THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
Thomas Mann 1924
Research
AND
now came on, as come it must, what Hans Castorp had never
thought to experience: the winter of the place, the winter
of these high altitudes. Joachim knew it already: it had
been in full blast when he arrived the year before - but
Hans Castorp rather dreaded it, however well he felt himself
equipped. Joachim sought to reassure
him.
"
You must not imagine it grimmer than it is," he said, " not
really arctic. You will feel the cold less on account of the
dryness of the air and the absence of wind. It's the thing
about the change of temperature above the fog line; they've
found out lately that it
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gets
warmer in the upper reaches, something they did not know be-
fore. I should say it is actually colder when it rains. But
you have your sleeping-bag, and they turn on the heat when
they absolutely must."
And
in fact there could be no talk of violence or surprises; the
winter came mildly on, at first no different from many a day
they had seen in the height of summer. The wind had been two
days in the south, the sun bore down, the valIey seemed
shrunken, the side walls at its mouth looked near and bald.
Douds came up, behind Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn. and drove
north-eastwards. It rained heavily. Then the rain turned
foul, a whitish-grey, mingled with snow-flakes - soon it was
all snow, the vaIley was full of flurry; it kept on and on,
the temperature fell appreciably, so that the fallen snow
could not quite melt, but lay covering the valley with a wet
and threadbare white garment, against which showed black the
pines on the slopes. In the dining-room the radiators were
luke- warm. That was at the beginning of November - All
Souls'- and there was no novelty about it. In August it had
been even so; they had long left off regarding snow as a
prerogative of winter. White traces lingered after every
storm in the crannies of the rocky Rhatikon, the chain that
seemed to guard the end of the vaIley, and the distant
monarchs to the south were aIways in snow. But the storm and
the fall in the temperature both continued. A pale grey sky
hung low over the valley; it seemed to dissolve in flakes
and faIl soundlessly and ceaselessly, until one almost felt
un- easy. It turned colder by the hour. A morning came when
the ther- mometer in Hans Castorp's room registered
44°, the next morning it was only 40°. That was
cold. It kept within bounds, but it per- sisted. It had
frozen at night; now it froze in the day-time as well, and
all day long; and it snowed, with brief intervaIs, through
the fourth, the fifth, and the seventh days. The snow
mounted apace, it became a nuisance. Paths had been
shovelled as far as the bench by the watercourse, and on the
drive down to the valley; but these were so narrow that you
could only walk single file, and if you met anyone, you must
step off the pavement and at once sink knee- deep in snow. A
stone-roller drawn by a horse, with a man at his haIter,
rolled all day long up and down the streetS of the cure,
while a yellow diligence on runners, looking like an
old-fashioned post-coach, plied between village and cure,
with a snow-plough attached in front, shovelling the white
masses aside. The \vorld, this narrow, lofty, isolated world
up here, looked now well wadded and uphol-stered indeed: no
pillar or post but wore its white cap; the steps up to the
entrance of the Berghof had turned into an inclined
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plane;
heavy cushions, in the drollest shapes, weighed down the
branches of the Scotch firs - now and then one slid off and
raised up a cloud of powdery white dust in its fall. Round
about, the heights lay smothered in snow; their lower
regions rugged with the evergreen growth, their upper parts,
beyond the timber line, softly covered up to their
many-shaped summits. The air was dark, the sun but a pallid
apparition behind a veil. Yet a mild reflected bright- ness
came from the snow, a milky gleam whose light became both
landscape and human beings, even though these latter did
show red noses under their white or gaily-coloured woollen
caps.
In
the dining-room the onset of winter - the "season " of the
region - was the subject of conversation at all seven
tables. Many tourists and sportsmen \vere said to have
arrived and taken up resi- dence at the hotels in the Dorf
and the Platz. The height of the piled-up snow was estimated
at two feet; its consistency was said to be ideal for
skiing. The bob-run, which led down from the north-western
slope of the Schatzalp into the valley, was zealously worked
on, it would be possible to open it in the next few days,
unless a thaw put out all calculations. Everyone looked
forward eagerly to the activities of these sound people down
below - to the sports and races, which it was forbidden to
attend, but which num- bers of the patients resolved to see,
by cutting the rest-cure and slipping out of the Berghof.
Hans Castorp heard of a new sport that had come from
Scandinavia, .. ski-joring ": it consisted in races in which
the panicipants were drawn by horses while standing in their
skis. It was to see this that so many of the patients had
re- solved to slip out. - There was talk too of
Christmas.
Christmas!
Hans Castorp had never once thought of it. To be sure, he
had blithely said, and written, that he must spend the win-
ter up here with Joachim, because of what the doctors had
dis- covered to be the state of his health. But now he was
startled to realize that Christmas would be included in the
programme - per- haps because (and yet not entirely because)
he had never spent the Chrismas season anywhere but in the
bosom of the family. Well, if he must he must; he would have
to put up with it. He was no longer a child; Joachim seemed
not to mind, or else to have ad- justed himself
uncomplainingly to the prospect; and, after all, he said to
himself, think of all the places and all the conditions in
which Christmas has been celebrated before
now!
Yet
it did seem to him rather premature to begin thinking about
Christrnas even before the Advent season, six weeks at least
before the holiday! True, such an interval was easily
overleaped by the guests in the dining-hall: it was a mental
process in which Hans
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Castorp
had already some facility, though he had not yet learned to
practise it in the grand style, as the older inhabitants
did. Christ-mas, like other holidays in the course of the
year, served them for a fulcrum, or a vaulting-pole, with
which to leap over empty inter- vening spaces. They all had
fever, their metabolism was acceler- ated, their bodily
processes accentuated, keyed up - all this per-haps
accounted for the wholesale way they could put time behind
them. It would not have greatly surprised him to hear them
dis- count the Christmas holiday as well, and go on at once
to speak of the New Year and Carnival. But no-so capricious
and unstable as this they were not, in the Berghof
dining-room. Christmas gave them pause, it gave them even
matter for concern and brain-rack- ing. It was customary to
present Hofrat Behrens with a gift on Christmas eve, for
which a collection was taken up among the guests - and this
gift was the subject of much deliberation. A meet-ing was
called. Last year, so the old inhabitants said, they had
given him a travelling-trunk; this time a new
operating-table had been considered, an easel, a fur coat, a
rocking-chair, an inlaid ivory stethoscope. Settembrini,
asked for suggestions, proposed that they give the Hofrat a
newly projected encyclopzdic work called The Sociology of
Suffering; but he found only one person to agree with him, a
book-dealer who sat at Hermine Kleefeld's table. In short,
no decision had been reached. There was difficulty about
coming to an agreement with the Russian guests; a divergence
of views arose. The Muscovites declared their preference for
making an independent gift. Frau Stohr went about for days
quite outraged on account of a loan of ten francs which she
inadvisedly laid out for Frau Iltis at the meeting, and
which the latter had " forgotten " to return. She " forgot "
it. The shades of meaning Frau Stohr con-trived to convey in
this word were many and varied, but one and all expressive
of an entire disbelief in Frau Iltis's lack of memory,
which, it appeared, had been proof against the hints and
proddings Frau Stohr freely admitted having administered.
Several times she declared she would resign herself make
Frau Iltis a present of the sum. " I'll pay for both of us,"
she said. "Then my skirts will be cleared " But in
the end she hit upon another p!an and communi-cated it to
her table-mates, to their great delight: she had the
"management" refund her the ten francs and insert it in Frau
Iltis's weekly bill. Thus was the reluctant debtor
outwitted, and at least this phase of the matter
settled.
It
had stopped snowing, the sky began to clear. The blue-grey
cloud-masses parted to admit glimpses of the sun, whose rays
gave a bluish cast to the scene. Then it grew altogether
fair; a bright
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hard
frost and settled winter splendour reigned in the middle of
November. The arch of the loggia framed a glorious panorama
of snow-powdered forest, softly filled passes and ravines,
white, sun- lit valleys, and radiant blue heavens above all.
In the evening, when the almost full moon appeared, the
world lay in enchanted splen-dour, marvellous. Crystal and
diamond it glittered far and wide, the forest stood up very
black and white, the quarter of the heavens where the moon
was not showed deeply dark, embroidered with stars. On the
flashing surface of the snow, shadows, so strong, so sharp
and clearly outlined that they seemed almost more real than
the objects themselves, fell from houses, trees, and
telegraph-poles. An hour or so after sunset there would be
some founeen degrees of frost. The world seemed spellbound
in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in
a deathlike, enchanted trance.
Hans
Castorp stopped until far into the night in his balcony
above the ensorcelled winter scene - much longer than
Joachim, who retired at ten or a little later. His excellent
chair, with the sectional mattress and the neck-roll, he
pulled close to the snow- cushioned balustrade; at his hand
was the white table with the lighted reading-lamp, a stack
of books, and a glass of creamy milk, the "evening milk"
which was brought to each of the guests' rooms at nine
o'clock. Hans Castorp put a dash of cognac in his, to make
it more palatable. Already he "had availed himself of all
his means of protection against the cold, the entire outfit:
lay en- sconced well up to his chest in the buttoned-up
sleeping-sack he had acquired in one of the well-furnished
shops in the Platz, with the two camel's-hair rugs folded
over it in accordance with the ritual. He wore his winter
suit, with a shon fur jacket atop, a woollen cap, felt
boots, and heavily lined gloves, which, however, could not
prevent the stiffening of his
fingers.
What
held him so late - often until midnight and beyond, long
after the " bad " Russian pair had left their loge - was
partly the magic of the winter night, into which, until
eleven, were woven the mounting strains of music from near
and far. But even more it was inertia and excitement, both
of these at once, and in combina-tion: bodily inertia, the
physical fatigue which hated any idea of moving; and mental
excitement, the busy preoccupation of his thoughts with
certain new and fascinating studies upon which the young man
had embarked, and which left his brain no rest. The weather
affected him, his organism was stimulated by the cold; he
ate enormously, attacking the mighty Berghof meals, where
the roast goose followed upon the roast beef, with the usual
Berghof appetite, which was always even larger in winter
than in summer.
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At
the same time he had a perpetual craving for sleep; in the
day-time, as well as on the moonlit evenings, he would drop
off over his books, and then, after a few minutes'
unconsciousness, betake himself again to research. Talk
fatigued him. He was more in-clined than had been his habit
to rapid, unrestrained, even reckless speech; but if he
talked with Joachim, as they went on their snowy walks, he
was liable to be overtaken by giddiness and trembling, would
feel dazed and tipsy, and the blood would mount to his head.
His curve had gone up since the oncoming of winter, and
Hofrat Behrens had let fall something about injections;
these were usually given in cases of obstinate high
temperature, and Joachim and at least two-thirds of the
guests had them. But he himself felt sure that the increase
in his bodily heat had to do with the mental activity and
excitation which kept him in his chair on the balcony until
deep into the glittering, frosty night. The reading which
held him so late suggested such an explanation to his
mind.
No
little reading was done, in the rest-halls and private
loggias of the International Sanatorium Berghof; largely,
however, by the new-comers and " short-timers," for the
patients of many months' or years' standing had long learned
to kill time without mental effort or means of distraction,
by dint of a certain inner virtuosity they came to possess.
They even considered it beginners' awkward-ness to glue
yourself to a book. It was enough to have one lying in your
lap or on your little table, in case of need. The collection
of the establishment was an amplification of the literature
found in a dentist's waiting-room - in many languages,
profusely illustrated, and offered free of charge. The
guests exchanged volumes from the loan-library down in the
Platz; now and again there would be a book for which
everybody scrambled, even the condescending old inhabitants
reaching out their hands with ill-concealed eager-ness. At
the moment it was a cheap paper-backed volume, intro-duced
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 pres-entation. In
matter it was an exposition of the philosophy of sen-sual
passion, developed in a spirit of debonair and
man-of-the-worldly paganism. Frau Stohr had read it early,
and pronounced it simply ravishing. Frau Magnus, the same
who had lost her albu-men tolerance, agreed unreservedly.
Her husband the brewer pur- portc:d to have profited
personally by a perusal, but regretted that his wife should
have taken up that sort of thing, because such read-ing
spoiled the women and gave them immodest ideas. His remarks
not a little increased the circulation of the volume. Two
ladies of
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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 be-side 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
finger-nail hand it to Franzchen Oberdank in the dining-room
- she was a new arrival and a light case, a flaxen- hrored
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 in-
tellectual 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
be-lieve it. He himself, after imbibing all that Ocem
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 ship-building, and the like. But these volumes
lay now neglected in favour of other text- books 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 weigh-ing 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
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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 paper- knife 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 bril- liance 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
proper-ties 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, pri- mordia; read wIth
compelling interest of life, and it sacred, im- pure
mysteries.
What
was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of it-self,
so soon as it was life; but it did not know what it was.
Con- sciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus,
was undoubt-edly, to a certain degree, present in the
lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible
to fix the first appearance.of con-scious processes at any
point In the history of the mdividual or the race;
immpossible 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 sus-pend life; not merely particular sense-organs,
not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could
temporarily suspend the irrita- bility to sensation of every
form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal
kingdom; one could narcotize ova and sperma- tozoa with
chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morp!une. Conscious- ness,
then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a
function that in higher manifestations turned upon its
avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the
pnenomenon it dis-played - a hopeful-hopeless project of
life to achieve self-knowl-edge, nature in recoil-and
vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in
knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to
itself.
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What
was life? No one knew. No one knew the actual point whence
it sprang, where it kindled itself. Nothing in the domain of
life seemed uncausated, or insufficiently causated, from
that point on; but life itself seemed without antecedent. If
there was anything that might be said about it, it was this:
it must be so highly developed, structurally, that nothing
even distantly related to It was present in the inorganic
world. Between the protean amreba and the vertebrate the
difference was slight, unessential, as com- pared to that
between the simplest living organism and that nature which
did not even deserve to be called dead, because it was in-
organic. For death was only the-logical negation of life;
but be- tween life and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which
research strove in vain to bridge. They tried to close it
with hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming
any the less deep or broad. Seeking for a connecting link,
they had condescended to the preposterous assumption of
structureless living matter, unorgan-ized organisms, which
darted together of themselves in the albu-men solution, like
crystals in the mother-liquor; yet organic dif- ferentiation
still remained at once condition and expression of all life.
One could point to no form of life that did not owe its
exist- ence to procreation by parents. They had fished the
primeval slime out of toe depth of the sea, and great had
been the jubilation - but the end of it all had been shame
and confusion. For it turned out that they had mistaken a
precipitate of sulphate of lime for proto-plasm. But then,
to avoid giving pause before a miracle - for life that built
itself up out of, and fell in decay into, the same sort of
matter as inorganic nature; would have been, happening of
itself, miraculous - they were driven to believe in a
spontaneous genera-tion - that is, in the emergence of the
organic from the inorganic - which was just as much of a
miracle. Thus they went on, devis-ing intermediate stages
and transitions, assuming the existence of organisms which
stood lower down than any yet known, but them-selves had as
forerunners still more primitive efforts of nature to
achieve life: primitive forms of which no one would ever
catch sight, for they were all of less than microscopic
size, and previous to whose hypothetic existence the
synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken
place.
What
then was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a
form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which
accom-panied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of
albumen mole-cules that were too impossibly complicated, too
impossibly ingen-ious in structure. It was the existence of
the actually impossible-to-exist, of a half-sweet,
half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing,
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in
this restricted and feverish process of decay and renewal,
upon the point of existence. It was not matter and it was
not spirit, but something between the two, a phenomenon
conveyed by mat-ter, like the rainbow on the waterfall, and
like the flame. Yet why not material- it was sentient to the
point of desire and disgust, the shamelessness of matter
become sensible of itself. the inconti-nent form of being.
It was a secret and ardent stirring in the frozen chastity
of the universal; it was a stolen and voluptuous impurity of
sucking and secreting; an exhalation of carbonic acid gas
and ma-terial impurities of mysterious origin and
composition. It was a pul-lulation, an unfolding, a
form-building (made possible by the over-balancing of its
instability, yet controlled by the laws of growth inherent
within it), of something brewed out of water, albumen, salt
and fats, which was called flesh, and which became form,
beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the essence of
sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty were not
spirit-borne; nor, like the form and beauty of sculpture,
conveyed by a neutral and spirit-consumed substance, which
could in all purity make beauty perceptible to the senses.
Rather was it conveyed and shaped by the somehow awakened
voluptuousness of matter, of the organic. dying-living
substance itself, the reeking
flesh.
As
he lay there above the glittering valley, lapped in the
bodily warmth reserved to him by fur and wool, in the frosty
night illumined by the brilliance from a lifeless star, the
image of life displayed itself to young Hans Castorp. It
hovered before him, somewhere in space, remote from his
grasp, yet near his sense; this body, this opaquely whitish
form, giving out exhalations, moist, clammy; the skin with
all its blemishes and native impurities, with its spots,
pimples, discolorations, irregularities; its horny,
scalelike regions, covered over by soft streams and whorls
of rudimentary lanugo. It leaned there, set off against the
cold lifelessness of the inanimate world, in its own
vaporous sphere, relaxed, the head crowned with something
cool, horny, and pigmented, which was an outgrowth of its
skin; the hands clasped at the back of the neck. It looked
down at him beneath drooping lids, out of eyes made to
appear slanting by a racial variation in the lid-formation.
Its lips were half open, even a little curled. It rested its
weight on one leg, the hip-bone stood out sharply under the
flesh, while the other, relaxed, nestled its slightly bent
knee against the inside of the sup-porting leg, and poised
the foot only upon the toes. It leaned thus, turning to
smile, the gleaming elbows akimbo, in the paired sym-metty
of its limbs and trunk. The acrid. steaming shadows of the
arm-pits corresponded in a mystic triangle to the pubic
dark-
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ness,
just as the eyes did to the red, epithelial mouth-opening,
and the red blossoms of the breast to the navel lying
perpendicularly below. Under the impulsion of a central
organ and of the motor nerves originating in the spinal
marrow, chest and abdomen func- tioned, the peritoneal
cavity expanded and contracted, the breath, warmed and
moistened by the mucous membrane of the respira- tory canal,
saturated with secretions, streamed out between the lips,
after it had joined its oxygen to the haemoglobin of the
blood in the air-cells of the lungs. For Hans Castorp
understood that this living body, in the mysterious symmetry
of its blood-of its nourished structure, penetrated
throughout by nerves, veins, arteries, and capillaries; with
its inner framework of bones - marrow-filled tubular bones,
blade-bones, vertebrre - which with the addition of lime had
developed out of the original gelatinous tissue and grown
strong enough to support the body weight; with the cap-sules
and well-oiled cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its
joints, Its more than two hundred muscles, its central
organs that served for nutrition and respiration, for
registering and transmitting stimuli, its protective
membranes, serous cavities, its glands rich in secre-tions;
with the system of vessels and fissures of its highly
compli-cated interior surface, communicating through the
body-openings with the outer world - he understood that this
ego was a livmg unit of a very high order, remote indeed
from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in
nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their
bodies. He knew it was built up out of myriads of such small
organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which
had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to
the most varied uses, and functions, separated,
dif-ferentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the
condition and result of their
growth.
This
body, then, which hovered before him, this individual and
living I, was a monstrous multiplicity of breathing and
self-nourishing individuals, which, through organic
conformation and adaptation to special ends, had parted to
such an extent with their essential individuality, their
freedom and living immediacy, had so much become anatomic
elements that the functions of some had become limited to
sensibility toward light, sound, contact, warmth; others
only understood how to change their shape or produce
di-gestive secretions through contraction; others, again,
were de-veloped and functional to no other end than
protection, support, the conveyance of the body juices, or
reproduction. There were modifications of this organic
plurality united to form the higher ego: cases where the
multitude of subordinate entities were only
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grouped
in a loose and doubtful way to form a higher living uait.
The student buried himself in the phenomenon of cell
colonies; he read about half-organisms, algae, whose single
cells, enveloped.. a mantle of gelatine, often lay apart
from one another, yet were multiple-cell formations, whIch,
if they had been asked, would not have known whether to be
rated as a settlement of single-celled individuals, or as an
individual single unit, and, in bearing witness, would have
vacillated quaintly between the I and the we. Nature here
presented a middle stage, between the highly social union of
countless elementary individuals to form the tissues and
organs of a superior I, and the free individual existence of
these simpler forms; the multiple-celled organism was only a
stage in the cyclic process, which was the course of life
itself, a periodic revolution from procreation to
procreation. The act of fructification, the sexual merging
of two cell-bodies, stood at the beginning of the upbuilding
of every rnultiple-celled individual, as it did at the
beginning of every row of generations of single elementary
forms,. and led back to itself. For this act was carried
through many species which had no need of it to multiply by
means of proliferation;until a moment came when the
non-sexually produced offspring found thcmselves once more
constrained to a renewal of the copu- lative function, and
the circle came full. Such was the multiple state of life,
sprung from the union of two parent cells, the asso- ciation
of many non-sexually originated generations of cell units;
its growth meant their increase, and the generative circle
came full again when sex-cells, specially developed elements
for the pur-pose of reproduction, had established themselves
and found the way to a new mingling that drove life on
afresh.
Our
young adventurer, supporting a volume of embryology on the
pit of his stomach, followed the development of the
or-ganism from the moment when the spermatozoon, first among
a host of its fellows, forced itself forward by a lashing
motion of its hinder part, struck with its forepart against
the gelatine mantle of the egg, and bored its way into the
mount of concep- tion, which the protoplasm of the outside
of the ovum arched agajnst its approach. There was no
conceivable trick or absurdity it would not have pleased
nature to commit by way of variation upon this fixed
procedure. In some animals, the male was a para-site in the
intestine of the female. In others, the male parent reached
with his arm down the gullet of the female to deposit the
semen within her; after which, bitten off and spat out, it
ran away by itself upon its fingers, to the confusion of
scientists, who for long had given it Greek and Latin names
an independent form
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of
life. Hans Castorp lent an ear to the learned strife between
ovists and animalculsts: the first of whom asserted that the
egg was in itself the complete little frog, dog, or human
being, the male element being only the incitement to its
growth; while the sec-ond saw in a spermatozoon, possessing
head, arms, and legs, the perfected form of life shadowed
forth, to which the egg performed only the office of "
nourisher in life's feast." In the end they agreed to
concede equal meritoriousness to ovum and semen, both of
which, after all sprang from originally indistinguishable
procre-ative cells. He saw the single-celled organism of the
fructified egg on the point of being transformed into a
multiple-celled organism, by striation and division; saw the
cell-bodies attach themselves to the lamellae of the mucous
membrane; saw the germinal vesicle, the blastula, close
itself in to form a cup or basin-shaped cavity, and begin
the functions of receiving and digesting food. That was the
gastrula, the protozoon, primeval form of all animal life,
pri-meval form of flesh-borne beauty. Its two epithelia, the
outer and the inner, the ectoderm and the entoderm, proved
to be prim:tive organs out of whose foldings-in and-out,
were developed the glands, the tissues, the sensory organs,
the body processes. A strip of the outer germinal layer, the
ectoderm, thickened, folded into a groove, closed itself
into a nerve canal, became a spinal column, became the
brain. And as the foetal slime condensed into fibrous
connective tissue, into cartilage, the colloidal cells
begirming to show gelatinous substance instead of mucin. he
saw in certain places the connective tissue take lime and
fat to itself out of the sera that washed it, and begin to
form bone. Embryonic man squatted in a stooping posture,
tailed, indistinguishable from em-bryonic pig; with enormous
abdomen and stumpy, formless extremities, the facial mask
bowed over the swollen paunch; the story of his growth
seemed a grim, unflattering science, like the cursory record
of a zoological family tree. For a while he had gill-pockets
like a roach. It seemed permissible, or rather unavoidable,
contemplating the various stages of development through
which he passed, to infer the very little humanistic aspect
presented by primitive man in his mature state. His skin was
furnished with twitching muscles to keep off insects; it was
thickly covered with hair; there was a tremendous
development of the mucous mem-brane of the olfactory organs;
his ears protruded, were movable, took a lively part in the
play of the features, and were much better adapted than ours
for catching sounds. His eyes were protected by a third,
nictating lid; they were placed sidewise, excepting the
third, of which the pineal gland was the rudimentary trace,
and
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which
was able, looking upwards, to guard him from dangers from
the upper air. Primitive man had a very long intestine, many
molars, and sound-pouches on the larnyx the better to roar
with, also he carried his sex-glands on the inside of the
intestinal cavity.
Anatomy
presented our investigator with charts of human limbs,
skinned and prepared for his inspection; he saw their
superficial and their buried muscles, sinews, and tendons:
those of the thighs, the foot, and especially of the arm,
the upper and the forearm. He learned the Latin names with
which medicine, that subdivision of the humanities, had
gallantly equipped them. He passed on to the skeleton, the
development of which presented new points of view - among
them a clear perception of the essential unity of all that
pertains to man, the correlation of all branches of
learning. For here, strangely enough, he found himself
reminded of his own field - or shall we say his former
field? - the scientific calling which he had announced
himself as having embraced, introducing himself thus to Dr.
Krokowski and Herr Settembrini on his ar- rival up here. In
order to learn something - it had not much mat-tered what -
he had learned in his technical school about statics, about
supports capable of flexion, about loads, about construction
as the advantageous utilization of mechanical material. It
would of course be childish to think that the science of
engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application
to organic nature; but just as little might one say that
they had been derived from organic nature. It was simply
that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and
corroborated in nature. The principle of the hollow cylinder
was illustrated in the structure of the tubular bones, in
such a way that the static demands were satis-fied with the
precise minimum of solid structure. Hans Castorp had learned
that a body which is put together out of staves and bands of
mechanically utilizable matter, conformably to the de- mands
made by draught and pressure upon it, can withstand the same
weight as a solid column of the same material. Thus in the
development of the tubular bones, it was comprehensible
that, step for step with the formation of the solid
exterior, the inner parts, which were mechanically
superfluous, changed to a fatty tissue, the marrow. The
thigh-bone was a crane, in the construction of which organic
nature, by the direction she had given the shaft, carried
out, to a hair, the same draught- and pressure-curves which
Hans Castorp had had to plot in drawing an instrument
serving a similar purpose. He contemplated this fact with
pleasure; he en- joyed the reflection that his relation to
the femur, or to organic
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nature
generally was now threefold: it was lyrical, it was medical,
it was technological; and all of these, he felt, were one in
being human, they were variations of one and the same
pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic
thought.
But
with all this the achievements of the protoplasm remained
unaccountable: it seemed forbidden to life that it should
under-stand itself. Most of the bio-chemical processes were
not only unknown, it lay in their very nature that they
should escape at-tention. Almost nothing was known of the
structure or composi-tion of the living unit called the "
cell." What use was there in establishing, the components of
lifeless muscle, when the living did not let itself be
chemically examined? The changes that took place when the
rigor mortis set in were enough to make worthless all
investigation. Nobody understood metaboIism, nobody under-
stood the true inwardness of the functioning of the nervous
sys- tem. To what properties did the taste corpuscles owe
their reaction? In what consisted the various kinds of
excitation of cer- tain sensory nerves by odour-possessing
substances? In what, in- deed, the property of smell itself?
The specific odours of man and beast consisted in the
vaporization of certain unknown substances. The composition
of the secretion called sweat was little under- stood. The
glands that secreted it produced aromata which among mammals
undoubtedly played an imporant role, but whose sig-nificance
for the human species we were not in a position to ex-
plain. The physiological significance of imponant regions of
the body was shrouded in darkness. No need to mention the
vermi- form appendix, which was a mystery; in rabbits it was
regularly found full of a pulpy substance, of which there
was nothing to say as to how it got in or renewed itself.
But what about the white and grey substance which composed
the medulla, what of the optic thalamus and the grey inlay
of the pons Varolii? The sub-stance composing the
brain and marrow was so subject to dis- integration, there
was no hope whatever of determining its struc-ture. What was
it relieved thie cortex of activity during slumber? What
prevented the stomach from digesting itself - as sometimes,
in fact, did happen after death? One might answer, life: a
special power of resistance of the living protoplasm; but
this would be not to recognize the mystical character of
such an explanation. The theory of such an everyday
phenomenon as fever was full of contradictions. Heightened
oxIdization resulted in increased warmth, but why was there
not an increased expenditure of warmtth to correspond? Did
the paralysis of the sweat-secretions depend upon
contraction of the skin? But such contraction took
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place
only in the case of " chills and fever," for otherwise, in
fever, the skin was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat
indicated the centnl nervous system as the seat of the
causes of heightened catabolism as well as the source of
that condition of the skin which we were content to call
abnormal, because we did not know how to define
it.
But
what was all this ignorance, compared with our utter
help-lessness in the presence of such a phenomenon as
memory, or of that other more prolonged and astounding
memory which we called the inheritance of acquired
characteristics? Out of the question to get even a glimpse
of any mechanical possibility of explication of such
performances on the part of the cell-substance. The
spermatozoon that conveyed to the egg countless complicated
individual and racial characteristics of the father was
visible only through a microscope; even the most powerful
magnification was not enough to show it as other than a
homogeneous body, or to determine its origin; it looked the
same in one animal as in another. These factors forced one
to the assumption that the cell was in the same case as with
the higher form it went to build up: that it too was already
a higher form, composed in its turn by the division of
living bodies, individual living units. Thus one passed from
the supposed smallest unit to a still smaller one; one was
driven to separate the elementary into its elements. No
doubt at all but just as the animal kingdom was composed of
various species of animals, as the human-animal organism was
composed of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so the
cell organism was composed of a new and varied animal
kingdom of elementary units, far below microscopic size,
which grew spontaneously, increased spontaneously according
to the law that each could bring forth only after its kind,
and, acting on the principle of a division of labour, served
together the next higher order of
existence.
Those
were the genes, the living germs, bioblasts, biophores-lying
there in the frosty night, Hans Castorp rejoiced to make
acquaintance with them by name. Yet how, he asked himself
ex-citedly, even after more light on the subject was
forthcoming. how could their elementary nature be
established? If they were living. they must be organic,
since life depended upon organiza-tion. But if they were
organized, then they could not be ele-mentary. since an
organism is not single but multiple. They were units within
the organic unit of the cell they built up. But if they
were, then, however impossibly small they were. they must
them-selves be built up. organically built up. as a law of
their existence; for the conception of a living unit meant
by definition that it was
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built
up out of smaller units which were subordinate; that is,
organized with reference to, a higher form. As long as
division yielded organIc unIts possessing the propertIes of
life - asslmila-tion and reproduction - no limits were set
to it. As long as one spoke of living units, one could not
correctly speak of elementary units, for the concept of
unity carried with it in perpetuity the concept of
subordinated, upbuilding unity; and there was no such thing
as elementary life, in the sense of something that was
already life, and yet elementary. And still, though without
logical existence, something of the kind must be eventually
the case; for it was not possible. to brush aside like that
the idea of the original procreation, the rise of life ; out
of what was not life. That gap which in exterior nature we
vainly sought to close, that between living and dead matter,
had its counterpart in nature's organic existence, and must
somehow either be closed up or bridged over. Soon or late,
division must yield " units " which, even though in
composition, were not organ- ized, and which mediated
betWeen life and absence of life; molec- ular groups, which
represented the transition between vitalized organization
and mere chemistry. But then, arrived at the mole-cule, one
stood on the brink of another abyss, which yawned yet more
mysteriously than that between organic and inorganic
na-ture: the gulf between the material and the immaterial.
For the molecule was composed of atoms, and the atom was
nowhere near large enough eveh to be spoken of as
extraordinarily small. It was so small, such a tiny, early,
transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of
the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like, of energy,
that it was scarcely possible yet - or, if it had been, was
now no longer possible - to think of it as material, but
rather as mean and border-line between material and
immaterial. The prob- lem of another original procreation
arose, far more wild and mys- terious than the organic: the
primeval birth of matter out of the immaterial. In fact the
abyss between material and. immaterial yawned as widely,
pressed as importunately - yes, more impor-tunately - to be
closed, as that between organic and inorganic -nature. There
must be a chemistry of the immaterial, there must be
combinations of the insubstantial, out of which sprang the
material - the atoms might represent protozoa of material,
by their nature substance and still not yet qulte substance.
Yet arrived at the .. not even small," the measure slipped
out of the hands; for " not even small " meant much the same
as enormously large "; and the step to the atom provecl: to
be without exaggeration portentous in the highest degree.
For at the very moment when one had assisted at
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the
final division of matter, when one had divided it into the
im-possibly small, at that moment there suddenly appeared
upon the horizon the astronomical
cosmos!
The
atom was a cosmic system, laden with energy; in which
heavenly bodies rioted rotating about a centre like a sun;
through whose ethereal space comets drove with the speed of
light years. kept in their eccentric orbits by the power of
the central body. And that was as little a mere comparison
as it would be were one to call the body of any
multiple-celled organism a " cell state." The city, the
state, the social community regulated according to the
principle of division of labour, not only might be compared
to organic life, it actually reproduced its conditions. Thus
in the in-most recesses of nature, as in an endless
succession of mirrors. was reflected the macrocosm of the
heavens, whose clusters, throngs. groups. and figures, paled
by the brilliant moon, hung over the dawing, frost-bound
valley, above the head of our muffled adept. Was it too bold
a thought that among the planets of the atomic solar system
- those myriads and milky ways of solar systems which
constituted matter - one or other of these inner-worldly
heavenly bodies might find itself in a condition
corresponding to that which made it possible for our earth
to become the abode of life? For a young man already rather
befuddled inwardly. suffering from abnormal skin-conditions.
who was not without all and any experience in the realm of
the illicit, it was a specularion which, far from being
absurd, appeared so obvious as to leap to the eyes, highly
evident, and bearing the stamp of logical truth. The "
small- ness " of these inner-worldly heavenly bodies would
have been an objection irrelevant to the hypothesis; since
the conception of large or small had ceased to be pertInent
at tlle moment when the cosmic character of the "smallest"
particle of matter had been revealed; while at the same
time, the conceptions of " outside " and " inside " had also
been shaken. The atom-world was an " outside." as, very
probably, the earthly star on which we dwelt was,
organically re-garded, deeply" inside." Had not a researcher
once, audaciously fanciful, referred to the" beasts of the
Milky Way," cosmic mon-sters whose flesh, bone, and brain
were built up out of solar sys- tems? But in that case, Hans
Castorp mused, then in the moment when one thought to have
come to to the end, it all began over again from the
beginning! For then, in the very innermost of his nature,
and in the inmost of that innermost, perhaps there was just
himself, just Hans Castorp, again and a hundred times Hans
Castorp, with burning face and stiffening fingers, lying
muffled on a balcony, with a view across the moonlit,
frost-nighted high valley. and prob-
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Page 285
ing,
with an interest both humanistic and medical, into the life
of the body!
He
held a volume of pathological anatomy in the red ray from
his table-lamp, and conned its text and numerous
reproductions. He read of the existcnce of parasitic
cell-juncture and of infec- tious tumours. These were forms
of tissue - and very luxuriant forms too - produced by
foreign cell-bodies in an organism which had proved
receptive to them, and in some way or other - one must
probably say perversely - had offered them peculiarly
fa-vourable conditions.lt was not so much that the parasite
took away nourishment from the surrounding tissues, as that,
in the process of building up and breaking down which went
on in it as in every other cell, it produced organic
combinations which were extraor- dinarily toxic - undeniably
destructive - to the cells where it had been entenained.
They had found out how to isolate the toxin from a number of
micro-organisms and produce it in concentrated form; and it
was amazing to see what small doses of this substance, which
simply belonged to a group of protein combinations, could,
when introduced into the circulation of an animal, produce
symptoms of acute poisoning and rapid degeneration. The
outward sign of this inward decay was a growth of tissue,
the pathological tumour, which was the reaction of the cells
to the stimulus of the foreign bacilli. Tubercles developed,
the size of a millet-seed, composed of cells resembling
mucous membrane, among or within which the bacilli lodged;
some of these were extraordinarily rich in proto- plasm,
very large, and full of nuclei. However, all this good
living soon led to ruin; for the nuclei of these monster
cells began to break down, the protoplasm they contained to
be destroyed by coagulation, and further areas of tissue to
be involved. They were attacked by inflammation, the
neighbouring blood-vessels suffered by contagion. White
blood-corpuscles were attracted to the seat of the evil; the
breaking-down proceeded apace; and meanwhile the soluble
toxins released by the bacteria half already poisoned the
nerve-centres, the entire organization was in a state of
high fever, and staggered - so to speak with heaving bosom -
toward dissolu- tion.
Thus
far pathology, the theory of disease, the accentuation of
the physical through pain; yet, in so far as it was the
accentuation of the physical, at the same time accentuation
through desire. Dis- ease was a perverse, a dissolute form
of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an
infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might
call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a
growth produced by morbid stimulation of the imma-
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terial?
The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was
taken precisely then, when there took place that first
increase in the density of the spiritual, that
pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the
irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part
pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the
primeval stage of matter, the transition from the
insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The
second creation. the birth of the organic out of the
inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of
the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the
organism was an intoxication. a heightening and unlicensed
accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was
nothing but next step on the reckless path of the spirit
dishonoured; nothing but the automatic blush of matte!'
roused to sensation and become receptive for that which
awaked it.
The
books lay piled upon the table, one lay on the matting next
his chair; that whIch he had latest read rested upon Hans
Castorp's stomach and oppressed his breath; yet no order
went from the cortex to the muscles in charge to take it
away. He had read down the page, his chin had sunk upon his
chest, over his innocent blue eyes the lids had fallen. He
beheld the image of life in flower, its structure, its
flesh-borne loveliness. She had lifted her hands from behind
her head, she opened her arms. On their inner side, par-
ticularly beneath the tender skin of the elbow-points, he
saw die blue branchings of the larger veins. These arms were
of unspeak- able sweetness. She leaned above him, she
inclined unto him and bent down over him, he was conscious
of her organic fragrance and the mild pulsation of her
heart. Something warm and tender clasped him round the neck;
melted with desire and awe, he laid his hands upon the flesh
of her upper arms, where the fine-grained skin over the
triceps came to his sense so heavenly cool; and upon his
lips he felt the moist clinging of her kiss.
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