hand, a sound principle can give rise only to sound results, no matter with which sound principle one may begin—for all such reasons, then, imprint this on your minds: illness is very far from being something so elegant, so venerable that it may not be associated with stupidity, even in passing. Illness is, rather, a debasement—indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration—imprint that on your minds!—an aberration and the beginning of all intellectual aberrations. The woman of whom you made mention—pardon me for choosing not to recall her name—Frau Stöhr, yes, thank you—in brief, it is this ridiculous woman herself, and not her case, it seems to me, that presents our human emotions with a dilemma, as you put it. Sick and stupid—in God’s name, that is misery itself. The matter is quite simple—we are left only with pity and shrugs. The dilemma begins, sir, the real tragedy begins where nature has been cruel enough to break the harmony of the personality—or to make it impossible from the very start—by joining a noble and life-affirming mind to a body unfit for life. Do you know Leopardi, my good engineer? Or you perhaps, lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my country, a hunchbacked, sickly man with a soul—a large soul originally, but one forever humbled by the misery of his body and dragged to the lower depths of irony, a soul that could produce laments to rend the heart. Just listen—”
And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the lovely syllables melt on his tongue, rocking his head back and forth, even closing his eyes now and then, oblivious to the fact that his companions understood not a word. It was evident that he did it to savor both his own powers of memory and the words themselves—and to show them off to his audience.
Finally he said, “But you do not understand. You hear, and yet you do not comprehend the painful meaning. As a cripple—gentlemen, you must grasp the situation in its entirety—Leopardi lacked the love of a woman, and that in fact was what made him incapable of preventing his soul from being stunted. Fame and virtue lost their luster for him, he viewed nature as evil—and she is evil, stupid and evil, I agree with him there—and he despaired, horrible to say, he despaired of science and progress. That is tragedy, my good engineer. That is your ‘dilemma for our human emotions.’ It is not the woman at your table—I refuse to tax my memory for her name. Do not speak to me of some ‘spiritual redemption’ that may result from illness—for God’s sake, do not speak of it. A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—whereby the first is the rare exception and the latter the rule. Normally it is the body that grows unchecked, usurping all importance, all life to itself, emancipating itself in the most loathsome fashion. A human being who lives as an invalid is only a body, and that is the most inhuman of debasements—in most cases, he is no better than a cadaver. . . .”
“That’s funny,” Joachim said, bending forward to look at his cousin, who was walking on the other side of Settembrini. “You said something very similar quite recently, too.”
“I did?” Hans Castorp said. “Yes, it may well be that something similar ran through my mind.”
Settembrini was silent as they strode on for a few paces. Then he said, “All the better, gentlemen. All the better, if that is so. Far be it from me to lecture you with some sort of original philosophy—that is not my calling. If for his part our good engineer has already voiced analogous opinions, that only confirms my surmise that, like so many talented young men, he is playing the intellectual dilettante, temporarily experimenting with possible points of view. The talented young man is no blank page, but is rather a page where everything has already been written, so to speak, in appealing inks, the good with the bad. And it is the educator’s task explicitly to foster the true—and by appropriate practical persuasion forever to eradicate the false when it tries to emerge. The gentlemen have been shopping?” he asked, adopting a lighter tone.
“No, not really,” Hans Castorp said, “that is . . .”
“We bought a couple of blankets for my cousin,” Joachim replied casually.
“For the rest cure, what with this miserable cold weather. I am supposed to join in for these few weeks,” Hans Castorp said with a laugh, looking down at the ground.
“Ah, blankets, rest cure,” Settembrini said. “Yes, yes, yes. I see, I see, I see. Indeed: placet experiri!” he repeated, pronouncing it with his Italian c; and now he took his leave, for they had arrived at the sanatorium, where they were greeted by the limping concierge. Once they were in the lobby, Settembrini turned off into one of the social rooms to read the papers before dinner, as he said. He apparently intended to play hooky from the second rest cure.
“Heaven help us!” Hans Castorp said, as he took his place beside Joachim in the elevator. “That’s your true pedagogue—he himself said not long ago that he had a pedagogic streak. You have to be awfully careful not to say one word too many, otherwise you’ll get an extensive lecture. But it is worth listening to, just the way he speaks, how each word leaps from his mouth so round and appetizing—listening to him always reminds me of fresh hot buns.”
Joachim laughed. “You’d better not tell him that. I’m sure he’d be disappointed to learn you’re thinking of hot buns when he’s lecturing.”
“Do you think so? Well, I’m not so certain about that. I always have the impression that what is really important to him is not the lecture itself—perhaps that’s only secondary—but more especially the speaking of it, the way he lets his words roll and bounce, like little rubber balls. And that he isn’t at all displeased, in fact, if you pay attention to that, too. Magnus the brewer is certainly a little silly with his ‘beautiful characters,’ but Settembrini should have said what literature is actually about. I didn’t want to ask for fear of leaving myself wide open. I don’t really understand much more about it myself, and I’ve never met a literary man before. But if it’s not a matter of beautiful characters, then evidently it’s a matter of beautiful words, that’s my impression when I’m around Settembrini. And what a vocabulary! He’s not the least embarrassed to use words like ‘virtue’—I mean, really! That word has never passed my lips once in all my life—even in Latin class we always just translated virtus as ‘bravery.’ It made me wince deep inside, let me tell you. And besides, it makes me a little nervous the way he squawks about the cold and Behrens and Frau Magnus, who’s losing protein—about almost everything in fact. He’s a professional naysayer, that much was clear to me right off. He hacks away at everything around him, and I can’t help it—that always makes things rather untidy and disorderly.”