Status Updates From The Magic Mountain

When a meal was over, his first requirement was a finger bowl of perfumed water, his second a Russian cigarette, on which he paid no customs duties, since he had found a way to obtain them with a few well-placed, casual bribes. This was a prelude to his cigar, a Maria Mancini, a very tasty brand from Bremen—we shall come to speak about that again—whose spicy toxins blended so satisfyingly with those of his coffee.

Although the shape of his hands was not particularly aristocratic, he took good care of them, keeping the skin supple and setting them off with a simple platinum band and his grandfather’s signet ring; his teeth, which were rather soft and subject to damage, had been repaired with gold inlays.

The upper class of this commercial and democratic city-state bequeaths its children the burden of higher civilization, and Hans Castorp bore it on his shoulders with a certain easy dignity. He was bathed spotless as a baby, and he had his clothes made by a tailor who enjoyed the trust of the young men in his circle.

For in this he was true to type: that he dearly and truly loved living well, and despite his thin-blooded, refined appearance, he clung to the cruder pleasures of life as a gluttonous baby clings to its mother’s breast.

He gazed at the roofed-over slips, which were wrapped in webs of smoky fog and from which the ribs of ships under construction protruded, while engineers, blueprints and pump-charts in hand, gave orders to the workers. From boyhood on, these were all familiar sights to Hans Castorp, awakening in him a warm sense of belonging,

He watched—and this would later prove to be his special area of interest—the teeming dry docks, the towering, mammoth cadavers of ships that had sailed to Asia and Africa, but now lay braced on strutbeams thick as trees, looking monstrous and clumsy on dry land, their keels and screws naked, swarmed over by hosts of midget laborers—hammering, scouring, whitewashing.

He watched the merchants in yellow mackintoshes, like the one he himself was wearing, as they streamed at noon toward the exchange, where things could get quite fierce, as he well knew, and someone might very suddenly be motivated to hand out invitations to a grand dinner, in hopes of prolonging his credit.

His nose took in the fumes of the harbor, of coal and tar, the pungent odors of the world’s produce piled high, and his eyes watched the huge steam cranes on the docks—so calm, wise, and monumentally strong that they looked like hardworking elephants—as they transferred tons of sacks, bales, crates, barrels, and carboys from the bowels of idle seagoing vessels to railroad cars and sheds.

The atmosphere of the metropolitan seaport, the damp atmosphere of global shopkeeping and prosperity, had been the air of life itself for his forefathers, and with great gusto he breathed it now as a matter of course and found it profoundly satisfying.

And if you were to hear him talking—in his nonchalant, reasonable way, his voice a little hollow and monotone, with just a hint of Platt—or even if you just saw him there, so blondly correct, his hair nicely trimmed, his head with the stamp of something classic about it, his air cool and languid, suggesting an inherited, unconscious arrogance, [...]

He was probably a little anemic from the start ...But otherwise he was a regular, healthy lad, a passable tennis-player and oarsman, although on summer evenings, instead of manning an oar, he preferred sitting on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst Boathouse, a refreshing drink in hand, listening to music and watching the boats as they drifted among the swans, their lights reflected in the bright, smooth water.

He grew—despite miserable weather, despite wind and fog—grew up, one might say, in his yellow mackintosh, and on the whole was a quite cheerful lad.

Hans Castorp gazed at the stuff out of which this life-size dead figure was made, at this waxy, yellow, smooth stuff with the consistency of cheese, gazed at the face and hands of what had been his grandfather. And just then a fly settled on the inert forehead and began to move its proboscis up and down. Old Fiete circumspectly shooed it off, though avoiding actually touching the forehead;

The man who lay there, or better, what lay there, was not Grandfather himself, but a shell—which, as Hans Castorp knew, was not made of wax, but of its own material. It was just stuff, and that was what was indecent, and so not really even sad—no sadder than things that have to do with the body, and only with it, are sad.

...the masses of flowers and more especially the very well represented tuberoses were there for a more sobering reason—and that was to gloss over the other side of death, the one that is neither beautiful nor sad, but almost indecent in its base physicality, to make people forget it or at least not be reminded of it.

The religious, spiritual side was expressed by the pretentious lying-in-state,by the pomp of flowers and palm fronds—which he knew signified heavenly peace—and also,&more to the point,by the cross between the dead fingers of what had been his grandfather,by the blessings a copy of Thorvaldsen’s Christ extended from the head of the coffin,& by two towering candelabra on either side,

...there was something religious, gripping, and sadly beautiful, which was to say, spiritual about death and at the same time something that was the direct opposite, something very material, physical, which one could not really describe as beautiful, or gripping, or religious, or even as sad.

Within three or four months after his father died, he had forgotten death; now he remembered it, and all the impressions from before reemerged simultaneously—in every precise, piercing, and incomparable detail.

It was in the dining room, the same room where they had so often sat across the table from one another; in the middle of the room Hans Lorenz Castorp now lay in a silver-trimmed coffin, atop a bier surrounded and besieged with wreaths....here he lay in state—one could not be sure whether triumphant or vanquished, but in any case, with a stern, satisfied look on his face,

...he could not help, as we have said, regarding this pictorial presence as his authentic&real grandfather, seeing in the everyday one a temporary, imperfectly adapted improvisation, so to speak. From that perspective, the lapses&eccentricities in his everyday appearance were apparently mere imperfections, or inept adaptations, were the vestiges or hints of a pure and true nature that could not be totally eradicated.