The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  It was agreed that Joachim should be returned home, and the Berghof took care of all arrangements necessary for the transport and whatever else seemed fitting and stately. His mother and cousin barely had to lift a finger. By morning, Joachim lay on his bed dressed in a ruffled shirt and with flowers placed beside him, and in the bright light reflected off the snow he looked even more handsome than he had at his passing. Every trace of strain was gone from his face; it had stiffened as it turned cold and was now pure, silent form. Little dark curls fell down across his immobile, yellowish brow, which looked as if it were made of some noble, yet delicate material halfway between wax and marble, and the arch of his lips was full and proud under his slightly curly moustache. An antique helmet would have looked good on that head, as was noted by several visitors who came by to say farewell.

  Frau Stöhr wept with enthusiasm at the sight of what had once been Joachim. “A hero! A hero!” she cried several times and demanded that they play Beethoven’s Erotica at his graveside.

  “Silence!” Settembrini hissed in her direction. Both he and Naphta were in the room with her, and he was sincerely moved. He gestured with both hands for those present to look at Joachim, insisting they mourn with him. “Un giovanotto tanto simpatico, tanto stimabile!” he exclaimed over and over.

  Naphta did not look up from his own constrained pose, but he could not refrain from whispering a cutting remark in Settembrini’s direction: “I’m glad to see you have feelings not just for freedom and progress, but for serious matters as well.”

  Settembrini swallowed the insult. Perhaps he felt that under the circumstances Naphta was temporarily in a superior position; perhaps it was this momentary supremacy of his foe that he had been attempting to counter with lively expressions of grief and that now silenced him—and kept him silent when Leo Naphta exploited his fleeting advantage by declaring with caustic sententiousness: “The error of literary men is to believe that only the Spirit makes us respectable. The opposite is closer to the truth. Only where there is no Spirit are we respectable.”

  “Well,” Hans Castorp thought, “there’s a Delphic remark for you. And if you purse your lips tight after delivering it, that will certainly intimidate everyone for a bit.”

  That afternoon the metal coffin arrived. Joachim’s transfer into this stately container trimmed with rings and lion’s heads was strictly a one-man job, or so the fellow who brought it claimed, an associate of the undertaking establishment that had been hired, who was dressed in a short, black frock coat and wore a wedding ring on his plebeian hand, the yellow circlet embedded deep in flesh, which had, so to speak, overgrown it. One might have been tempted to think his frock coat gave off a grisly odor, but that would have been pure prejudice. The man made it clear, however, that he fancied himself a specialist whose activities had to take place backstage, with only the results of his endeavors displayed for pious review by the bereaved—all of which aroused Hans Castorp’s mistrust. This was not at all what he had in mind. He agreed that Frau Ziemssen should withdraw, but refused to bow out himself and stayed behind to lend a hand; he grabbed the body under the armpits and helped transfer it from bed to coffin, where Joachim’s remains then lay solemnly bedded atop linen sheets and a tasseled pillow, with candelabra provided by the Berghof set on either side.

  Two days later, however, something occurred to convince Hans Castorp to detach himself emotionally from this shell and leave things to the professional, that offensive guardian of piety. Joachim, whose expression so far had been earnest and honorable, began to smile under his beard. Hans Castorp could not help admitting that this smile bore within it the seeds of degeneration—and it filled his heart with a sense of haste. Thank God, the body would soon be picked up, the coffin closed and screwed shut. Setting aside his native reserve, Hans Castorp touched his lips in a gesture of tender farewell to the stone-cold brow of what had once been Joachim, and despite his misgivings, turned his back on the undertaker and meekly followed Luise Ziemssen out of the room.

  We let the curtain fall now, to rise but one more time. But while it rustles to the floor, we wish to join Hans Castorp, left behind on those distant heights, as he gazes in his mind down on a wet garden of crosses in the lowlands, watches a sword flash and then lower, hears barked commands and the three volleys that follow, the three fervent rounds of honor bursting above Joachim Ziemssen’s soldier’s grave, thick with matted roots.

  CHAPTER 7

  A STROLL BY THE SHORE

  Can one narrate time—time as such, in and of itself? Most certainly not, what a foolish undertaking that would be. The story would go: “Time passed, ran on, flowed in a mighty stream,” and on and on in the same vein. No one with any common sense could call that a narrative. It would be the same as if someone took the harebrained notion of holding a single note or chord for hours on end—and called it music. Because a story is like music in that it fills time, “fills it up so nice and properly,” “divides it up,” so that there is “something to it,” “something going on”—to quote, with the melancholy reverence one shows to statements made by the dead, a few casual comments of the late Joachim, phrases that faded away long ago, and we are not sure if the reader is quite clear just how long ago that was. Time is the element of narration, just as it is the element of life—is inextricably bound up with it, as bodies are in space. It is also the element of music, which itself measures and divides time, making it suddenly diverting and precious; and related to music, as we have noted, is the story, which also can only present itself in successive events, as movement toward an end (and not as something suddenly, brilliantly present, like a work of visual art, which is pure body bound to time), and even if it would try to be totally here in each moment, would still need time for its presentation.

  That much is perfectly obvious. But that there is a difference is equally clear. The time element of music is singular: a segment of human earthly existence in which it gushes forth, thereby ineffably enhancing and ennobling life. Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative’s imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years. A musical piece entitled “Five Minute Waltz” lasts five minutes—this and only this defines its relationship to time. A story whose contents involved a time span of five minutes, however, could, by means of an extraordinary scrupulosity in filling up those five minutes, last a thousand times as long—and still remain short on boredom, although in relationship to its imaginary time it would be very long in the telling. On the other hand, it is possible for a narrative’s content-time to exceed its own duration immeasurably. This is accomplished by diminishment—and we use this term to describe an illusory, or, to be quite explicit, diseased element, that is obviously pertinent here: diminishment occurs to some extent whenever a narrative makes use of hermetic magic and a temporal hyperperspective reminiscent of certain anomalous experiences of reality that imply that the senses have been transcended. The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person’s dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man’s ability to experience time—dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoker puts it, the intoxicated user’s brain seems “to have had something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch.”

  A narrative, then, can set to work and deal with time in much the same way as those depraved dreams. But since it can “deal” with time, it is clear that time, which is the element of the narrative, can also become its subject; and although it would be going too far to say that one can “narrate time,” it is apparently not such an a
bsurd notion to want to narrate about time—so that a term like “time novel” may well take on an oddly dreamlike double meaning. And indeed we posed the question about whether one could narrate time precisely in order to say that we actually have something like that in mind with this ongoing story. And in touching upon the wider question of whether those gathered around us were quite clear about how long it had actually been since the now-deceased, honor-loving Joachim wove those comments about time and music into a conversation (which in fact revealed a certain alchemistic enhancement of his own character, since such remarks were not part of his upright nature), we would hardly have been irritated to learn that our readers really were no longer quite clear about the matter at the moment—hardly irritated, indeed we would be content, for the simple reason that a general sympathy for our hero and his experiences naturally lies in our own interest. And he, Hans Castorp, was not quite certain about the matter himself, and had not been for a good while. That uncertainty is very much part of his novel, a “time novel”—whether taken in one sense or the other.

  How long had Joachim actually lived up here with him, whether measured until his wild departure or taken as a whole? What had been the date on the calendar of his first defiant departure? How long had he been gone, when had he returned, and how long had Hans Castorp himself been here when he did return and then took leave of time? How long, to set Joachim aside for now, had Frau Chauchat not been present? How long, purely in terms of years, was it now since she was back again (because she was back again); and how much earthly time had Hans Castorp spent at the Berghof until the day she came back? In response to all such questions—assuming someone had posed them to him, which, however, no one did, not even he to himself, for he was probably afraid of posing them—Hans Castorp would have drummed his fingertips on his brow and most assuredly known no definite answer: a phenomenon no less disquieting than the temporary inability to tell Herr Settembrini his own age on his first evening here; indeed, it represented a worsening of that incapacity, for he now seriously no longer knew at any time just how old he was.

  That may sound bizarre, but it is far from improbable or unprecedented, and given certain conditions it can happen to any of us at any time; under such conditions, nothing could prevent us from sinking into profound ignorance about the passage of time and so about our own age. The phenomenon is possible because we lack an internal organ for time, because, that is, if left on our own without external clues, we are totally incapable of even approximate reliability when estimating elapsed time. A group of miners buried by a cave-in, and cut off from observing the sequence of day and night, were rescued at last and guessed the period of time they had spent in the dark, between hope and despair, at three days. And it had been ten. One would think that in such an agonizing situation time would have had to have seemed longer to them. And yet it had shrunk to less than a third of its objective proportions. And judging from that, it appears that under confusing conditions, man in his helplessness tends to experience time in a greatly diminished form rather than to overestimate it.

  No one disputes, of course, that it would have been no great burden for Hans Castorp, had he truly wanted, to reckon his way out of ignorance and into clarity, just as any reader can do with no great difficulty if he should feel that this blurred, tangled web offends his common sense. As for Hans Castorp, he did not feel all that at ease with the blurry tangle, perhaps; but he was not about to waste any exertion wrestling himself free in order to determine how old he had now become up here. What held him back were scruples of conscience—although it was patently most unconscionable to pay no attention to time.

  We do not know if he should be exonerated because circumstances favored his lack of good intentions—that is, if one chooses not to speak of his bad intentions. Frau Chauchat’s return (and her return had been very different from anything Hans Castorp had dreamed—but of that at the appropriate time) had coincided with a return of the season of Advent and the year’s shortest days; the beginning of winter, astronomically speaking, had been imminent. In reality, however—that is, apart from any theoretical system—in terms of snow and cold, it had been winter now for God knew how long; winter had been interrupted, as always, only very briefly by scorching summer days with a sky whose blue was so inordinately deep that it verged on black—by summer days, then, that could occur in the midst of winter, too, if you ignored the snow, which, by the by, could also fall at any time during summer. How often Hans Castorp had chatted with the late Joachim about the grand confusion that mixed up the seasons higgledy-piggledy, robbing the year of its divisions and making it diverting in a boring sort of way, or boring in a diverting sort of way, until, as the late Joachim had put it out of pure disgust early on, there was no time as such. What got mixed up so higgledy-piggledy in this grand confusion were those emotional concepts and states of consciousness that define “still” and “again”—which is one of the most bewildering, perplexing, and bewitching experiences there is. And from his very first day up here Hans Castorp had felt an immoral appetite to taste that experience—in particular at the five prodigious meals in the cheerfully stenciled dining hall, where he had had his first slight, and relatively innocent, dizzy spell of this sort.

  Since then, this deception of mind and senses had assumed much larger dimensions. Time, although the subjective experience of it may be weakened or even abrogated, is an objective reality to the extent that it is active and “brings forth.” Are hermetically sealed preserves on the shelf outside of time? That is a question for the professional philosopher—and it was only out of youthful presumption that Hans Castorp had got himself mixed up in the topic. We do know that time does its work even on a hibernating dormouse. A physician has attested to the case of a twelve-year-old girl who fell asleep one day, and remained asleep for thirteen years—during that time, however, she did not remain a twelve-year-old girl, but grew into an adult female. How could it be otherwise? The dead man is dead and has left our temporal world behind; he has a lot of time, which is to say, he has none at all—personally speaking. That does not prevent his nails and hair from growing, or that all in all—but we shall not repeat the slang idiom that Joachim once used in this same context and that at the time offended Hans Castorp’s flatland sensitivities. His hair and nails were growing, too, growing quickly it seemed, because a fringe of hair kept overlapping the edges of the ears; and he frequently sat, a white cape wrapped around him, in the adjustable chair in the barber shop on the main street of Dorf and had his hair cut—he was forever sitting there, it seemed. Or rather, when Hans Castorp sat there and chatted away with the fawning barber deftly doing his work, after time had done its, or when he stood at his balcony door and cut his nails with the shears and file he had taken from a pretty velvet etui, he was suddenly overcome with the old dizziness that was mixed with a scary sense of curious delight, an ambiguous dizziness that made him feel not only unsteady, but also beguiled by his whirling inability to differentiate between “still” and “again,” out of whose blurred jumble emerge the timeless “always” and “ever.”

  We have often declared that we do not wish to make him any better or any worse than he was, and so we do not want to hide the fact that he frequently took countermeasures to try to atone for the reprehensible pleasure he found in mystic disturbances that he quite consciously and intentionally elicited himself. He would sit, his watch open in his hand—his flat, smooth gold pocket watch with his monogram engraved on its spring case—and look down at its round porcelain surface encircled with a double row of black and red Arabic numerals, at the two splendid delicately ornamented golden hands spreading in different directions, and at the slender second hand busily pecking its way around its own special circle. Hans Castorp would gaze steadily at it, trying to slow and expand a few minutes, to hold time by the tail. The little hand tripped along paying no heed to the numerals as it came up on them, touched and passed them, left them behind, far behind, and returned to come up on them again. It had no sense o
f goals, segments, measurements. It could have stopped at the 60 for a moment or at least given some tiny signal that something had been accomplished. But from the way it quickly moved past it, treating it no differently than any unnumbered mark, it was evident that the whole set of numerals and strokes had only been laid under its path, and that it just kept going, and going. And so Hans Castorp would slip this product of the jeweler’s art back into his vest pocket and let time take care of itself.

  How can we help principled flatlanders understand the changes taking place in our young adventurer’s interior economy? The scope of his dizzying equations grew. Where previously, by yielding just slightly, he had not found it easy to separate the “now” of today from that of yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or the day before that, when all were alike as peas in a pod, of late that same “now” was apt, even likely, to muddle its present with a present that had prevailed a month or a year before, and to fuse into an “always.” But since his moral states of consciousness kept “still,” “again,” and “next” separate to some extent, the temptation grew to expand relational terms like “yesterday” and “tomorrow”—words by which “today” holds the past and the future at arm’s length—and to apply them to still larger contexts. It is not difficult to imagine creatures, on smaller planets perhaps, who administer a miniaturized time and for whose “short” life the nimble, mincing steps of our second hand possess the dogged spatial frugality of an hour hand. But it is also possible to imagine creatures whose space requires time to move at a pace so monumental that in their experience our terms for describing intervals like “just now” and “in a bit” acquire the vastly expanded meaning of “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” That would be, we repeat, not only possible, but when viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativism a la “when in Rome,” it might also be considered legitimate, healthy, and respectable. But what should one think of a son of this earth—at an age, moreover, when a day, a week, a month, a semester should play an important role in life and bring a great many changes and much progress—who one day acquires the disgraceful habit, or at least yields occasionally to the pleasure, of saying “yesterday” for “a year ago” and “tomorrow” for “a year from now”? There is no doubt that it would be appropriate to judge him as “lost and confused” and worthy of our gravest concern.