The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  It had stopped snowing. The overcast broke here and there; leaden-gray clouds parted to reveal glimpses of the sun, whose rays lent a bluish hue to the landscape. Then the sky turned clear. A bright, pure frost reigned, winter’s splendor settled over mid-November, and the panorama beyond the arches of the balcony was magnificent—snow-powdered forests, ravines filled with soft white, a glistening sunlit valley under a radiant blue sky. And of an evening, when the almost circular moon appeared, the world turned magical and wondrous—flickering crystals and glittering diamonds flung far and wide. The forests stood out black against white. The regions of the sky beyond the reach of moonlight were dark and embroidered with stars. The sharp, precise, intense shadows of houses, trees, and telegraph poles cast on the sparkling surface looked more real and significant than the objects themselves. Within a few hours after sunset, the temperature sank to twenty degrees, then seventeen degrees. Its natural squalor hidden, the world seemed to be under a spell of icy purity, trapped inside a fantastic dream of fatal enchantment.

  Hans Castorp stayed out on his balcony, looking down on the bewitched valley until late into the night, even though Joachim went back in around ten, or a little after. His splendid lounge chair with its three cushions and neck roll had been pulled up close to the wooden railing, topped along its full length by a little pillow of snow; on the white table at his side stood a lighted electric lamp, a pile of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the “evening milk” that was served to all the residents of the Berghof in their rooms at nine each night and into which Hans Castorp would pour a shot of cognac to make it more palatable. By now he was availing himself of every possible means of protection against the cold, the whole paraphernalia. The fur-lined sleeping bag he had purchased in an appropriate shop down in town was buttoned all the way up his chest, and he had ritually wrapped himself in his two camel-hair blankets. He wore a short fur jacket over his winter suit, had a woolen cap on his head, felt boots on his feet, and thickly lined gloves on his hands, although those did not prevent his fingers from turning numb.

  What kept him out there so long, until midnight and even later (long after the Bad Russian couple had left the adjacent balcony), was in part the magic of the winter night, particularly since until eleven it was interwoven with music drifting up, now near, now far, from the valley—but primarily it was languor and excitement, both at once and in combination: the languor and weary inertia of his body and the busy excitement of a mind that could find no rest in its preoccupation with the new and fascinating studies the young man had recently taken up. The weather was hard on him, the frost exacted a toll on his physical organism. He ate a great deal, attacking the sumptuous Berghof meals—a roast beef course followed by a roast goose course—with an immense appetite not all that uncommon here, particularly in winter it seemed. At the same time he was subject to fits of drowsiness, so that whether by broad daylight or on moonlit evenings he would often drop off as he thumbed through his books (of which more later), and after a few minutes of unconsciousness, resume his research where he had left off. And when he and Joachim would take their constitutionals in the snow, their lively conversations exhausted him—and he tended here, more than ever had been the case down in the flatlands, to get caught up in his own hasty, unrestrained, even loose chatter. Shivering and dizzy, he would be overcome with a kind of numb intoxication that left his head flushed and hot. Since the onset of winter, his fever chart had been curving upward, and Director Behrens had mentioned something about injections that he liked to give for chronic high temperature and which two-thirds of the guests, including Joachim, regularly received. But Hans Castorp was certain his body was generating increased warmth because of the mental excitement and turmoil that kept him sitting in his lounge chair until very late every sparkling, frosty night. Indeed, the books he was reading with such fascination suggested much the same explanation.

  Quite a bit of reading went on at the International Sanatorium Berghof, both in the common lounging areas and on private balconies—this was particularly true of newcomers and short-termers, since residents of many months or even years had long since learned how to ravage time without diverting or employing their minds, had become virtuosi at putting time behind them, and declared openly that only clumsy bunglers in the art needed a book to hang on to. At most they might leave a book lying on their lap or within reach on a table—that sufficed for them to feel their reading needs were taken care of. The sanatorium library was a polyglot affair with many illustrated works—an expanded version of the sort of thing that serves to entertain patients in a dentist’s waiting room—and offered its services free of charge. People exchanged novels from the lending library down in Platz. Now and then a book or publication would appear that everyone fought over, and even those who had given up reading would grab for it, with only pretended disinterest. At the period we are describing here, The Art of Seduction, a badly printed booklet that Herr Albin had introduced, was making the rounds. It was translated almost word for word from the French, with even the original syntax perfectly preserved, lending a certain demeanor and titillating elegance to its exposition of a philosophy of physical love and debauchery, all in a spirit of worldly, life-affirming paganism. Frau Stöhr had soon read it and found it “stunning.” Frau Magnus—the woman who was losing protein—supported her unconditionally. Her husband, the brewer, claimed personally to have profited from reading it, but regretted that his wife had imbibed, since that sort of thing only “spoiled” women and gave them immodest ideas. His remarks significantly increased demand for the publication. Two ladies from the lower common lounging area, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrialist, and a certain widow Hessenfeld from Berlin, both of them recent October arrivals, became involved in a rather unedifying scene after supper; indeed they came to blows and one of them began screaming hysterically (it might have been Redisch, but could just as easily have been Hessenfeld), and finally, simply sick with rage, had to be taken to her room—all because each claimed she was first in line for the book. Hans Castorp observed the incident from his balcony. Young people were quicker to get hold of the tract than patients of more advanced years. They would study it, sometimes in groups, up in their rooms after supper. Hans Castorp watched the lad with the saltcellar fingernail pass it on to a young lady with blond hair parted neatly in the middle—Fränzchen Oberdank, a lady’s companion and housemaid, who was not all that ill and had only recently been brought up here by her mother.

  Perhaps there were exceptions, people who spent the hours of their rest cure with some sort of serious intellectual pursuit, some rewarding study of one topic or another, even if they did so only to maintain contact with life on the plains or to give a little weight to time, a deeper draft to its keel, and prevent it from becoming pure time and nothing else. Perhaps besides Herr Settembrini struggling to eradicate suffering and honor-loving Joachim poring over his Russian textbooks, there were here and there people who did likewise, if not among the denizens of the common lounging areas—which was indeed very unlikely—then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp, at least, was inclined to believe it was so. As for himself, once he found that Ocean Steamships no longer had anything to say to him, he had requested that, along with his winter gear, his family send him a few books pertinent to his profession, works on engineering science and the technology of shipbuilding. These volumes, however, now lay neglected, replaced by others from quite a different department, textbooks from a field of study in which young Hans Castorp had developed a sudden interest. These were books on anatomy, physiology, and biology, written in various languages—German, French, and English—and sent him one day by the local bookdealer; evidently he had ordered them, on his own and without a word to anyone, while taking a walk down in Platz alone. (Joachim had had an appointment for an injection or was getting weighed that day.) His cousin was surprised to see them in Hans Castorp’s hands. They were expensive books, as scientific works always are. The prices were written both inside the
cover and on the jackets. He asked Hans Castorp why, if he really wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them from the director, who surely had a fine selection of that sort of literature. But Hans Castorp replied that he wanted to own them himself—it was different reading a book that you owned. And besides, he loved to take his pencil and underline at will. Joachim listened for hours to the sound coming from his cousin’s balcony: a paper knife slipping through uncut pages.

  The volumes were heavy, cumbersome. When reclining, Hans Castorp propped the lower edge on his chest or stomach, which hurt a little but was simply part of the bargain. His mouth hanging half-open, he would let his eyes glide down each learned page illuminated by the reddish light from his shaded lamp, though, if it had come to that, he could just as easily have read by the bright moonlight. His head would lower until his chin lay on his chest, and he would hold that pose awhile—lost in thought perhaps or musing in a doze—half-asleep, before lifting his head for the next page. While the moon followed its prescribed path across the high mountain valley glistening like crystal below, he would read, pursue his study of organized matter, of the characteristics of protoplasm, that self-sustaining, delicate substance that hovers intriguingly between synthesis and dissolution and whose basic forms have remained the same as when it first assumed rudimentary shape. He read with burning interest about life and its sacred, yet impure mystery.

  What was life? No one knew. It was aware of itself the moment it became life, that much was certain—and yet did not know what it was. Consciousness, as sensitivity to stimuli, was undoubtedly aroused to some extent at even the lowest, most undeveloped stages of its occurrence; it was impossible to tie the emergence of consciousness to any particular point in life’s general or individual history—to link it, for instance, to the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animals had no nervous systems, let alone a cerebral cortex, and yet no one dared deny that they were capable of responding to stimuli. And you could anesthetize life, life itself, not just the special organs capable of the response that informs life, not just the nerves. You could temporarily suspend the responses of every speck of living matter, in both the plant and animal kingdoms, narcotize eggs and sperm with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself—ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.

  What was life? No one knew. No one could pinpoint when it had emerged from nature and struck fire. Nothing in the realm of life was self-actuated or even poorly actuated from that point on. And yet life seemed to have actuated itself. If anything could be said about it, then, it was this: life’s structure had to be so highly developed that nothing like it could occur in the inanimate world. The distance between an amoeba—a pseudopod—and a vertebrate was minor, insignificant in comparison to that between the simplest form of life and inorganic nature, which did not even deserve to be called dead—because death was merely the logical negation of life. Between life and inanimate nature, however, was a yawning abyss, which research sought in vain to bridge. People endeavored to close that abyss with theories—it swallowed them whole, and was still not an inch less broad or deep. In the search for some link, scientists had stooped to the absurdity of hypothesizing living material with no structure, unorganized organisms, which if placed in a solution of protein would grow like crystals in a nutrient solution—whereas, in fact, organic differentiation was simultaneously the prerequisite and expression of all life, and no life-form could be proved that did not owe its existence to propagation by a parent. What jubilation had greeted the first primal slime fished from the sea’s deepest deeps—and what humiliation had followed. It turned out that they had mistaken a precipitate of gypsum for protoplasm. But to avoid one miracle (because it would be a miracle for life spontaneously to arise out of and return to the same stuff as inorganic matter), scientists had found it necessary to believe in another: archebiosis, that is, the slow formation of organic life from inorganic matter. And so they went about inventing transitional and intermediate stages, assuming the existence of organisms lower than any known form, but which themselves were the result of even more primal attempts by nature to create life—attempts that no one would ever see, that were submicroscopic in size, and whose hypothesized formation presupposed a previous synthesis of protein.

  What was life, really? It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction. It was the existence of what, in actuality, has no inherent ability to exist, but only balances with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair. It was not matter, it was not spirit. It was something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above a waterfall, like a flame. But although it was not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and revulsion, it was matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without—existence in its lewd form. It was a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space. It was furtive, lascivious, sordid—nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature. Out of overcompensation for its own instability, yet governed by its own inherent laws of formation, a bloated concoction of water, protein, salt, and fats—what we call flesh—ran riot, unfolded, and took shape, achieving form, ideality, beauty, and yet all the while was the quintessence of sensuality and desire. This form and this beauty were not derived from the spirit, as in works of poetry and music, nor derived from some neutral material both consumed by spirit and innocently embodying it, as is the case with the form and beauty of the visual arts. Rather, they were derived from and perfected by substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh.

  This was the image of life revealed to young Hans Castorp as he lay there preserving his body warmth in furs and woolens, looking down on the valley glistening in the frosty night, bright beneath the luster of a dead star. The image hovered out there in space, remote and yet as near as his senses—it was a body: dull, whitish flesh, steaming, redolent, sticky; its skin blemished with natural defects, blotches, pimples, discolorations, cracks, and hard, scaly spots, and covered with the delicate currents and whorls of rudimentary, downy lanugo. The body was leaning back, wrapped in the aura of its own vapors, detached from the coldness of the inanimate world, its head crowned with a cool, keratinous, pigmented substance that was a product of its own skin, its hands clasped behind the neck. Gazing out from under lowered lids, the eyes had a slanted look because of a racial variation in the formation of the lid; its mouth was half-open, its lips pouted slightly. Its weight was on one leg, so that flesh protruded where the bone of the supporting hip stuck out, while the relaxed leg was raised so that the knee bent a little to nestle against the inside of the supporting leg and the foot rested on just the toes. There the body stood, leaning charmingly, turning to smile at him, its radiant elbows spread wide in the dual symmetry of its limbs, of its corporeality. The night of its pubic region built a mystic triangle with the steaming pungent darkness of the armpits, just as the red epithelial mouth did with the eyes, or the red buds of the breast with the vertically elongated navel. Under the impetus of brain and of motor nerves extending from the spine, belly and rib cage stirred, the pleuroperitoneal cavity swelled and contracted; the breath, warmed and moistened by mucous membranes along the trachea and laden with secreted material, streamed out between the lips, now that oxygen had bonded with the hemoglobin in the blood deep in the air sacs o
f the lungs. For Hans Castorp understood that this living body—with its mysterious symmetry of limbs, nourished by blood through a network of nerves, veins, arteries, capillaries, all oozing lymph; with its scaffold of bones, some of them tubes filled with marrow, some like blades, some like bulbs, some torqued vertebrae, but all originating in a gelatinous base that with the help of calcium salts and lime had grown firm enough to support the rest; with its joints made of tendons, cartilage, and slippery, well-oiled balls and sockets; with its more than two hundred muscles; with its central system of organs for nutrition and respiration, for registering and transmitting stimuli; with its protective membranes, serous cavities, and glands pumping secretions; with its complicated interior, a network of pipes and crevices, including openings onto the world outside—understood that this self was a living entity of a higher order, far removed from those simple organisms that breathed, fed, even thought, with just the surface of their bodies, that it was constructed, rather, out of a myriad of small organized units, which all shared a common origin, but had multiplied by constantly dividing, had adapted and combined for various functions, and had then separated to develop on their own and germinated new forms that were both the prerequisite and the effect of its growth.