Status Updates From کوه جادو

Sometimes prose is soooooooo earth shattering and thats ok

The boy looked up at his grandfather’s narrow gray head which was bent over the bowl again, just as it had been in that long-vanished hour he was talking about, and a familiar feeling stole over him—a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something and a dizzying, everlasting sameness,[...]

At the sound of those somber syllables, religious feelings got mixed up with a sense of death and history, and all of it together somehow left the boy with a pleasant sensation—.

The sound made him feel as if he were breathing the moldy, cool air of Saint Catherine’s Church or the crypt in Saint Michael’s, as if he could sense the gentle draft of places where as you walked, hat in hand, you fell into a certain reverential, forward rocking motion, your heels never touching the ground; and he also thought he could hear the remote, cloistered silence of those reverberating spaces.

His father’s name was there, as was in fact his grandfather’s,& his great-grandfather’s;& now that syllable came doubled, tripled,& quadrupled from the storyteller’s mouth; and the boy would lay his head to one side, his eyes fixed and full of thought, yet somehow dreamily thoughtless, his lips parted in drowsy devotion, and he would listen to the great-great-great-great—that somber sound of the crypt & buried time,

As for the plate, one could read its much greater age right on its surface. There stood “1650” in ornate numbers, and framing the date were all sorts of curlicued engraved lines, done in the “modern fashion” of the period, bombastic and capricious arabesques and crests that were half stars, half flowers.

The bowl was beautiful, its lines simple and elegant, fashioned according to the austere taste of the early years of the last century. Smooth and massive, it rested on round feet, its interior lined with gold, though the yellow luster had faded with the years. The only ornamentation was an embossed wreath of roses and serrated leaves around its rim.

“Grampa,” little Hans Castorp might say once they were in the den,raising himself up on tiptoe and stretching to reach the old man’s ear, “please show me the baptismal bowl.”
And his grandfather, who had already pushed back the long,soft flap of his frock coat and pulled a bundle of keys from his trouser pocket,now opened the china cabinet, from whose interior rose a fragrance the boy found both strange and pleasant.

No sooner had he turned out the lamp on his nightstand than sleep overwhelmed him—but he started up again when he recalled that someone had died in that very bed only two nights before. “Not for the first time, either,” he told himself, as if that might serve to reassure him. “It’s just a deathbed, an ordinary deathbed.”

“He’s a little sensitive,” Joachim admitted. “You shouldn’t have been so brusque about rejecting medical treatment, at least not the psychological part. He doesn’t like for people to try to avoid it. He’s not all that well disposed toward me, either, because I don’t confide enough in him. But now and then I do tell him a dream, so that he’ll have something to dissect.”

“Bravo, my congratulations. And so you’ll not be availing yourself here of any sort of medical attention, either physical or psychological?”
“No, no, thanks just the same,”Hans Castorp said, almost stepping back.
Krokowski broke into his triumphant smile again, and shaking the young man’s hand once more, he exclaimed in a loud voice, “In that case, sleep well, Herr Castorp—in full enjoyment of your impeccable health.

You see, I’ve never met a perfectly healthy person before. And what kind of exams were those, if you’ll pardon the question?”
“I’m an engineer, doctor,” Hans Castorp answered with modest dignity.
“Ah, an engineer.” And Dr. Krokowski’s smile receded, as it were, losing something of both its energy and warmth for a moment.

In answering, he said something about three weeks, mentioned his exams, and added that, thank God, he was perfectly healthy.
“You don’t say!” Dr. Krokowski replied, thrusting his head forward at a derisive slant and smiling more broadly. “In that case you are a phenomenon of greatest medical interest.

You have come as a patient, have you not—if you’ll pardon the question?”
It was touching to see how Hans Castorp struggled to be polite and master his drowsiness. He was annoyed with himself for being in such bad shape, and with the leery self-consciousness of youth he detected traces of an indulgent smirk in the assistant director’s reassuring smile.

Getting deeper into this also getting into Kierkegaard and black holes at the same time…. A lot going on