The Magic Mountain

  It was a park that lay before him, just below the balcony where he was evidently standing—a wide, luxuriantly green park of hardwoods, of elms, planes, beeches, maples, birches, with subtle gradations in the colors of the full, fresh, glossy foliage. Their tops rustled gently in the breeze, and the air was perfumed with their delicate, moist balm. A warm shower passed over, but the rain was translucent. You could see high up into the sky, and the air was filled with a glistening rush of ripples. How beautiful! Oh, the breath of home, the scent and richness of the lowlands—he had gone so long without it. The air was full of birdcalls, of dainty, ardent, sweet piping, twittering, cooing, warbling, and sobbing, though not a single creature was to be seen. Hans Castorp smiled, took a deep, grateful breath. And meanwhile it all turned more beautiful still. A rainbow stretched across a flank of the landscape, a strong, perfectly formed arch, all its moist colors shimmering in pure splendor and flowing like rich oils down into the dense, lustrous green. It was like music, like the sound of harps, joined by flutes and violins. The surging of blue and violet was especially marvelous. And then it all merged and sank in a magical blur, was transformed, unfolded anew, grew more and more beautiful. It was just like a day many years before, when Hans Castorp had been privileged to hear a world-famous singer, an Italian tenor, from whose throat the power of grace-filled art had poured out over the hearts of men. He had held a high note—beautiful from the very first. And then gradually, from moment to moment, the passionate tone had opened up, swelled, unfolded, grown ever brighter and more radiant. It was as if veils, visible to no one before, were falling away one by one—and now the last, or so they thought, revealing the purest, most intense light, and then one more, the ultimate, and then, incredibly, the absolute last, releasing a glory shimmering with tears and a brilliance so lavish that a hollow sound of rapture had gone up from the audience, almost in protest and contradiction, it seemed, and even he, young Hans Castorp, had felt a sob well up within him. And it was the same with this landscape now, transforming itself, opening onto an ever-growing radiance. Blue floated. The glistening curtain of rain fell away—and there lay the sea, a sea, the Mediterranean, deep deep blue, sparkling with silver, a marvelously beautiful bay, opening to haze on one side and embraced on the other by mountain ranges receding to paler and paler blues, dotted with islands where towering palm trees grew or you saw the glint of little white houses set among groves of cypress. Oh, oh, enough, all so undeserved—what a bliss of light, of deep pure sky, of sun-drenched water. Hans Castorp had never seen it before, not even anything like it. He had never vacationed in the south, taken so much as a sip of it, knew only his own rough, pallid sea and clung to it with clumsy, childish emotion, but he had never reached the Mediterranean—Naples, Sicily, Greece. And yet he remembered it. Yes, it was that peculiar sense of recognition he celebrated now. “Ah, yes, that’s how it is!”—a cry went up within, as if he had always carried this blue sunshine now spreading before him secretly in his heart, hiding it even from himself. And this “always” was wide, infinitely wide, as wide as the sea there on his left, where the sky settled down upon it in soft violet hues.

  The line of the horizon lay high, its vastness seemed to climb—this was because Hans was gazing down on the bay from a considerable height. The mountains reached out on all sides, beginning with wooded foothills that ran down into the sea, then rising in a semicircle from a midpoint in the distance to where he was, and extending on behind him. It was a mountainous coast, and here he sat, crouching on sun-warmed stony steps; the ground fell away from him in tiers of moss-covered boulders and undergrowth, down to the level shoreline, where little harbors and ponds could be seen among reeds and shingled blue bays. And this whole sunny region—these easily scaled coastal heights, these laughing rock-bound pools, and the sea itself, as far as the islands where boats sailed past now and then—was populated in all directions: people, children of the sea and sun, were stirring and resting everywhere, intelligent, cheerful, beautiful, young humanity, so fair to gaze upon. And at the sight, Hans Castorp’s whole heart opened wide—painfully, lovingly wide.

  Lads exercised trotting, whinnying, head-tossing horses, ran beside them, one hand on the halter, tugged at their long bridles when they reared, or rode them bareback, naked heels drumming at the animals’ flanks, out into the sea—and then the muscles of the boys’ golden-tan backs played in the sunlight and the cries they exchanged or shouted to the horses sounded inexplicably enchanting. Maidens were dancing beside a bay that extended far inland and mirrored its shores like a mountain lake. One girl, her hair wound in a knot, but with a few, especially charming stray strands at the back of her neck, sat with her feet dangling in a little dell and played a shepherd’s pipe, her eyes gazing out over her capering fingers to her playmates dressed in long, loose robes, some of whom stood alone, smiling, arms spread wide, while others danced in couples, leaning against one another, temples sweetly touching; and at the piper’s back—bent to one side in a long, graceful, white curve because of the way she held her arms—still more of her sisters sat or stood together, embracing, watching, and talking quietly. Another group of young men were engaged in archery. What a happy, friendly sight it was—the way the older lads worked with the unskilled, curly-haired boys, helping them string their bows, showing them how to draw and take aim, supporting them when they reeled back laughing from the recoiling bow as the arrow left it with a whir. Still others were fishing. They lay on their stomachs across flat rocks along the shore; wiggling a leg in the air and holding a line down into the sea, one fellow would turn his head for a leisurely chat with his neighbor, who from the same odd angle stretched his body and threw his bait far out to sea. There was also a group busy dragging, pulling, and shoving a deep-drafted boat with mast and boom into the water. Children played and hooted among the breaking waves. A young woman lay stretched out on her back, gazing up and behind her; with one hand she clutched her flowered garment tight above her breasts and with the other reached into the air, demanding a twig with fruit, which a narrow-hipped lad standing at her head held out at arm’s length, teasing her. Some young people reclined in niches in the rocks, others hesitated at the edge of the pool, arms crossed, hands clutching their shoulders, testing the cool water with their toes. Couples strolled along the shore, and each lad’s lips were pressed to the ear of the girl he escorted. Longhaired goats leapt from ledge to ledge, watched over by a young shepherd, who stood farther up and wore a little hat cocked over his brown curls, the brim rolled up at the back; he leaned against his long staff, grasping it tightly in one hand, setting the other to his hip.

  “It’s all so very charming,” Hans Castorp thought, touched to the quick. “They’re all so pleasant, so winning. How pretty, healthy, clever, and happy they are. It’s not just their well-formed bodies—a cleverness and warmth comes from within them, too. That is what moves me, makes me love them so—the spirit and purpose, if I can put it that way, that lies at the basis of their being and allows them to live together like this.” What he meant was the vast friendliness, the courteous honesty common to all these sunny people in their dealings with one another; he meant the gentle reverence, which, though hidden beneath smiles, they showed one another at every turn, almost imperceptible and yet so evident in both the physical connections and the deep-seated ideals that bound them all; he meant the dignity, bordering on gravity, though totally fused with good cheer, which alone defined their every deed, an ineffable spiritual influence, earnest yet never gloomy, devout yet always reasonable—though not lacking a certain ceremonial quality. For there on a round, mossy stone, a young mother, dressed in a brown garment that fell away from one shoulder, sat nursing her child. And each person who passed offered her a special greeting that fully expressed what was so eloquently tacit in their general conduct—the young men turned to the mother and quickly, formally, lightly crossed their arms against their chests and bowed their heads with a smile; the maidens approached with just a hint of a curtsy, much like
the fleeting genuflection with which visitors honor the high altar in a church, but then made sure to add several energetic, cheerful, cordial nods. Their formal homage mixed with genial friendship, plus the deliberate mildness with which the mother looked up from her baby, while still helping him drink with gentle pressure from her forefinger, to acknowledge with a smile the reverence shown her—it all suffused Hans Castorp with rapture. He could not get his fill of gazing, and yet he asked himself anxiously if he was in fact allowed to gaze upon them, if it was not a punishable crime for an outsider—who felt so ugly and clumsy and base—to spy upon such sunny, civilized happiness.

  There seemed to be no objection. Just below where he was sitting, a pretty lad, with a full head of hair brushed to one side and falling down across his brow and temples, stood with his arms crossed on his chest a little distance away from his friends—not in sorrow or defiance, but merely casually off to one side. And the boy looked directly at him, turned his eyes up toward him, and, watching the watcher, his gaze passed back and forth between Hans Castorp and the scenes on the shore. Suddenly, however, he looked beyond and behind him, into the distance, and in a flash that smile of courteous, brotherly deference common to them all vanished from his beautiful, finely chiseled, almost childlike face, and, without so much as a frown, it took on a grave expression, an inscrutable blank look of deathlike reserve, as if it were made of stone—which hardly reassured Hans Castorp and sent a shiver of fear over him, tinged with a vague premonition as to what it might mean.

  He looked in the same direction. Towering behind him were huge columns, piled cylindrical blocks with no bases and with moss growing in the joints—the columns of a temple gate, and he was sitting on the open stairway that led to it. With a heavy heart he stood up and descended along one side of the stairs; entering the deep portal, he emerged onto a street paved with flagstones, which soon led him to other propylaea. He passed through them as well, and now the temple stood before him—its massive foundation was weathered a grayish green; a steep flight of stairs led up to the broad façade, its pediment resting on the capitals of powerful, squat, tapering columns; here and there a fluted, round block had slipped out of position and protruded slightly. Hans Castorp labored to climb the steep stairs, helping himself with his hands at times; sighing heavily to relieve the growing pressure around his heart, he now reached the forest of columns. It was very deep, and he walked among its rows as if in a grove of beech trees beside a pallid sea. He kept his distance from the middle of the temple, tried to avoid it. And yet he kept coming back to it, and now found himself at an opening in the rows of columns, before him a group of statuary: two stony female figures on a pedestal, a mother and daughter, it appeared. The one was seated—an older, dignified matron clad in a heavily pleated tunic and drape, a veil drawn over her wavy hair, her vacant, starless eyes truly mild and godlike, yet with a plaintive set to the brows; held in her maternal embrace, the other figure, a young woman with a round face, stood with arms and hands buried in the folds of her cloak.

  Hans Castorp stood gazing at the statues, and for some dark reason his heart grew even heavier with fear and foreboding. Hardly daring to risk it, he felt himself compelled to circle behind the figures and move on through the next double row of columns. The metal doors to the sanctuary stood open, and the poor man’s knees almost buckled under him at what he now saw. Two half-naked old women were busy at a ghastly chore among flickering braziers—their hair was gray and matted, their drooping witches’ breasts had tits long as fingers. They were dismembering a child held above a basin, tearing it apart with their bare hands in savage silence—Hans Castorp could see pale blond hair smeared with blood. They devoured it piece by piece, the brittle little bones cracking in their mouths, blood dripping from their vile lips. Hans Castorp was caught frozen in the gruesome, icy spell. He wanted to cover his eyes with his hands and could not. He wanted to flee and could not. They went on about their grisly work, but they had seen him now and shook bloody fists and damned him soundlessly with the filthiest, lewdest curses of his hometown dialect. He felt sick, sicker than he had ever felt in his life. Trying desperately to pull himself away, he slipped and fell against the column at his back. Still in the grip of cold horror, foul scolding whispers still in his ears, he found himself lying in the snow, his head resting on one arm, his legs stretched out before him, his skis still on.

  It was not a genuine awakening; he simply lay there blinking, relieved to be rid of those repulsive women, although it was less than clear to him, and not all that important, if it was a temple column or a hayshed at his back, and he went on dreaming, as it were—no longer in visions, but in thoughts hardly less perilous and tangled.

  “I thought so—it was only a dream,” he babbled to himself. “A very enchanting, very dreadful dream. At some level, I knew all along that I was making it up myself—the park, the trees, the sweet moist air, and all the rest, lovely or hideous—knew it ahead of time almost. But how can a person know something like that, make it up, to exhilarate and terrify himself? Where did I get that beautiful bay with those islands, and the temple precincts, to which the eyes of that lovely lad who stood off by himself directed me? We don’t form our dreams out of just our own souls. We dream anonymously and communally, though each in his own way. The great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us so to speak, dreams in our many different ways its own eternal, secret dream—about its youth, its hope, its joy, its peace, and its bloody feast. Here I lie against my column, with real remnants of my dream still inside my body—both the icy horror of the bloody feast and the previous boundless joy, my joy in the happiness and gentle manners of that fair humanity. It all comes to me, I say. I have a legal right to lie here and dream such things. I have experienced so much among the people up here, about kicking over the traces, about reason. I have passed on with Naphta and Settembrini into these dangerous mountains. I know everything about humankind. I have known flesh and blood, I gave Pribislav Hippe’s pencil back to ailing Clavdia. But he who knows the body, who knows life, also knows death. Except that’s not the whole thing—but merely a beginning, pedagogically speaking. You have to hold it up to the other half, to its opposite. Because our interest in death and illness is nothing but a way of expressing an interest in life—just look at how the humanistic faculty of medicine always addresses life and its illness so courteously in Latin. But that is only an adumbration of one great, urgent concern, which in fullest sympathy I shall now call by its name: life’s problem child, man himself, his true state and condition. I know quite a bit about him, have learned a great deal among the people up here, after having been driven up here from the flatlands—almost took my breath away. I really do have a fair overview from here at the base of my column. I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectful community of men—while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini—they’re both windbags. The one is voluptuous and malicious, and the other is forever tooting his little horn of reason and even imagines he can stare madmen back to sanity—how preposterous, how philistine! It’s mere ethics, irreligious, that much is certain. And yet I’m not going to take little Naphta’s side, either, with his religion that’s nothing more than a guazzabuglio of God and the Devil, good and evil, just made for someone to tumble headlong into its void and perish mystically there. My two pedagogues! Their arguments and contradictions are nothing but a guazzabuglio, the hubbub and alarum of battle, and no one whose head is a little clear and heart a little devout will let himself be dazed by that. With their question of ‘true aristocracy’! With their nobility! Death or life—illness or health—spirit or nature. Are those really contradictions? I ask you: Are those problems? No, they are not problems, and the que
stion of their nobility is not a problem, either. Death kicks over its traces in the midst of life, and this would not be life if it did not, and in the middle is where the homo Dei’s state is found—in the middle between kicking over the traces and reason—just as his condition is somewhere between mystical community and windy individualism. I can see all that from my column here. And in that state let him commune with himself, fine, gallant, genial, and respectful—for he alone is noble, and not that set of contradictions. Man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they. More noble than death, too noble for it—that is the freedom of his mind. More noble than life, too noble for it—that is the devotion of his heart. There, I have rhymed it all together, dreamed a poem of humankind. I will remember it. I will be good. I will grant death no dominion over my thoughts. For in that is found goodness and brotherly love, and in that alone. Death is a great power. You take off your hat and tiptoe past his presence, rocking your way forward. He wears the ceremonial ruff of what has been, and you put on austere black in his honor. Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love—there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death—it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. And form, too, comes only from love and goodness: form and the cultivated manners of man’s fair state, of a reasonable, genial community—out of silent regard for the bloody banquet. Oh, what a clear dream I’ve dreamed, how well I’ve ‘played king’! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken. For with that I have dreamed my dream to its end, to its goal. I’ve long been searching for that truth: in the meadow where Hippe appeared to me, on my balcony, everywhere. The search for it drove me into these snowy mountains. And now I have it. My dream has granted it to me so clearly that I will always remember. Yes, I am overjoyed and filled with its warmth. My heart is beating strong and knows why. It beats not for purely physical reasons, the way fingernails grow on a corpse. It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy. The truth of my dream has refreshed me—better than port or ale, it courses through my veins like love and life, so that I may tear myself out of my dreaming sleep, which I know only too well can be fatal to my young life. Awake, awake! Open your eyes. Those are your limbs, your legs there in the snow. Pull yourself together and stand up! Look—good weather!”