How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long—dismissing Joachim from our calculations—Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking himself. If they had been put him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known—a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Settembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age.
All which may sound preposterous; yet there are conditions under which nothing could keep us from losing account of the passage of time, losing account even of our own age; lacking, as we do, any trace of an inner time-organ, and being absolutely incapable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by ourselves, without any outward fixed points as guides. There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering between hope and fear, to be some three days. It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made the time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would appear, then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under- rather than overestimate time.
No doubt Hans Castorp, were he wishful to do so, could without any great trouble have reckoned himself into certainty; just as the reader can, in case all this vagueness and involvedness are repugnant to his healthy sense. Perhaps our hero himself was not quite comfortable either; though he refused to give himself any trouble to wrestle clear of vagueness and involution and arrive at certainty of how much time had gone over his head since he came up here. His scruple was of the conscience—yet surely it is a want of conscientiousness most flagrant of all not to pay heed to the time!
We do not know whether we may count it in his favour that circumstances advantaged his lack of inclination, or perhaps we ought to say his disinclination. When Frau Chauchat came back—under circumstances very different from those Hans Castorp had imagined, but of that in its place—when she came back, it was the Advent season again, and the shortest day of the year; the beginning of winter, astronomically speaking, was at hand. Apart from arbitrary time-divisions, and with reference to the quantity of snow and cold, it had been winter for God knows how long, interrupted, as always all too briefly, by burning hot summer days, with a sky of an exaggerated depth of blueness, well-nigh shading into black; real summer days, such as one often had even in the winter, aside from the snow—and the snow one might also have in the summer! This confusion in the seasons, how often had Hans Castorp discussed it with the departed Joachim! It robbed the year of its articulation, made it tediously brief, or briefly tedious, as one chose to put it; and confirmed another of Joachim’s disgusted utterances, to the effect that there was no time up here to speak of, either long or short. The great confusion played havoc, moreover, with emotional conceptions, or states of consciousness like “still” and “again”; and this was one of the very most gruesome, bewildering, uncanny features of the case. Hans Castorp, on his first day up here, had discovered in himself a hankering to dabble in that uncanny, during the five mighty meals in the gaily stenciled dining-room; when a first faint giddiness, as yet quite blameless, had made itself felt.
Since then, however, the deception upon his senses and his mind had assumed much larger proportions. Time, however weakened the subjective perception of it has become, has objective reality in that it brings things to pass. It is a question for professional thinkers—Hans Castorp, in his youthful arrogance, had one time been led to consider it—whether the hermetically sealed conserve upon its shelf is outside of time. We know that time does its work, even upon Seven-Sleepers. A physician cites a case of a twelve-year-old-girl, who fell asleep and slept thirteen years; assuredly she did not remain thereby a twelve-year-old girl, but bloomed into ripe womanhood while she slept. How could it be otherwise? The dead man—is dead; he has closed his eyes on time. He has plenty of time, or personally speaking, he is timeless. Which does not prevent his hair and nails from growing, or, all in all—but no, we shall not repeat those free-and-easy expressions used once by Joachim, to which Hans Castorp, newly arrived from the flat-land, had taken exception. Hans Castorp’s hair and nails grew too, grew rather fast. He sat very often in the barber’s chair in the main street of the Dorf, wrapped in a white sheet, and the barber, chatting obsequiously the while, deftly performed upon the fringes
