The Magic Mountain

though he was by the slight to his pleura-shock. Herr Settembrini took advantage of their hilarity to expatiate further on the contemptibleness of people who were subject to hallucinations, and of pazzi in general. It was his opinion that these people gave way a great deal more than they need, and often had it in their power to control their own freakishness. He had made this observation when he had visited asylums for the insane. For in the presence of the doctor, or of a stranger, the patients would mostly intermit their jabbering, grimaces, and weaving to and fro, and behave quite sensibly, as long as they felt themselves under scrutiny, only to let themselves go again afterwards. For lunacy undoubtedly in many cases meant the kind of self-abandonment which was the refuge of a weak nature against extreme distress, a defence against such overwhelming blows of destiny as it felt itself, when in its right mind, unable to cope with. But almost anybody might get in that state; and he, Settembrini, had held more than one lunatic to temporary self-control, simply by opposing to his humbuggery an air of inexorable reason.

Naphta laughed derisively; Hans Castorp protested his readiness to believe Herr Settembrini’s statement. Indeed, as he pictured him smiling beneath his moustaches and fixing the feebleminded with the eye of remorseless reason, he could well understand how the poor fellow had had to pull himself together and behave with “temporary self-control,” though probably finding Herr Settembrini’s presence a most unwelcome incident.⁠—But Naphta too had had experience of asylums for the insane. He recalled a visit to the violent ward, where he had seen such sights as⁠—my God, such sights as would have been a bit too much even for Herr Settembrini’s intelligent eye or disciplinary powers: Dantesque scenes, monstrous tableaux of horror and agony: naked madmen squatting in the continuous bath, in every posture of mental anguish or in the stupor of despair; some shrieking aloud, others with uplifted arms and gaping mouths whence issued laughter that mingled all the elements of hell⁠—

“Aha,” cried Herr Ferge, and took leave to remind them of the laughter which had escaped him when they went over his pleura. In short, Herr Settembrini’s inexorable pedantry would have had to confess itself beaten before these sights in the violent ward; in the face of which, the shudder of religious awe would surely have been a more human reaction than this condescending twaddle about reason, which our Worshipful Brother and Eminent Preceptor saw fit to put forward as a treatment for insanity.

Hans Castorp was too preoccupied to question the new titles Naphta was conferring on Herr Settembrini. Hastily he made a resolve to look them up the first chance he got; for the moment, he had his hands full with the present conversation. Naphta was acrimoniously debating the general tendency which led the humanist to exalt health and cry down and belittle illness. Herr Settembrini’s attitude was, he thought, a remarkable, even admirable example of self-abnegation, considering he was ill himself. But the position, no matter how strikingly meritorious, was as mistaken as it could well be: resting as it did upon a respect and reverence for the human body which could only be justified if that body had remained in original sinlessness, instead of sinking to its present fallen state (statu degradationis). For it had been created immortal, and by the original sins of depravity and abomination, by the degeneration of its nature, it had become mortal and corruptible, and was thus to be regarded as the prison-house and torture-chamber of the soul, or as the fit instrument for rousing the conscience to a sense of shame and confusion (pudoris et confusionis sensum), as Saint Ignatius had it.

The humanist Plotinus, exclaimed Hans Castorp, was also known to have given expression to the same idea. But Herr Settembrini flung up his hands and ordered the young man not to confuse two different points of view⁠—and, for the rest, to be advised and maintain an attitude of receptivity.

Naphta, continuing, derived the reverence which the Christian Middle Ages paid to physical suffering from the fact that it acquiesced on religious grounds in the sight of the anguish of the flesh. For the wounds of the body not only emphasized its sunken state, they also corresponded in the most edifying manner to the envenomed corruption of the soul, and thereby gave rise to emotions of true spiritual satisfaction: whereas blooming health was a misleading phenomenon, insulting to the conscience of man and requiring to be counteracted by an attitude of debasement and humility before physical infirmity, which was infinitely beneficial to the soul. Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? Who will deliver me from the body of this death? There spoke the voice of the spirit, which was eternally the voice of true humanity.

On the contrary⁠—according to Herr Settembrini’s view, presented with no little heat⁠—it was a voice from the darkness, a voice from a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity was not yet risen. Truly, in his own physical person he was contaminate; yet what mattered that, since his mind was untainted and sound⁠—and quite competent to bring confusion to his priestly opponent in any discussion touching the body, or to laugh him to scorn over the soul? He took too high a flight in celebrating the human body as the true temple of the Godhead; for Naphta straightway declared that this mortal fabric was nothing more than a veil between us and eternity; whereupon Settembrini definitely forbade him the use of the word “humanity”⁠—and so it went on.

Bareheaded, their faces stiff in the cold, they trod in their rubber galoshes the crisp, creaking, cinder-strewn snow, or ploughed through porous masses in the gutter: Settembrini in a winter jacket with beaver collar and cuffs⁠—the fur was worn to the pelt, and looked fairly mangy, but he knew how to carry it off with an air;