The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

She had the look of a Protestant sister—that is to say, one working without a real vocation and burdened with restlessness and ennui.

He tried to put himself in Herr Albin’s place and see how it must feel to be finally relieved of the burden of a respectable life and made free of the infinite realms of shame; and the young man shuddered at the wild wave of sweetness which swept over him at the thought and drove on his labouring heart to an even quicker pace.

he is an intellectual amateur and up to the present, as is the wont of gifted youth, still experimenting with various points of view.

complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.

For of course it all had a certain end and aim; it was by a definite design that women were permitted to array themselves with irresistible allure: it was for the sake of posterity, for the perpetuation of the species.

Europe was the theatre of rebellion, the sphere of intellectual discrimination and transforming activity, whereas the East embodied the conception of quiesence and immobility.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

Have you never remarked that when a Russian says four hours, he means what we do when we say one? It is easy to see that the recklessness of these people where time is concerned may have to do with the space conceptions proper to people of such endless territory. Great space, much time—they say, in fact, that they are the nation that has time and can wait.

Take our great cities, the centres and foci of civilization, the crucibles of thought! Just as the soil there increases in value, and space becomes more and more precious, so, in the same measure, does time. Carpe diem! That was the song of a dweller in a great city.

There, Engineer, you have the hostility the intellect feels against nature, its proud mistrust, its high-hearted insistence upon the right to criticize her and her evil, reason-denying power. Nature is force; and it is slavish to suffer force, to abdicate before it—to abdicate, that is, inwardly.

funk and felicity aren’t mutually exclusive, everybody knows that.

made a few remarks about the carpenter’s son and rabbi of humanity, whose birthday they fancied they were celebrating to-day. Whether he had actually lived, Settembrini said, was uncertain; yet his time had given birth to an idea, which had continued its triumphant course even up to to-day: the idea of the dignity of the human spirit, the idea of equality—in a word, they were celebrating the birth of individualistic democracy, and to it he would empty the glass they gave him.

“But mind, the mountain’s magic-mad to-night, And if you choose a will-o’-the-wisp to light Your path, take care, ‘twill lead you all astray.”

“ ‘Look at her well,’ ” Hans Castorp heard Herr Settembrini say, as though from a distance, following her with his glance as she presently left the room. “ ‘The fair one, see! ’Tis Lilith!’ ” “Who?” asked Hans Castorp. Herr Settembrini’s literary soul was pleased. He answered: “ ‘Adam’s first wife is she.’ ”

Hans Castorp was standing on the tiled court of the school yard, gazing at close quarters into these blue-grey-green epicanthus eyes, above the prominent cheekbones, and saying: “Do you happen to have a pencil?”

All the propaganda carried on to-day by the prophets of nature, the experiments in regeneration, the uncooked food, fresh-air cures, sun-bathing, and so on, the whole Rousseauian paraphernalia, had as its goal nothing but the dehumanization, the animalizing of man.

100 years ago. Same As It Ever Was

She spoke to us as though we were old friends, told about herself, asked questions, though it seems Joachim had never actually known her. I thought it rather odd.” “That is the East—and the illness,” replied Hans Castorp. “One mustn’t try to measure her by humanistic standards.”

music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration—like music—even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.