The Magic Mountain

of his hair, growing too long behind his ears. First time, then the barber, performed their office upon our hero. When he sat there, or when he stood at the door of his loggia and pared his nails and groomed them, with the accessories from his dainty velvet case, he would suddenly be overpowered by a mixture of terror and eager joy that made him fairly giddy. And this giddiness was in both senses of the word: rendering our hero not only dazed and dizzy, but flighty and lightheaded, incapable of distinguishing between “now” and “then,” and prone to mingle these together in a timeless eternity.

As we have repeatedly said, we wish to make him out neither better nor worse than he was; accordingly we must report that he often tried to atone for his reprehensible indulgence in attacks of mysticism, by virtuously and painstakingly striving to counteract them. He would sit with his watch open in his hand, his thin gold watch with the engraved monogram on the lid, looking at the porcelain face with the double row of black and red Arabic figures running round it, the two fine and delicately curved gold hands moving in and out over it, and the little second hand taking its busy ticking course round its own small circle. Hans Castorp, watching the second hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, unheeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came on to again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should it not pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the tiny intervening unmarked strokes showed that all the figures and divisions on its path were simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on.⁠—

Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashütte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.

How make plain to the sober intelligence of the flat-land the changes that took place in the inner economy of our young adventurer? The dizzying problem of identities grew grander in its scale. If today’s now⁠—even with decent goodwill⁠—was not easy to distinguish from yesterday’s, the day before’s or the day before that’s, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused with the now which had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be mingled and rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with it into the always? However one might still differentiate between the ordinary states of consciousness which we attached to the words “still,” “again,” “next,” there was always the temptation to extend the significance of such descriptive words as “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” by which “today” holds at bay “the past” and “the future.” It would not be hard to imagine the existence of creatures, perhaps upon smaller planets than ours, practising a miniature time-economy, in whose brief span the brisk tripping gait of our second hand would possess the tenacious spatial economy of our hand that marks the hours. And, contrariwise, one can conceive of a world so spacious that its time system too has a majestic stride, and the distinctions between “still,” “in a little while,” “yesterday,” “tomorrow,” are, in its economy, possessed of hugely extended significance. That, we say, would be not only conceivable, but, viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativity, and in the light of an already-quoted proverb, might be considered legitimate, sound, even estimable. Yet what shall one say of a son of earth, and of our time to boot, for whom a day, a week, a month, a semester, ought to play such an important role, and bring so many changes, so much progress in its train, who one day falls into the vicious habit⁠—or perhaps we should say, yields sometimes to the desire⁠—to say “yesterday” when he means a year ago, and “next year” when he means tomorrow? Certainly we must deem him lost and undone, and the object of our just concern.

There is a state, in our human life, there are certain scenic surroundings⁠—if one may use that adjective to describe the surroundings we have in mind⁠—within which such a confusion and obliteration of distances in time and space is in a measure justified, and temporary submersion in them, say for the term of a holiday, not reprehensible. Hans Castorp, for his part, could never without the greatest longing think of a stroll along the ocean’s edge. We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader’s recollections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk⁠—never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished. O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale; we turn toward thee our thoughts, our love, loud and expressly we call on thee, that thou mayst be present in the tale we spin, as in secret thou ever wast and shalt be!⁠—A singing solitude, spanned by a sky of palest grey; full of stinging damp that leaves a salty tang upon the lips.⁠—We walk along the springy floor, strewn with seaweed and tiny mussel-shells. Our ears are wrapped about by the great mild, ample wind, that comes sweeping untrammelled blandly through space, and gently blunts our senses. We wander⁠—wander⁠—watching the tongues of foam lick upward toward our feet and sink back again. The surf is seething; wave after wave, with high, hollow sound, rears up, rebounds, and runs with a silken rustle out over the flat strand: here one, there one, and more beyond,