“You could say that,” Joachim said, musing. “But then again, there’s a kind of pride about him, with no hint of anything disorderly, quite the contrary. He’s a man with a lot of self-respect, or better, respect for people in general, and I like that about him, there’s something decent about that, as I see it.”
“You’re right,” Hans Castorp said. “There’s even something rigorous about him. It often makes you quite uneasy because you feel, let’s call it, controlled—controlled, that’s not a bad word for it. Would you believe that I had the definite feeling that he didn’t approve of my having bought those blankets for the rest cure, was against it and ridiculed it somehow?”
“No,” Joachim replied in composed surprise. “How could that be? I really can’t imagine it.” And then he headed off for his rest cure, lock, stock, and thermometer, while Hans Castorp began to wash and change for dinner—it was less than an hour away.
EXCURSUS ON THE SENSE OF TIME
When they came back up from their meal, the package of blankets was lying on a chair in Hans Castorp’s room, and he made use of them that day for the first time. Joachim, as the expert, gave him lessons in the art of wrapping oneself the way they all did it up here, something every novice had to learn right off. You spread the blankets, first one, then the other, over the frame of the lounge chair, but so that a long piece was left dangling to the floor at the foot. Then you sat down and began to wrap the top one around you, first flinging it lengthwise all the way up to under the armpit, then tucking the bottom up over the feet—and for that you had to sit up, bend forward, and grab the fold with both hands—and finally tugging the other side over, making sure that the double foot-tuck fit tight against both sides to form the smoothest and most regular package possible. And then you followed the same procedure with the second blanket—but it was more difficult to handle, and as a bungling beginner Hans Castorp groaned quite a bit while he bent forward and reached out to practice the moves as he was taught them. Only a very few old veterans, Joachim said, were able to fling both blankets around them at once in three deft motions, but that was a rare and coveted skill, which demanded not only years of practice, but also a natural predisposition. And Hans Castorp had to laugh at that word as he leaned back with aching muscles.
Joachim did not understand what was so funny and gazed at him uncertainly, but then joined in the laughter. “So then,” he said—as Hans Castorp, exhausted from all these gymnastics, lay there a solid, unbroken cylinder, the pliant roll tucked behind his neck—“it could be five below now and it wouldn’t matter.” And then he ducked behind the glass partition to wrap himself up as well.
Hans Castorp doubted what he had said about five below, because he was definitely freezing, and he kept shivering as he gazed through the wooden arches into the damp, trickling drizzle out there, which seemed to threaten to turn to snow again at any moment. How strange, too, that despite the wet, his cheeks still felt so hot and dry, as if he were sitting in an overheated room. And he felt absurdly frazzled from the practice session with his blankets—in fact, when he now looked down at Ocean Steamships, it lay trembling in his hands. He was not so terribly healthy after all—totally anemic, just as Director Behrens had said, and that was probably why he tended to chill so easily. These unpleasant sensations, however, were counterbalanced by the comfortable position furnished by the lounge chair and its almost mysterious properties, which Hans Castorp found difficult to analyze but which had found his highest approval from the very first and had stood the test again and again. Whether it was the texture of the cushions, the perfect slant of the back support, the proper height and width of the armrests, or simply the practical consistency of the neck roll—whatever it was, nothing could possibly have offered more humane benefits for a body at rest than this splendid lounge chair. And so Hans Castorp’s heart was filled with contentment at the thought that before him lay two empty, safely serene hours: the main rest cure, sacred to the rules of the house. Although he was only a visiting guest up here, he, too, found it to be a very suitable arrangement. For he was a patient man by nature, who could spend long hours doing nothing in particular and loved, as we recall, his leisure time, with no numbing activity to demolish, banish, or overwhelm it. At four there would be afternoon tea with cake and preserves, followed by a little exercise outdoors, and then he would come back up here to rest in the lounge chair again, with supper at seven—which, like all the meals, brought with it certain sights and tensions that he looked forward to—and afterward a peep or two into the stereoscopic viewer, the kaleidoscopic tube, or the cinematographic drum. Hans Castorp had the daily schedule down pat, though it would perhaps be too much to say that he had now “settled in,” as the expression goes.
Ultimately, there is something odd about settling in somewhere new—about the perhaps laborious process of getting used to new surroundings and fitting in, a task we undertake almost for its own sake and with the definite intention of abandoning the place again as soon as it is accomplished, or shortly thereafter, and returning to our previous state. We insert that sort of thing into the mainstream of our lives as a kind of interruption or interlude, for the purpose of “recreation,” which is to say: a refreshing, revitalizing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life, of languishing and growing indifferent. And what is the cause of the enervation and apathy that arise when the rules of life are not abrogated from time to time? It is not so much the physical and mental exhaustion and abrasion that come with the challenges of life (for these, in fact, simple rest would be the best medicine); the cause is, rather, something psychological, our very sense of time itself—which, if it flows with uninterrupted regularity, threatens to elude us and which is so closely related to and bound up with our sense of life that the one sense cannot be weakened without the second’s experiencing pain and injury. A great many false ideas have been spread about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that by filling time with things new and interesting, we can make it “pass,” by which we mean “shorten” it; monotony and emptiness, however, are said to weigh down and hinder its passage. This is not true under all conditions. Emptiness and monotony may stretch a moment or even an hour and make it “boring,” but they can likewise abbreviate and dissolve large, indeed the largest units of time, until they seem nothing at all. Conversely, rich and interesting events are capable of filling time, until hours, even days, are shortened and speed past on wings; whereas on a larger scale, interest lends the passage of time breadth, solidity, and weight, so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than do paltry, bare, featherweight years that are blown before the wind and are gone. What people call boredom is actually an abnormal compression of time caused by monotony—uninterrupted uniformity can shrink large spaces of time until the heart falters, terrified to death. When one day is like every other, then all days are like one, and perfect homogeneity would make the longest life seem very short, as if it had flown by in a twinkling. Habit arises when our sense of time falls asleep, or at least, grows dull; and if the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air, for a trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes. The first few days in a new place have a youthful swing to them, a kind of sturdy, long stride—that lasts for about six to eight days. Then, to the extent that we “settle in,” the gradual shortening becomes noticeable. Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week—of, let us say, four—is uncanny in its fleeting transience. To be sure, this ref
reshment of our sense of time extends beyond the interlude; its effect is noticeable again when we return to our daily routine. The first few days at home after a change of scene are likewise experienced in a new, broad, more youthful fashion—but only a very few, for we are quicker to grow accustomed to the old rules than to their abrogation. And if our sense of time has grown weary with age or was never all that strongly developed—a sign of an inborn lack of vitality—it very soon falls asleep again, and within twenty-four hours it is as if we were never gone and our journey were merely last night’s dream.
These remarks are inserted here only because young Hans Castorp had something similar in mind when, after a few days, he said to his cousin (while gazing at him with bloodshot eyes), “I’ve always found it odd, still do, how time seems to go slowly in a strange place at first. What I mean is, of course there’s no question of my being bored here, quite the contrary—I can assure you that I’m amusing myself royally. But when I look back, retrospectively as it were—you know what I mean?—it seems as if I’ve been up here for who knows how long already, and that it’s been an eternity since I first arrived and didn’t quite understand right off that I actually had, until you said, ‘This is where you get off!’—do you remember? It has absolutely nothing to do with reason or with measurements of time—it’s purely a matter of feeling. Of course it would be absurd to say, ‘It’s as if I’d been here two months already’—that would be pure nonsense. All I really can say is ‘a very long time.’ ”
“Yes,” Joachim replied, a thermometer in his mouth, “it’s good for me, too. Since you’ve been here, I feel as if I have you to hold on to, so to speak.” And Hans Castorp laughed at the way Joachim said this so straight-out, without any explanation.
HE TRIES OUT HIS CONVERSATIONAL FRENCH
No, he had not actually settled in yet, neither in terms of his intimacy with life here in all its peculiarities—an intimacy it would be impossible to gain in so few days, or as he told himself (and admitted quite candidly to Joachim), in three weeks, sad to say—nor as regarded the adaptation of his organism to the very peculiar atmospheric conditions found among “the people up here,” because it seemed to him that his physical adjustment was proceeding only painfully, very painfully, if indeed at all.
The normal day was carefully organized and neatly divided into its
constituent parts; one quickly fell in with the routine and learned to move with its turning gears. In the framework of a week or larger units of time, however, there were certain recurring deviations that made their appearance little by little—one variation might appear, for instance, only after another had already repeated itself. And even in terms of the objects and faces that made up the details of a day, Hans Castorp had to learn at every step to take a closer, less casual look at accustomed facts and faces and assimilate new things with youthful receptivity.
Those balloon-shaped containers with short necks, for example, which were set out beside the doors in the corridor and which had caught his eye on the evening of his arrival—Joachim explained about them when he asked. They held pure oxygen, for six francs the demijohn, and the stimulating gas was provided to dying patients in order to help preserve their energies and rouse them one last time—it was sipped through a rubber hose. And behind the doors where these potbellied containers stood lay the dying or the moribundi, as Director Behrens called them one day, when Hans Castorp chanced to meet him on the second floor—just as the purple-cheeked director in his white smock came rowing down the corridor. They walked down to the next floor together.
“Well, my innocent bystander,” Behrens said, “what are you up to, have we found favor in your searching eyes? We are honored, we are honored. Yes, our summer season’s quite the thing, of very good parentage. It cost me a pretty penny to puff it a bit, too. But what a shame, really, that you don’t want to stay through the winter with us—want to spend a mere eight weeks, I’ve heard, correct? Oh, three? But that’s just dropping by, not even worth taking off your hat and coat. Well, just as you like. But it really is a shame that you’ll not be spending the winter, because the crème de la crème”—he made a joke of his outrageous pronunciation—“the international crème de la crème down in Platz doesn’t arrive until winter, and you really must see them, just for educational purposes. Split your sides, watching these lads leaping about on planks tied to their feet. And the ladies—Lord, Lord, the ladies! Regular birds of paradise, I tell you, and eminently amorous. Well, now I have to attend to my moribundus,” he said, “in room twenty-seven here. Last stage, you know. Exit up center. He’s downed five dozen fiascoes between yesterday and today, the guzzler. But he will probably be joining his ancestors by noon. Well, my dear Reuter,” he said, stepping into the room, “how would it be if we crack another bottle . . .” His words were lost behind the door as he closed it. But for a moment Hans Castorp could see across the room to a waxen profile against pillows, a young man with a sparse goatee, who slowly rolled his very large eyes toward the door.
This was the first moribundus that Hans Castorp had ever seen in his life, inasmuch as both his parents and his grandfather had died behind his back, so to speak. What dignity in the way the young man laid his head against the pillows, his goatee jutting upward. What meaning in the gaze of those huge eyes as he turned them slowly toward the door. Returning to the stairway now, still absorbed in that fleeting glimpse, Hans Castorp instinctively tried to make the same large, meaningful, and deliberate eyes as those:-of the dying man; and it was with that look that he greeted a lady who had emerged from a door behind him and caught up with him now at the head of the stairs. He did not realize at once that it was Madame Chauchat. She smiled wanly at the eyes he was making, put a hand to the braid at the back of her head, and preceded him down the stairs—soundlessly, supplely, her head thrust slightly forward.
He made almost no new acquaintances in those first days, and not for some time afterward, either. On the whole, the daily routine was not conducive to it. Reserved by nature in any case, Hans Castorp felt that he was merely a visitor here, an “innocent bystander,” as Director Behrens had put it, and so for the most part he was quite content with Joachim’s conversation and company. To be sure, the nurse on their corridor kept craning her neck as they passed, until Joachim, who had stopped to chat with her on occasion before, introduced her to his cousin. The cord of her pince-nez tucked behind her ear, she spoke with an affectation that was absolutely excruciating, and from up close, one had the impression of a woman whose reason had long suffered the tortures of boredom. It was very difficult to get away from her, because she displayed an almost pathological fear of a conversation’s drawing to a close; and as soon as the young men assumed an air of wanting to move on, she would cling to them with hasty words and looks and a desperate little smile, until they took pity on her and stood there a while longer. She spoke at great length about her papa, the lawyer, and her cousin, the doctor—apparently to cast herself in a favorable light and to indicate that she came from the educated strata of society. As for the patient she tended behind the closed door there, he was the son of a doll-manufacturer in Coburg, Rotbein was the name—and recently it had spread to young Fritz’s intestines as well. That made things hard for everyone involved, as she was sure the gentlemen could well understand, particularly hard if one came from an academic household and possessed the sensitivities of the upper classes. One dared not turn one’s back for a moment. And recently, if the gentlemen could believe it, when she returned from having gone out for just a moment, merely to purchase some tooth powder, she found her patient sitting up in bed, with a glass of dark, heavy beer, a salami, a piece of coarse rye bread, and a pickle, all spread out before him. His relatives had sent him these homey delicacies to help him build up some strength. But the next day, of course, he had been more dead than alive. He was hastening his own demise. And that would in fact be a release, but only for him, not for her—Sister Berta was her name, by the way, or more accurately, Alfreda Schildkn
echt—because she would only move on then to another patient in a more or less advanced stage of the illness, here or at some other sanatorium. Such were her prospects, and no others would ever open before her.
Yes, Hans Castorp said, her profession was certainly difficult, but it did have its satisfactions, or so he would presume.
Certainly, she replied, there were satisfactions, although it was very difficult.
Well, their best wishes for Herr Rotbein. And the cousins made to go.
But she clung to them with words and looks, and her exertions, as she tried to hold on to the young men for just a while longer, were so pitiful to watch that it would have been cruel not to grant her a little more time.
“He’s sleeping,” she said. “He doesn’t need me. I stepped into the hall for just a few minutes.” And she began to complain about Director Behrens and the tone of voice he used with her—all too offhand, considering her background. She much preferred Dr. Krokowski—she found him so full of soul. Then she came back around to her papa and her cousin. Her brain would yield nothing more. In vain she grappled to find something to hold the cousins still longer, and as they started to go, she suddenly made another running leap at them, raising her voice almost to a shriek—they escaped and went their way. But the nurse gazed after them for a long time, her body bent forward, her eyes following them as if she hoped to suck them back to her. Then she heaved a great sigh and returned to her patient in his room.