The reader will accuse the writer of laying it on pretty thick when he associates two such ideas as these, and ascribes to mere staleness a mystical and supernatural character. But we are not indulging in flights of fancy. We are adhering strictly to the personal experience of our simple-minded hero, which in some way defying exact definition it has been given us to know, and which indicates that when all the uses of this world unitedly become flat, stale, and unprofitable, they are actually possessed by a demonic quality capable of giving rise to the feelings we have described. Hans Castorp looked about him. He saw on every side the uncanny and the malign, and he knew what it was he saw: life without time, life without care or hope, life as depravity, assiduous stagnation; life as dead.
Yet it was occupied too, it had activities of various kinds, pursued simultaneously; now and again one of these would assume the proportions of a craze, and subordinate everything to itself. Old residents experienced the periodic revival of more than one of these fads. So for instance amateur photography, always playing an important role at the Berghof, had twice become a perfect mania, lasting weeks and months on end. Everywhere one saw people absorbedly bent over cameras supported in the pit or their stomachs, focusing and snapping the shutter; and floods of snapshots were handed round at table. It became a point of honour to do the developing oneself. The supply of darkrooms in the establishment was not sufficient, the bedroom windows and doors were draped with black cloth, and people busied themselves by dim red lights over chemical baths, until something caught fire, the Bulgarian student at the “good” Russian table was nearly reduced to ashes, and a prohibitory decree went forth from the management. Next they tired of ordinary photography, the fashion veered to flashlights and colour photography after Lumière. They were enthusiastic over groups of people with startled, staring eyes in livid faces dazed by the magnesium flare, resembling the corpses of the murdered set upright. Hans Castorp had a framed diapositive, showing him with a copper-coloured visage, a brassy buttercup in his buttonhole, standing among buttercups in a poisonously green meadow, with Frau Stöhr on one side of him in a sky-blue blouse, and Fräulein Levi on the other in a bloodred sweater.
Then there was the collecting of postage stamps, a considerable interest at all times, but rising periodically to an obsession. Everybody pasted, haggled, exchanged, took in philatelic magazines, carried on correspondence with special vendors, foreign and domestic, with societies and private owners; astonishing sums were spent for rare specimens, even by people whose means were scarcely adequate to their expenses at the Berghof.
Postage stamps would have their day, and give way to the next folly on the list, which might be the accumulation and endless munching of all possible brands of chocolate. Everybody’s mouth was stained brown, and the Berghof kitchen offered its most elaborate delicacies to captious and indifferent diners who had lost their appetites to Milka-nut, Chocolat à la crême d’amandes, Marquis-napolitains, and gold-besprinkled cats’ tongues.
Pig-drawing, a diversion introduced by high authority on a long-ago carnival evening, had had its little day, and led up to geometrical teasers which for a time consumed all the mental powers of the Berghof world, and even the last thoughts and energies of the dying. Weeks on end the house was under the spell of a complicated figure consisting of not less than eight circles, large and small, and several engaged triangles, the whole to be drawn freehand without lifting the pen—or, as a further refinement, to be drawn blindfold. Lawyer Paravant, the virtuoso of this kind of mental concentration, finally succeeded in performing the feat, perhaps with some loss of symmetry; but he was the only one.
We know on the authority of the Hofrat that Lawyer Paravant studied mathematics; we know too the disciplinary grounds of his devotion to that branch of learning, and its virtue in cooling and dulling the edge of fleshly lusts. If the guests of the Berghof had more generally applied themselves to the same study, the necessity for certain recent rulings would most likely have been obviated. The chief of these dealt with the passage across the balconies, at the end of the white glass partitions that did not quite reach to the balustrade. These were now extended by means of little doors, which the bathing-master had it in charge to lock every night—and did so, to a general accompaniment of smirks and sniggers. Since that time, the chambers in the first storey had become popular, because they afforded a passage across the verandah roof beyond the balustrade. But this disciplinary departure had not been introduced on Lawyer Paravant’s account. He had long since overcome the severe attack caused by the presence of the Egyptian Fatme, and she had been the last to challenge his natural man. Since her time he had flung himself with redoubled conviction into the arms of the clear-eyed goddess, of whose soothing powers Hofrat Behrens had so morally discoursed. There was one problem to which day and night he devoted all his
