by Thomas Mann
In the evening he would study the stars. He became fascinated by the passing year—although he had watched some twenty summers pass on earth without ever having been concerned about it before. We automatically used a term like “vernal equinox,” because we knew that when we came to this topic, such terminology would reflect Hans Castorp’s own thinking. For of late he had developed a fondness for tossing around such nomenclature, and his cousin was amazed by his knowledge of this subject as well.
“The sun will very soon enter Cancer,” he might remark while they were out on a walk. “Do you understand what that means? It’s the first summer sign of the zodiac, you see. And then the sun moves on through Leo and Virgo to the point where autumn begins, at the equinox toward the end of September, when the sun passes across the celestial equator, just as it did recently in March, when it entered Aries.”
“I must have missed that,” Joachim said peevishly. “What are you rattling on about? Entered Aries—and that’s part of the zodiac?”
“Quite right, the zodiac. The ancient heavenly signs—Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricorn, Aquarius, and all the rest—how can someone not be interested in it? There are twelve of them, you should at least know that much, three for each season, ascending and descending, a circle of constellations through which the sun moves—it’s all so splendid! Imagine, they found it painted on the ceiling of an Egyptian temple—a temple of Aphrodite, by the way—not far from Thebes. The Chaldeans already knew about it, too—the Chaldeans, if you please, that ancient tribe of Semitic or Arabic magicians, highly trained astrologists and diviners. They had already studied the celestial zone in which the planets move, dividing it into twelve constellations or signs, the dodecatemoria, which have come down to us. Now that’s splendid! That’s humanity!”
“And now you’re starting in on ‘humanity,’ just like Settembrini.”
“Yes, like him—or not quite like him, either. You have to take humanity as it is, but it’s still splendid. I like to think back to the Chaldeans when I’m lying there watching the planets, the ones they already knew about, because they didn’t know them all, clever as they were. But I can’t see the ones they didn’t know, either. Uranus was only recently discovered through a telescope, about a hundred and twenty years ago.”
“Recently?”
“I’d call it ‘recently’ in comparison to the previous three thousand years, if you please. But when I’m lying there and watching the planets, then those last three thousand years seem fairly ‘recent’ themselves, and somehow I feel very intimate with those Chaldeans, who watched them, too, and wrote poetry about them—and that’s what humanity means.”
“Well, that’s nice. You certainly have some grand ideas in your head.”
“You call them ‘grand’ and I call them ‘intimate’—what they’re called doesn’t make any difference. But when the sun enters Libra, about three months from now, then the length of the days will have decreased until day and night are equal, and will continue to decrease until around Christmas—you know all that. But, please consider this: that while the sun moves through the winter signs—Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces—the length of the days is increasing .again. And then we come back to the point where spring begins, for the three thousandth time since the Chaldeans, and the days go on lengthening until the year comes round again and summer begins.”
“That’s obvious enough.”
“No, it’s all smoke and mirrors! The days get longer during winter, and when we get to the longest one, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they start getting shorter again and it all heads right back downhill toward winter. You call it obvious, but once you disregard the obvious part, it can momentarily set you into a panic, make you want to grab something to hold on to. It’s really like some great practical joke, so that the beginning of winter is actually spring, and the beginning of summer is actually autumn. It’s as if we’re being led around by the nose, in a circle, always lured on by the promise of something that is just another turning point—a turning point in a circle. For a circle consists of nothing but elastic turning points, and so its curvature is immeasurable, with no steady, definite direction, and so eternity is not ‘straight ahead, straight ahead,’ but rather ‘merry-go-round.’ ”
“Stop!”
“Midsummer Night!” Hans Castorp said. “Midsummer Night celebrations, with fires and dances around the leaping flames, everyone joining hands. I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard that’s how primitive tribes do it, celebrating the first night of summer, which is actually the beginning of autumn—the year’s high noon, its zenith, and it’s all downhill from there. They dance and whirl and cheer. And what are these primitives cheering about—can you explain that to me? Why are they so boisterous and merry? Because they are now headed back down into the dark, maybe? Or is it because things have gone uphill until now, and the turning point has come, the slippery turning point, Midsummer Night? Is it melancholy mirth at the high-point? I’m just describing it as I see it, in the words that come to mind. Melancholy mirth and mirthful melancholy—that’s the reason why those primitives are cheering and dancing around the flames. They do it out of constructive despair, if you want to put it that way, in honor of the practical joke of the circle, of eternity that has no permanent direction, but in which everything keeps coming back.”
“I don’t want to put it that way,” Joachim muttered, “please don’t lay the blame on me. Those are awfully grand notions you’re playing with when you’re lying there of an evening.”
“Yes, I won’t deny it—you keep yourself busy with more practical matters, with your Russian grammar. You should soon be fluent, my man, and that can only be to your great advantage—if there should be a war, which God forbid.”
“Forbid? You’re talking like a civilian. War is necessary. Without war the world would soon go to rot, as Moltke said.”
“Yes, it has that tendency. I’ll grant you that much,” Hans Castorp added, intending to return to the Chaldeans, who had also waged war and conquered Babylon, although they were Semites, and so practically Jews—when both of them at the same time noticed two gentlemen just ahead, who had heard them talking and interrupted their conversation now to turn and look back.
They were on the main street between the Kurhaus and the Hotel Belvedere, on the way back to Davos-Dorf. The valley was dressed in its Sunday best, in delicate, soft, and cheerful colors. The air was delightful—pure, dry, clear, sun-drenched, filled with a symphony of blithe wildflower fragrances.
They realized that it was Lodovico Settembrini at the side of a stranger, but it appeared that he did not recognize them or at least did not want to encounter them, because he quickly turned his head away and dived back into the conversation with his companion, gesticulating and at the same time trying to move quickly on ahead of them. But when the cousins caught up with him on the right and greeted him with friendly bows, he pretended to be pleasantly surprised, exclaimed, “Sapristi!” and “Damned if it isn’t!” but then held back as if to let the two of them pass and move on ahead; they, however, did not understand what he wanted—or better, simply paid no attention since they did not see the point. Genuinely pleased to see him after what had been a rather long separation, they stopped and shook his hand, asked how he was doing and glanced at his companion, expecting to be introduced. And so they forced him to do something he evidently preferred not to do, whereas to them it seemed the most natural and logical thing in the world: to make formal introductions—which Settembrini now did, with obligatory gestures and good-natured phrases, but so that they all had to shake hands across his chest as they half stood there, half kept moving.
It turned out that the stranger, who was about Settembrini’s age, lived in the same house with him. He was the other person to whom Lukaček, the ladies’ tailor, had sublet rooms. His name, as nearly as the young men could make out, was Naphta. He was a small, skinny, clean-shaven man, and so ugly—caustically, one could almost say corrosively, ugly—that the cousins were
astonished. Somehow everything about him was caustic: the aquiline nose dominating the face; the small, pursed mouth; the pale gray eyes behind thick lenses in the light frames of his glasses; even his studied silence, from which it was clear that his words would be caustic and logical. As was the custom here, he wore neither hat nor overcoat, but he was very well dressed: his suit was dark blue flannel with white pinstripes, its cut elegant, understated, stylish—which did not escape the scrutiny of the cousins’ sophisticated eyes, though their gaze was immediately countered by an even sharper, more caustic inspection of their persons. If Lodovico Settembrini had not known how to wear his threadbare petersham and checked trousers with such grace and dignity, the figure he cut in this fine company would not have been to his advantage. But such was not the case, particularly since his checked trousers had been freshly pressed, so that at first glance you might have thought them new—doubtless the work of his landlord, the young men thought in passing. But although in terms of expensive, sophisticated clothes, ugly Herr Naphta had one thing in common with the cousins, it was more than just his advanced years that allied him with his neighbor in contrast to the younger men; there was definitely something else, too, which might best be attributed to the matter of complexion—that is, one pair was either tanned or sunburnt, whereas the other two were pale. Over the course of the winter, Joachim’s face had turned an even deeper bronze, and Hans Castorp’s face glowed pink under his blond hair. Herr Settembrini’s exotic pallor, however, which looked quite refined against his black moustache, had been left totally unaffected by the sun’s rays; and his companion, although a blond—with metallic, colorless, ash-blond hair that he combed straight back from his receding forehead—likewise had the dull white skin characteristic of some darker races. Two of the four were carrying walking sticks—Hans Castorp and Settembrini; as a military man, Joachim never bothered with a cane, and after the introductory handshakes, Naphta immediately crossed his hands behind his back. They were small, dainty hands, just as his feet were dainty, too—but all in proper proportion to the rest of his body. He had a cold, but no one paid any attention to his feeble and not very wholesome coughs.
Settembrini had at once elegantly overcome any trace of the embarrassment or annoyance he had shown upon first seeing the young men. He seemed in the best of moods and wittily helped all three get better acquainted—calling Naphta a “princeps scholasticorum,” for example. Mirth, he claimed, quoting Aretino, “held brilliant court in the hall of his breast” today—and that was the work of spring, a spring that he could only praise. As the gentlemen knew, he harbored considerable ill will against the world up here, had surely disparaged it often enough. Yet one must give the Alpine spring its due—for the moment, spring was atoning for all the horrors of the region. There was none of the confusion and provocation of spring down on the plains—no seething in the depths, no damp odors, no sultry vapors. And instead—clarity, serenity, a dry, austere charm. It was all to his taste, it was superb!
They walked four abreast in a ragged row, as much as possible, but when they passed people coming from the opposite direction, Settembrini, on the right flank, was forced to step out into the road; or the line would be broken up when someone else temporarily dropped back and yielded the right-of-way—Naphta, for instance, on the left, or Hans Castorp, who had been walking between the humanist and Joachim. Naphta laughed in short bursts muted by his cold, and his voice sounded like a piece of cracked porcelain when you rap it with a knuckle.
Tilting his head to point at the Italian, he said with a drawl, “Just listen to our rationalist here, our Voltairian. He’s praising nature because even in her fertile phase she does not confuse us with mystic damps, but provides classical austerity. And yet, what is the Latin word for moisture?”
“Humor,” Settembrini cried back over his left shoulder, “and the humor in our professor’s observations about nature can be found in the fact that, like Saint Catherine of Siena, he sees the wounds of Christ in the markings of a red cowslip.”
Naphta countered, “That would be more witty than humorous. But ’tis said we must bring our spirits to bear upon nature. And she sorely needs it.”
“Nature,” Settembrini said, lowering his voice and no longer speaking over his shoulder but merely looking down at it, “certainly has no need of your spirit. It is itself spirit.”
“Doesn’t your monism bore you?”
“Ah, so you admit that it is solely for the sake of your own amusement that you divide the world into two hostile camps, sundering God and nature.”
“I find it interesting you would use the term ‘amusement’ for what I have in mind when I speak of Spirit and the Passion.”
“To think that someone like you, who uses such grand words for such shameless purposes, can accuse me of demagoguery.”
“And so you still believe that Spirit is shameless, do you? But it cannot help being what it is: dualistic. Antithesis, dualism—that is the motivating, passionate, dialectical, spiritual principle. To see the world divided into hostile camps, that is Spirit. All monism is boring. Solet Aristoteles quaerere pugnam.”
“Aristotle? Aristotle shifted the reality of universal ideas to the individual. And that is pantheism.”
“False. If you posit substantial character in the individual, that is, if you transfer the essence of things from the universal to the particular, as Thomas and Bonaventura did, being true Aristotelians, you have then removed the world from its unity with the highest idea, it becomes something outside God, and so God becomes transcendent. That is classic medievalism, my dear sir.”
“ ‘Classic medievalism,’ now isn’t that a delicious phrase.”
“I beg your pardon, but I grant the term ‘classic’ its place where it is applicable, that is, whenever an idea has achieved its apogee. Antiquity was not always classic. I have observed an aversion on your part to . . . to the absolute, to the broader application of categories. You do not want Spirit to be an absolute. You want Spirit to be democratic progress.”
“I hope we are agreed in our conviction that Spirit, however absolute it may be, can never become the advocate of reactionary forces.”
“Nevertheless, it is always the advocate of freedom.”
“Nevertheless? Freedom is the law of brotherly love, not of nihilism and malice.”
“Both of which you apparently fear.”
Settembrini flung an arm in the air. The skirmish broke off. Joachim looked in bewilderment from one to the other, and Hans Castorp raised his eyebrows and gazed down at his path. Naphta’s words had been caustic, apodictic—even though it was he who had defended a larger definition of freedom. Particularly unpleasant was the way he contradicted you with his “False!”—thrusting his lips forward at the final s and then closing them to a pucker. Settembrini had countered him in jaunty fashion for the most part, but had also added considerable warmth to his remarks, whenever he exhorted his opponent to agreement on certain fundamental points, for instance. But now that Naphta had fallen silent, the Italian began to provide the cousins with explanations of who this stranger was—explanations he assumed they might very well need in the wake of his debate with Naphta. And the latter let him proceed and paid little attention. He was professor of classical languages for advanced students at the Fridericianum, Settembrini declared, emphasizing the title of the introductee with great pomposity, the way Italians do. Naphta’s fate was much the same as his, Settembrini’s, own. His health had brought him up here five years before, and having discovered that his stay would be a long one, he had left the sanatorium and taken private lodgings with Lukaček, the ladies’ tailor. A brilliant Latinist—having been educated in a school run by a religious order, as he put it rather vaguely—he had very wisely secured himself a position as an instructor at the local secondary school, and did great credit to that institution. In brief, Settembrini did not stint in his praise of ugly Herr Naphta, despite the rather abstract argument they had just had—a dispute that would very soon be t
aken up again.
Settembrini now went on to offer Herr Naphta some information about the cousins, from which it became apparent that he had previously told him about these young men. This, then, was the young engineer who had come to visit for three weeks, only to have Director Behrens discover a moist spot; and this young hope of the Prussian military was Lieutenant Ziemssen. And he spoke of Joachim’s general disgust and plans to depart—and made sure to add that one would doubtless be doing the engineer a disservice if one did not ascribe to him the same impatience to return to his work.
Naphta made a wry face and said, “The gentlemen have an eloquent advocate. Far be it from me to doubt that he has aptly interpreted your thoughts and wishes. Work, work—beg your pardon, but he is about to chide me as an enemy of mankind, an inimicus humanae naturae, for daring to recall a time when his fanfare to labor would not have achieved its accustomed effect—a time, that is, when the opposite of his ideal was held in incomparably higher esteem. Bernard of Clairvaux, for instance, taught about a ladder of perfection unlike anything Herr Lodovico has ever conceived in his wildest dreams. Would you like to hear about it? His lowest rung was found at the ‘treadmill,’ the second in the ‘plowed field,’ the third and most praiseworthy, however—now don’t listen to this part, Settembrini—was ‘a bed of rest.’ The treadmill is the symbol of life in the world—not badly chosen, I must say. The plowed field represents the soul of worldly man, where preachers and spiritual teachers labor—already a more honorable level. The bed, however—”
“Enough! We know!” Settembrini cried. “Gentlemen, he will now describe for you the purpose and use of the libertine’s couch.”
“I did not know you were such a prude, Lodovico. After all, I’ve seen you wink at the girls. Where’s your pagan open-mindedness? The bed, then, is the place where lover and beloved cohabit, a symbol of contemplative retreat from the world and its creatures for the purpose of cohabitation with God.”