The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  The body hovering before him, this individual, living self was therefore a huge multiplicity of breathing and self-nourishing entities, which in the course of organic integration and specialization had forfeited their existence as selves to become anatomical elements, but with such a total loss of freedom and direct connection to life that some functioned only in response to stimuli like light, sound, touch, or warmth, whereas others could only cluster in new shapes or secrete digestive juices, and still others had been trained to function solely for defense, support, transport of fluids, or procreation. Relaxation of the rules unifying this organic multiplicity into a single higher self was permitted in some cases, and then a multitude of subordinate individuals would be collected in a loose, muddled way to form a higher living unit. The student brooded over the phenomenon of cell colonies; he learned about transitional organisms, algae, whose individual cells, wrapped in a coating of gelatin, were often widely dispersed, but nevertheless built multicelled formations, which, had they been asked, would not have known if they should be regarded as a settlement of single-celled individuals or as a single living entity, and in providing their answer would have vacillated strangely between the use of “I” and “we.” Nature here exhibited an intermediate state between the free individual existence of simple units and the highly social organization of countless elemental individuals such as tissues and organs within a dominant self—the multicelled organism being only one possible form life might take as it passed through the cyclical process leading from procreation to procreation. The act of fertilization, the sexual union of two cells, marked the beginning of the formation of each pluralistic individual, just as it marked the beginning of each successive generation of more elemental forms, and so always led back to itself. The effects of this act lasted through many generations, which could then multiply all on their own in constant repetition, until the moment came when these asexually produced offspring once again found they required renewal by means of copulation, and the circle was closed. A complex living entity, born from the merged nuclei of two parental cells, was in fact a cooperative venture of many generations of individual cells produced asexually; it grew as they multiplied, and the circle of procreation was closed only when sexual cells, individual units specialized for procreation, had been produced within it and now found their way to a new fusion that would propel life onward.

  With a volume on embryology propped at the bottom of his sternum, our young adventurer followed the development of the organism from the moment when the sperm, out in front of many just like itself and driven onward by the whipping motion of its tail, crashed headfirst into the gelatin coating of the egg and bored its way through to what is called the mount of conception, a conical protrusion in the outer rim of the egg’s protoplasm formed in reaction to the approach of the sperm. In its serious pursuit of variations on this standard procedure, nature had employed every conceivable farce and grotesquerie. In some animal species the male was a parasite in the intestine of the female. There were others where the male placed his arm down the gullet of the female to lay his sperm inside her; the arm, bitten off and vomited back up, now ran away on its fingers, long fooling scientists into believing it to be an independent life-form deserving a Greek and Latin name of its own. Hans Castorp listened to the learned argument between the ovists and animalculists, the former asserting that the egg contains a perfect little frog, dog, or human being and the sperm merely stimulates it to grow, the latter seeing the sperm as a living creature with preformed head, arms, and legs, which then found in the egg a medium on which to feed—until everyone finally agreed to grant equal merit in the process to egg and sperm, both of which had arisen out of what were originally undifferentiated reproductive cells. He watched the single cell of the fertilized egg transform itself into a multicelled organism that grew by cleavage and division, saw the cellular ball nestle up against the lamellae of the mucous membrane, saw the blastula fold in on itself to form a basin or cavity, which then assumed the task of receiving and digesting nourishment. This was the gastrula, the protozoon, the primal form of all animal life, the primal form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the outer and inner, ectoderm and endoderm, turned out to be primitive organs, from whose folds and protrusions were formed glands, tissues, sense organs, the body’s appendages. One layer of the ectoderm thickened, folded to form a groove, then closed to build a nerve canal, became the spinal column, the brain. When gelatinous cells began to produce glutens in place of mucin, the fetal fluid solidified into fibrous connective tissue, to cartilage; and he watched as calcium salts and fats were extracted from the surrounding liquid to form bone. The human embryo lay there crouched and cowering, it had a tail—and with its monstrous abdomen, stubby shapeless extremities, and larval face bent down over a bloated belly, it was indistinguishable from an embryonic pig. And according to one branch of science, whose notions of reality were equally unflattering and lurid, the embryo’s development seemed to be a hasty recapitulation of zoological genealogy. It even temporarily had gill flaps, like a skate’s.

  It seemed permissible, or necessary, to view these developmental stages as finding their logical conclusion in the less-than-humanistic picture presented by the finished product: primitive man. His skin was covered with thick hair and equipped with twitching muscles to ward off insects. The olfactory membranes covered an extensive surface; his ears stuck out and were movable, so that they not only played a role in facial expression but also were more adept at catching sound than at present. In those days, the eyes, protected by a third, blinking lid, were at the sides of the head—except for a third eye, of which the pineal gland was a vestige, that was able to patrol the upper air. Primitive man also had a very long intestine, several sets of milk teeth, and air sacs next to the larynx to enhance his roar; the male sexual glands were carried inside the abdomen.

  Anatomy presented our researcher with human limbs skinned and prepared for study; it showed him both the surface and the deeper structure of muscles, tendons, and ligaments, those of the thigh, the foot, and especially the arm, the upper and lower arm; it taught him the Latin names that medicine—that adumbration of the humanist spirit—had nobly and chivalrously supplied to distinguish them; and it allowed him to penetrate to the skeleton, an illustration of which offered him new perspectives, revealing the unity of all things human, the interconnection of all disciplines. For here, in a most remarkable fashion, he found himself reminded of his own—or should one say, his former—profession and of the fact that on his arrival he had presented himself to whomever he met, from Dr. Krokowski to Herr Settembrini, as a member of the scientific caste.

  In order to study something—just what had been quite unimportant—he had learned in technical college about statics, flexible supports, and loads, about how good construction was the functional use of mechanical materials. It would surely have been childish to think that the engineering sciences and the laws of mechanics had been applied to organic nature, any more than one could say that they had been derived from it. They were simply repeated and corroborated in it. The principle of the hollow cylinder dominated the structure of tubular bones to such an extent that static requirements were satisfied with the precise minimum of solid material. A structure, Hans Castorp had learned, conformable to the demands of tension and pressure put upon it and constructed of nothing more than rods and braces of a mechanically suitable material, will withstand the same weight as a solid made of the same materials. So, too, one could observe that as tubular bones developed, with each increase in solid surface material, the inner portion, which had become mechanically superfluous, was transformed step by step into fatty tissue, the marrow. The bone of the upper thigh was a crane, and in constructing its bony beam, organic nature had given it precisely the same shape and direction that Hans Castorp would have had to draw as lines of tension and pressure in the blueprint of a mechanism subject to similar stresses. He was delighted to see it, for he now realized that his relationship to the femur, and
to organic nature in general, was threefold: lyric, medical, and technical. It came as a great inspiration. And these three relationships, he believed, were a unity within the human mind, were schools of humanist thought, variations of one and the same pressing concern.

  And yet, for all that, the accomplishments of protoplasm remained quite inexplicable—it seemed that life was prohibited from understanding itself. Not only were most biochemical processes unknown, but it was also their very nature to avoid examination. Almost nothing was understood about the construction and makeup of the unit of life known as the “cell.” What good did it do to uncover the components of dead muscle? The living tissue did not permit chemical analysis; the very changes that brought about rigor mortis were enough to make all such experimentation futile. No one understood metabolism, no one knew how the nervous system functioned. What made it possible for taste buds to taste? What made it possible for certain olfactory nerves to be stimulated by various odors? What, indeed, made something smell at all? The specific odor of animals or people resulted from the vaporization of substances that no one could identify. The composition of the secretion called sweat was poorly understood. The glands that excreted it also produced aromas that doubtless played an important role among mammals, but whose significance among humans no one was prepared to claim to know much about. The physiological significance of obviously important parts of the body remained shrouded in darkness. One could, of course, simply disregard the appendix, call it a mystery—except that the appendices of rabbits were regularly found filled with a pulpy substance, and no one could explain either how it ever got back out or was replenished. But what about the white and gray matter in the medulla, what about the optic thalamus and its connection to the eye, or the gray matter in the pons? Brain and spinal tissue deteriorated so quickly that there was no hope of determining its structure. What caused the cerebral cortex to shut down as one fell asleep? What prevented the stomach from digesting itself—which occasionally did happen with corpses? The answer people gave was: Life, a special immunity of living protoplasm—and acted as if they did not notice what a mystical explanation that was. The theory behind such a commonplace phenomenon as fever was self-contradictory. An increase in metabolism caused an increase in the production of body heat. But, then, why did the body not compensate, as usual, by releasing that heat? Instead, sweat production was retarded—was that because of a contraction of the skin? But that could be demonstrated only if a chill was also present—otherwise the skin remained hot. “Hot flashes” would indicate that the central nervous system was the seat both of whatever caused catabolism and of a skin condition we are content to call abnormal, simply because we do not know any better way to define it.

  But even so, what was such ignorance in comparison with our confusion when confronted by phenomena like memory—or the even more astounding extended memory that allowed acquired characteristics to be inherited? Anything like a mechanical explanation for these achievements of protoplasm was completely out of the question. Sperm, which transferred the countless, complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father to the egg, was visible only under a microscope; and even the most powerful magnification did not suffice to determine its genesis or allow it to be seen as anything but a homogeneous body—for the sperm of one animal looked like that of every other. Such structural factors forced one to assume that a single cell was no different from the higher life-form of which it was a building block, that it, too, was a higher organism, yet another composite made up of discrete units of life, individual living entities. One progressed from the ostensibly smallest unit to something smaller still, one was compelled to split something elemental into yet more basic elements. No doubt just as the animal kingdom consisted of various species of animals, just as the organism of the human animal consisted of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so, too, the cell consisted of a new and diverse animal kingdom of elemental, submicroscopic living entities that grew independently, multiplied independently according to the law that each can only produce its own kind, and cooperated by division of labor to serve the next higher level of life.

  Those were the genes, the bioblasts, the biophores—Hans Castorp rejoiced in the frosty night to make their acquaintance by name. But even in his excitement, he asked himself just how elemental they might appear under better light. Since they were bearers of life, they had to be organized, because life was based on organization; but if they were organized, they could not be elemental, because an organism is not elemental, but multiple. They were living entities below the level of the cell that they built and organized. But if that was so, despite their incomprehensible smallness, they, too, as living entities had to be built out of something, had to be organized, structured organically. Because to be a living entity was by definition to be built out of smaller, subordinate entities, or better, out of entities organized to serve the higher form of life. There could be no limit to such division as long as it yielded organic entities—that is, those possessing the characteristics of life, in particular the ability to ingest, grow, and multiply. As long as one spoke of living entities, any discussion of elemental units was dishonest, because the concept of an entity carried with it, ad infinitum, the concept of the subordinate, organizing unit. There was no such thing as elemental life—that is, something that was both already life and yet elemental.

  But although it could not logically exist, ultimately there had to be something of that sort, because the notion of archebiosis—that is, the slow development of life from inorganic matter—could not be dismissed out of hand; and the gap in external nature between living and nonliving matter, which we vainly attempted to close, had to be filled or bridged somewhere deep within organic nature. At some point the division had to lead to “entities,” which, although composites, were not yet organized and mediated between living and nonliving matter, groups of molecules that formed a transition between mere chemistry and organized life. But when one looked at chemical molecules, one found oneself at the edge of a yawning abyss far more mysterious than the one between organic and inorganic nature—at the edge of the abyss between the material and nonmaterial. Because the molecule was made up of atoms, and the atom was not even close to being large enough to be called extraordinarily small. It was so small, in fact, such a tiny, initial, ephemeral concentration of something immaterial—of something not yet matter, but related to matter—of energy, that one could not yet, or perhaps no longer, think of it as matter, but rather as both the medium and boundary between the material and immaterial. But that posed the question of another kind of spontaneous generation, far more baffling and fantastic than that of organic life: the generation of matter from nonmatter. And indeed, the gap between matter and nonmatter demanded—at least as urgently as the one between organic and inorganic nature—that there be something to fill it. There must of necessity be a chemistry of nonmatter, of unsubstantial compounds, from which matter then arose, just as organisms had come from inorganic compounds, and atoms would then be the microbes and protozoa of matter—substantial by nature, and yet not really. But confronted with the statement that atoms were “so small they were no longer small,” one lost all sense of proportion, because “no longer small” was tantamount to “immense”; and that last step to the atom ultimately proved, without exaggeration, to be a fateful one. For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.

  The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike center, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core. That was not merely a metaphor—any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells.” A city, a state, a social community organized around the division of labor was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of
stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovered above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade. Was it illicit to think that certain planets of the atomic solar system—among all those hosts of solar systems in all those milky ways that constituted matter—that the state of some planet or other in that inner world might not correspond to the conditions that made the earth an abode of life? For a slightly tipsy young master of the muffling art with an “abnormal” skin condition, who was no longer totally lacking in experience when it came to illicit matters, this was a speculation that bore the stamp of logic and truth and, far from being absurd, seemed as perfectly obvious as it was illuminating. Once the cosmic character of the “smallest” bits of matter became apparent, any objection about the “smallness” of these stars in the inner world would have been quite irrelevant—and concepts like inner and outer had now lost their foundation as well. The world of the atom was an outer world, just as it was highly probable that the earthly star on which we lived was a profoundly inner world when regarded organically. Had not one researcher in his visionary boldness spoken of the “beasts of the milky way”—cosmic monsters whose flesh, bones, and brains were formed from solar systems? But if that was so, as Hans Castorp believed it to be, then at the very moment when one thought one had reached the outermost edge, everything began all over again. But that meant, did it not, that perhaps in inner world after inner world within his own nature he was present over and over again—a hundred young Hans Castorps, all wrapped up warmly, but with numbed fingers and flushed face, gazing out from a balcony onto a frosty, moonlit night high in the Alps and studying, out of humanistic and medical interest, the life of the human body?