The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Had not the Morning Star been a regular military academy, whose pupils, divided into “divisions,” were honorably exhorted to spiritual-military bienséance—a combination “stiff collar” and “Spanish ruff,” if one could put it that way? Ideas of honor and excellence played a significant role in Joachim’s profession—and were equally conspicuous, Hans Castorp thought, in the order in which Naphta had unfortunately been unable to advance very far due to illness. Listening to him, one might believe that the order consisted of nothing but very ambitious officers inspired by a single thought: to make their mark—insignes esse, as the Latin had it. According to the teaching and rules of its founder and first general, the Spaniard Loyola, they accomplished more and served more splendidly than those who acted purely out of common sense. Rather, they accomplished their work above and beyond the call of duty (ex supererogatione), not only by resisting the insurrections of the flesh (rebellioni carnis), which was, after all, the task of every man of average common sense, but also by doing battle against every inclination of the senses, against both love of self and love of the world, against things that are normally permitted. Because in battling the enemy, to attack (agere contra) was better and more honorable than simply to defend oneself (resistere). Weaken the enemy and break him—those were the instructions in their field handbook; and here again its author, the Spaniard Loyola, was of one mind with Joachim’s own capitán general, the Prussian Frederick, whose rule of war was: “Attack! Attack!” “Jump into your enemy’s pants!” “Attaquez donc toujours!”

  But Naphta’s and Joachim’s worlds had something else special in common: their relationship to blood and the axiom that one should not refrain from shedding it. On that they were in fierce agreement—as worlds, as orders, as professions; and a child of peace found it worth his while to listen to Naphta talk about the martial monks of the Middle Ages, who, although ascetics to the point of exhaustion, were likewise filled with a spiritual lust for power and did not refrain from bloodshed in order to bring about the City of God and its transcendent world dominion; or about belligerent Knights Templar, who considered death in battle against unbelievers more meritorious than death in one’s bed and for whom slaying and being slain for the sake of Christ was no crime, but the highest glory. It helped if Settembrini was not present for such lectures. Otherwise, he played the role, as always, of the bothersome organ-grinder and trumpeted peace, even though he remained hardly averse to his holy, civilizing, patriotic war against Vienna—and Naphta, of course, was sure to repay such passion and weakness with sarcasm and disdain. In any case, whenever the Italian warmed to that cause, Naphta would champion a Christian world citizenship, claim every land and no land as his fatherland, and caustically recall the phrase of Nickel, a former general of the order, who declared patriotism “a plague and the surest death of Christian charity.”

  And, of course, what prompted Naphta to call patriotism a plague was asceticism—what all did he not subsume under that concept, what all, in his opinion, did not oppose asceticism and the kingdom of God! Not only our ties to family and homeland did so, but also those to health and life. Asceticism was even his basis for reproaching the humanist whenever he trumpeted peace and happiness; Naphta would belligerently accuse him to his face of love of the flesh (amor carnalis) and love of physical comfort (commodorum corporis), call it utter bourgeois irreligion to ascribe the least value to life and health.

  Then there was the great colloquy on health and sickness, which arose out of differences that became apparent one day, very close to Christmas, as they walked through the snow to Platz and back. They all took part: Settembrini, Naphta, Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal—all of them slightly feverish, frequently shivering in the Alpine chill, numbed and excited by the walk and the discussion; and, whether, like Naphta and Settembrini, they participated more actively or merely followed the conversation and broke in with only brief remarks, they were all so avidly involved that they often forgot where they were and stopped to form a deeply engrossed, gesticulating group, all speaking at once and blocking the walkway, unconcerned about strangers who had to detour around them or stopped to lend an ear, listening in astonishment to such extravagant talk.

  Actually the dispute had started over Karen Karstedt—poor Karen with the open sores on her fingers, who had died recently. Hans Castorp had been unaware of her sudden turn for the worse and exitus; otherwise he would gladly have taken part in her burial, both out of friendship and his admitted love of funerals in general. But the local custom of discretion had meant that he learned of Karen’s demise too late and that she had already been placed in a permanent horizontal position, in the garden of the cupid whose snowy cap was cocked to one side. Requiem aeternam. He offered a few friendly words in her memory, which inspired Herr Settembrini to make sarcastic remarks about Hans’s charitable activities—his visits to Leila Gerngross, business-minded Rotbein, overblown Frau Zimmermann, the braggart son of Tous-les-deux, and the tormented Natalie von Mallinckrodt—and then went on to sneer at the expensive flowers with which the engineer had shown his devotion to such a totally wretched and ridiculous crew. Hans Castorp had then pointed out that those who had received his attentions, with the exception, for now, of Frau von Mallinckrodt and the lad named Teddy, were all quite dead; in response, Settembrini asked whether that made them any more respectable. There was such a thing, Hans Castorp replied, that one might call Christian reverence for human misery. And before Settembrini could rebuke him, Naphta began to speak of pious excesses of charity witnessed in the Middle Ages, amazing examples of fanaticism and ecstasy in the care of the sick—the daughters of kings had kissed the stinking wounds of lepers, with the express purpose of becoming infected, had called the ulcerated sores to which they exposed themselves “roses,” had drunk the water with which they had bathed those festering bodies, and had declared they had never drunk anything so tasty.

  Settembrini pretended he was going to vomit. It was less the sheer physical repulsiveness of such scenes and ideas that turned his stomach, he said, than the monstrous insanity evident in such a conception of active charity. And pulling himself up straight and regaining his serene dignity, he spoke about modern, progressive forms of humanitarian nursing, the slow, steady victory over epidemic disease, and went on to contrast such horrors with the achievements of medical science, hygiene, and social reforms.

  During the centuries he was talking about, Naphta responded, such decent bourgeois measures would have served neither side—would have been of no more use to the ill and suffering than to the healthy and happy, who had wanted to demonstrate their charity not so much out of compassion as out of the desire to save their own souls. Efficacious social reforms would have deprived the latter of the most important means of justification, and the former of their sanctified state. And so it had been in the interest of both parties to perpetuate poverty and illness, and that attitude had held as long as it had been possible to maintain a purely religious view of things.

  A squalid view of things, Settembrini asserted, and he felt himself almost above combating such an attitude. For the notion of a “sanctified state” or what the engineer had called “Christian reverence for misery”—though the phrase was surely not his own—was a fraud based on deception, on misplaced feelings, on a psychological blunder. The sympathy that the healthy person felt for someone who was ill, which could intensify to the point of awe, since he was unable to imagine how he could ever bear such suffering himself—such sympathy was utterly exaggerated. The sick person had no right to it. It was based on a misperception, a failure of imagination, because the healthy person was attributing his own mode of experience to the sick person, making of him, so to speak, a healthy person who had to bear the torments of sickness—a totally erroneous idea. The sick person was just that, sick, both by nature and in his mode of experience. Illness battered its victim until they got along with one another: the senses were diminished, there were lapses in consciousness, a merciful self-narcosis set in—all mean
s by which nature allowed the organism to find relief, to adapt mentally and morally to its condition, and which the healthy person naively forgot to take into account. A perfect example was this tubercular pack up here, with their frivolity, stupidity, depravity, their aversion to becoming healthy again. In short, if the sympathetic or awestruck healthy person were to become sick himself, to lose his health, he would soon see that illness is a state in and of itself, though certainly not an honorable one, and that he had been taking it all too seriously.

  At this, Anon Karlovitch Ferge flared up to defend his pleural shock against such sneers and slanders. What—taken his pleural shock too seriously? Well, thanks very much, but beg your pardon! His large Adam’s apple and his good-natured moustache bobbed up and down, and he demanded some respect be shown for what he had gone through. He was just an ordinary man, a traveling insurance agent, and higher things were utterly foreign to him—this conversation, in fact, was far beyond him. But if Herr Settembrini presumed to include pleural shock, for example, in what he had said—that ticklish hell with its sulfur stench and faints in three colors—then all he could say was thanks very, very much, but beg your pardon. There had not been a trace of diminished senses or merciful self-narcosis or failures of imagination, but only the biggest, crudest piece of filth on God’s green earth, and anyone who had not undergone that beastly experience as he had could not even begin to—

  “Oh my, oh my yes,” Settembrini said. Herr Ferge’s collapse was growing more and more glorious as time went on, until it had become almost a halo around his head. He, Settembrini, had little respect for sick people who felt entitled to other people’s admiration. He was himself more than a little ill; but without any affectation, he could say he was more inclined to be ashamed of the fact. In any case, his remarks had been impersonal, philosophical, and what he had said about the nature of the sick and the healthy, about the difference in their experiences, was a solid argument. The gentlemen had only to think of the mentally ill, of hallucinations, for example. If one of his companions, the good engineer or Herr Wehsal, for example, should happen to see his dead father sitting in the corner of his room at dusk that evening, see him look up and hear him speak—it would be absolutely horrible for the beholder, a dreadfully shocking, distressing experience, so disconcerting that he would doubt his own senses, his very reason, and feel he had to vacate his room as soon as possible and put himself under psychiatric care. Was that not so? But the joke was that this could not happen to any one of these gentlemen, because their minds were healthy. And if it ever should occur, then they would not be healthy, but sick, and instead of reacting like a healthy person, that is, turning tail and running in horror, they would think it quite normal, join in the conversation, the way people who hallucinate did. The belief that one would be healthy enough to regard one’s hallucination as a horror—that was the failure of imagination of which healthy people were guilty.

  Herr Settembrini spoke very graphically, very drolly, about the father in the corner. They all had to laugh, even Ferge, although he was still offended by the disparagement of his infernal adventure. The humanist then took advantage of this animated mood to explain further about how one ought to pay no attention to those who suffered from hallucinations, to pazzi in general, advancing the proposition that such people let themselves get carried away, quite illegitimately, and often had it within their power to control their madness, as he had himself observed on several visits to madhouses. Because whenever a doctor or a stranger appeared on the threshold, the hallucinating patient would usually cease grimacing, talking, and gesticulating and behave himself, as long as he knew he was being watched, letting himself go again only afterward. Letting oneself go, in fact, was doubtless a definition of madness in many cases, inasmuch as it was a way of fleeing from great affliction and served weak natures as a defense against the overpowering blows of fate, which such people felt they could not withstand in their right mind. But then anyone could use that excuse, so to speak; and he, Settembrini, had brought many a madman back to reality, at least temporarily, by confronting his fiddle-faddle with a pose of unrelenting reason.

  Naphta laughed scornfully, whereas Hans Castorp stated he believed every word Herr Settembrini had said. When he pictured him with his moustache, smiling and staring some feebleminded fellow directly in the eye, he could well understand why the poor man would have pulled himself together and given reality its due, however unwelcome a disturbance Herr Settembrini’s visit must have been for him. But Naphta had also visited madhouses, and he recalled having entered a “violent ward,” the kind of place that offered scenes and images for which, good God, Herr Settembrini’s reasonable stare and decorous influence would hardly have been a match. Grotesque images of horror and torment straight out of Dante: naked madmen living their lives squatting in tubs of water, in every pose of mental anguish and terrified stupor, some screaming aloud in lament, others with arms raised and mouths gaping as they burst with laughter—all the ingredients of hell merged in one.

  “Aha!” Herr Ferge said, and took the freedom of recalling the laughter that had burst from him as he had blacked out.

  And in short, Herr Settembrini’s unrelenting pedagogy could have packed its bags when confronted with those faces in the “violent ward,” on which a shudder of religious awe would have had a more humanizing effect than the sort of arrogant moralizing about reason with which this Most Worthy Knight of the Sun and Vicar of Solomon here had chosen to combat madness.

  Hans Castorp had no time to concern himself with the titles Naphta had bestowed upon Herr Settembrini. He hastily promised himself to probe the issue at the first opportunity. At the moment, however, their current discussion consumed his total attention, because Naphta now went on to discuss in caustic fashion the general biases that induced humanists to honor health on principle and dishonor and belittle sickness whenever possible—a position, however, that revealed a remarkable and almost praiseworthy self-abnegation on Herr Settembrini’s part, since he was himself ill. Such an attitude, which was no less faulty for all its dignity, arose from a regard and reverence for the body, which could only be justified if the body still existed in its original God-given state, rather than in a state of humiliation (in statu degradationis). For although created immortal, it had become subject to decay and abomination as part of the general impairment of nature brought about by Original Sin, was now mortal and corruptible, and should be regarded merely as a prison, the stocks in which the soul was entrapped, its sole purpose being to awaken within us a feeling of shame and confusion (pudoris et confusionis sensum), as Saint Ignatius had put it.

  The same feeling, as was well known, that the humanist Plotinus had expressed, Hans Castorp exclaimed. But flinging his arm high above his head, Herr Settembrini demanded he not confuse the two points of view, adding that the engineer would do better to remain receptive to ideas.

  Naphta now proceeded to prove that the awe in which the Christian Middle Ages had held the suffering human body was derived from religious affirmation in the face of the afflictions of the flesh. For festering sores were not only conspicuous reminders of the body’s sunken state, but also, in reflecting the venomous corruption of the soul, they awakened a desire for edifying spiritual compensation; whereas the bloom of health was a deceptive phenomenon, an offense to the conscience that it was best to disavow by bowing low in profound humility before human frailty. Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? That was the voice of the Spirit, and it would be the voice of true humanity for all eternity.

  No, that was a benighted voice, in Herr Settembrini’s opinion—which he delivered with much emotion. The voice of a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity had never risen. Yes indeed, his own body might be venomous, but he had kept his mind healthy and uninfected enough to defy Naphta’s priestly views concerning the body and to ridicule what he called the soul. He went so far as to celebrate the human body as the veritable temple of G
od, whereupon Naphta declared our stuff to be nothing more than a curtain between us and eternity, which resulted in Settembrini’s forbidding him ever to use the word “humanity” again—and so on.

  Faces numbed with cold, heads bare, but feet in rubber galoshes, they moved along the sidewalk, its deep layer of snow strewn with ashes and crunching underfoot, or plowed through looser mounds of snow in the road—Settembrini in his winter coat, its beaver collar and lapels worn so smooth and hard that it had a rather mangy look, though he wore it elegantly all the same; Naphta in a black, ankle-length coat that buttoned to the neck, fully lined with fur, but not so that anyone could see it. And as they moved along, they argued their principles with great personal urgency, although frequently they did not speak to one another, but instead each would turn to Hans Castorp to deliver his views, lecturing him, while pointing a head or thumb at the real opponent. Hans Castorp was trapped between them; turning his head back and forth, he would agree first with one, then with the other, or he would come to a stop, bending his body backward and gesticulating with a hand inside its fur-lined goatskin glove, and offer some opinion of his own—some highly unsatisfactory comment, of course; meanwhile Ferge and Wehsal circled the three of them, now walking in front, now behind, now forming a single row, until oncoming traffic broke the group up again.