The Magic Mountain

condescending old inhabitants reaching out their hands with ill-concealed eagerness. At the moment it was a cheap paper-backed volume, introduced by Herr Albin, and entitled The Art of Seduction: a very literal translation from the French, preserving even the syntax of that language, and thus gaining in elegance and pungency of presentation. In matter it was an exposition of the philosophy of sensual passion, developed in a spirit of debonair and man-of-the-worldly paganism. Frau Stöhr had read it early, and pronounced it simply ravishing. Frau Magnus, the same who had lost her albumen tolerance, agreed unreservedly. Her husband the brewer purported to have profited personally by a perusal, but regretted that his wife should have taken up that sort of thing, because such reading spoiled the women and gave them immodest ideas. His remarks not a little increased the circulation of the volume. Two ladies of the lower rest-hall, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrial magnate, and Frau Hessenfeld, a widow from Berlin, both of these new arrivals since October, claimed the book at the same time, and a regrettable incident arose after dinner, yes, more than regrettable, for there was a violent scene, overheard by Hans Castorp, in his loggia above. It ended in spasms of hysteria on the part of one of the women⁠—it might have been Frau Redisch, but equally well it might have been Frau Hessenfeld⁠—and she was borne away beside herself to her own room. The youth of the place had got hold of the treatise before those of riper years; studying it in part in groups, after supper, in their various rooms. Hans Castorp himself saw the youth with the fingernail hand it to Fränzchen Oberdank in the dining-room⁠—she was a new arrival and a light case, a flaxen-haired young thing whose mother had just brought her to the sanatorium.

There may have been exceptions; there may have been those who employed the hours of the rest-cure with some serious intellectual occupation, some conceivably profitable study, either by way of keeping in touch with life in the lowlands, or in order to give weight and depth to the passing hour, that it might not be pure time and nothing else besides. Perhaps here and there was one⁠—not, of course, to mention Herr Settembrini, with his zeal for eliminating human suffering, or Joachim with his Russian primer yes, there might be one, or two, thus occupied; if not among the guests in the dining-room, which seemed not very likely, then among the bedridden and moribund. Hans Castorp inclined to believe it. He himself, after imbibing all that Ocean Steamships had to offer him, had ordered certain books from home, some of them bearing on his profession, and they had arrived with his winter clothing: scientific engineering, technique of shipbuilding, and the like. But these volumes lay now neglected in favour of other textbooks belonging to quite a different field, an interest in which had seized upon the young man: anatomy, physiology, biology, works in German, French and English, sent up to the Berghof by the book-dealer in the village, obviously because Hans Castorp had ordered them, as was indeed the case. He had done so of his own motion, without telling anyone, on a solitary walk he took down to the Platz while Joachim was occupied with the weekly weighing or injection. His cousin was surprised when he saw the books in Hans Castorp’s hands. They were expensive, as scientific works always are: the prices were marked on the wrappers and inside the front covers. Joachim asked why, if his cousin wanted to read such books, he had not borrowed them of the Hofrat, who surely possessed a well-chosen stock. The young man answered that it was quite a different thing to read when the book was one’s own; for his part, he loved to mark them and underline passages in pencil. Joachim could hear, hours on end, the noise made by the paperknife going through the uncut leaves.

The volumes were heavy, unhandy. Hans Castorp propped them against his chest or stomach as he lay; they were heavy, but he did not mind. Lying there, his mouth half open, he let his eye glide down the learned page, upon which fell the light from his red-shaded lamp, though he might have read, if need were, by the brilliance of the moonlight alone. He read, following the lines down the page with his head, until at the bottom his chin lay sunk upon his breast⁠—and in this position the reader would pause perhaps for reflection, dozing a little or musing in half-slumber, before lifting his eyes to the next page. He probed profoundly. While the moon took its appointed way above the crystalline splendours of the mountain valley, he read of organized matter, of the properties of protoplasm, that sensitive substance maintaining itself in extraordinary fluctuation between building up and breaking down; of form developing out of rudimentary, but always present, primordia; read with compelling interest of life, and its sacred, impure mysteries.

What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance of conscious processes at any point in the history of the individual or the race; impossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritability to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine.