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The Magic Mountain · Chapter IV

The Sense of Time, Hippe and the Thermometer

IllnessPassionReasonTime

Necessary Purchase

Illness

Section summary

After a second splendid summer day, on the third day, during the rest after lunch, the sky darkens, an icy wind sweeps the valley, and a heavy snowfall with thunder breaks out, in early August. Hans Castorp asks ironically whether their summer is over, and Joachim replies that up here the seasons mix and there is snow in every month. They turn the heating on during the snowfall and turn it off the next day, with the rooms at six degrees. Hans Castorp and Joachim go to the village, in the rain, to buy blankets for the rest, and they bring back two of camel wool; Hans Castorp refuses a fur sleeping bag because he would feel like "one of you," settled there, and it is not worth it for a few weeks.

On the way back they meet Lodovico Settembrini, sallow and in an elegiac mood, who complains of the cold and of the owners of the sanatorium, who turn off the heating to save money; he evokes his father, a refined Romanist who worked in a well-heated study in Padua, and speaks ill of the doctor, of Krokowski and of the table companions, such as the brewer Magnus, who despises literature. Hans Castorp remarks that seeing Mrs. Stöhr, stupid and sick, puts him before a dilemma, because illness seems to him worthy of reverence and does not go with stupidity. Settembrini answers with a sermon: illness is not noble, it is a humiliation of man, an idea of superstitious ages, and the fight against it is work for the sake of progress. The true dilemma is that of a noble spirit trapped in a sick body, like the poet Leopardi; and the sick man, he says, is only body, as inhuman as a soul without a body.

Joachim notes that the cousin had already said something similar. Settembrini takes this as proof that Hans Castorp is a dilettante of the spirit who tries out ideas, "placet experiri," and says it falls to the educator to develop the good in a talented young man. Upon learning of the blankets for the rest, he repeats "placet experiri" ("it is fitting to try") and withdraws to read the newspapers. In the elevator, Hans Castorp remarks that Settembrini is a pedagogue whose words are like fresh rolls, that he seems to enjoy talking more than the theories and criticizes everything; Joachim replies that this shows respect for oneself and for men.

Analysis

Hans buys the blankets because the cold is real and a traveling rug would not be enough; he refuses the fur sleeping bag because the object would make him "one of you." He separates necessity from belonging: the blanket is a visitor's resource, the bag is a resident's dress. That the refusal is so clear shows that he already feels the attraction he wants to keep at a distance.

If I bought a fur sleeping bag, I ask you to understand, I would have the impression of wanting to settle here and of becoming, in a certain sense, one of you, Necessary Purchase

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Excursus on the Sense of Time

Time

Section summary

After lunch, Joachim teaches Hans Castorp to wrap himself in the two blankets on the deck chair, and the narrator interrupts the scene for a theoretical digression on why time stretches out during the first days in a new place and then shrinks as habit takes hold of the experience. Hans Castorp expresses the same sensation a few paragraphs later, telling his cousin that the time since arriving in Davos-Dorf already seems an eternity, although only a few days have passed.

Analysis

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Hans Castorp Attempts Conversation in French

Death

Section summary

Hans Castorp, who has not yet acclimatized, learns the daily machinery of the Berghof (see the Berghof) and discovers that the bulging balloons in the corridors, at six francs apiece, bring oxygen for the dying. Dr. Behrens, on his way to room 27, calls him a "disinterested spectator," and Hans Castorp glimpses the first dying man of his life, a young man with a sparse beard, while an anxious nurse keeps the cousins talking about her patient. Then he is introduced to the Mexican woman nicknamed "Tous-les-deux," hears her phrase from her, and answers in French, pleased not to have made a mistake.

Analysis

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Politically Suspect!

Reason

Section summary

On the Sunday of the fortnightly concert, the first break from the normal day, the terrace of the Berghof fills with guests, among them the cheerful young people from the staircase, Mr. Albin and Hermine Kleefeld, and Hans Castorp smokes and drinks beer at a small table with Joachim. Lodovico Settembrini arrives, sits down with them, and declares that he dislikes music administered by the authorities, toward which he has a political antipathy. Joachim Ziemssen defends the concert because each piece of some seven minutes has a beginning and an end, and Settembrini turns the remark into a thesis and calls the music politically suspect.

Analysis

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Hippe

Passion

Section summary

On Sunday afternoon, carriages take the Russian guests on an outing, among them Madame Clavdia Chauchat and Marusja, and Hans Castorp sees Joachim gaze at Marusja with a sadness that is not a soldier's. On Monday there will be Dr. Krokowski's lecture, part of a fortnightly series on "Love as a Pathogenic Factor," which everyone must attend and which Settembrini never will. Before it, tired of the horizontal life and blaming his discomfort on the Russian couple, Mrs. Stöhr, Mr. Albin, and the aristocrat's cough, Hans Castorp resolves to take a long walk alone. He climbs the slope singing loudly and improvising, loses his breath, falls at the foot of a pine tree, and is left with a head tremor just like that of his grandfather, Hans Lorenz Castorp, which amuses him.

Beside a waterfall, seated on a bench, he suffers a heavy nosebleed and then, lying down with his eyes closed, goes back to the age of thirteen: in the schoolyard, he asks his classmate Pribislav Hippe for a pencil, a boy with Kirghiz eyes whom he had admired in silence for a year without ever having spoken to him. The memory is stitched onto the dream of the previous chapter.

On waking, he notices that Hippe looks like "that woman" up here, and asks himself whether this is why he is interested in her. With weak knees, he rests several times on the descent, returns to the sanatorium exhausted, covers part of the way on a cart of empty crates, and arrives just as the porter announces that Krokowski's lecture has begun.

Analysis

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Analysis

IllnessPassion

Section summary

Hans Castorp enters the lecture, already begun, pale and with his clothes stained with blood, and sits down right behind Madame Clavdia Chauchat, who turns to look at him with slanted eyes exactly like Pribislav's. He notices her relaxed posture, back curved and head thrust forward, and connects it to the illness and the lack of restraint that Mr. Albin had boasted of. Dr. Krokowski speaks to an attentive audience of flushed faces about love as the most endangered of nature's forces: when chastity and shame oppress it, it does not die, it returns in disguise, and the form in which it returns is illness, "love transformed."

Hans distracts himself by looking at Madame Chauchat's short, bitten hand and her nearly bare arm, thinks about how women dress to provoke desire, and finds it indecent to do so when the body is sick inside, and he compares this, uncomfortably, to the silent interest he had taken in Hippe. In the end Krokowski, arms outspread, almost like a crucified man, invites everyone to the dissection of souls and promises a cure through analysis, and the audience follows him like the crowd following the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Hans Castorp thinks he is only there as a visitor and wonders whether Madame Chauchat, too, will let herself be dissected; to his cousin, who greets him with a question about the walk, he says only that the walk was less worthwhile than he had hoped, and neither of them mentions the lecture again.

Analysis

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Doubts and Considerations

Section summary

On the first weekly bill, one hundred and eighty francs, Hans Castorp pays at the office and, with Joachim, talks about the organization of the sanatorium: Dr. Behrens is not the owner but an employee of a joint-stock company, a widower who stayed in Davos beside his wife's grave and who may himself be ill. The narrator draws from this a question that runs through the chapter: can the sick doctor cure? Joachim objects that Behrens has probably already recovered, and Hans Castorp, accompanying him to the basement, sees Krokowski's office in a veiled twilight.

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Table Talk

Passion

Section summary

Since the solitary walk, Hans Castorp has had his grandfather's head tremor, which bothers him mostly during meals and which he tries to hide by propping his arm on the table or turning his head from one neighbor to the other. He knows the cause is not only the mountain air but an inner agitation, tied to Madame Clavdia Chauchat, who almost always arrives late and makes the glass door bang. Before, he flew into a rage at the crash; now he lowers his head, ashamed, as if sharing the blame.

The one who notices this is Mrs. Engelhart, his neighbor at table, who never stops praising Madame Chauchat. Hans Castorp pretends to mock the spinster, calling Madame Chauchat "beautiful Minka" and saying the professor is in love with her, only so that he can talk about the Russian woman, and both of them know the game. He asks why she does not wear a wedding ring, and she tells him she is married to a civil servant in Dagestan, lives apart from him, and is in Davos for the third time. Hans Castorp says he suspects her and asks her to find out Madame's Christian name, which appears the next day: Clavdia. He begins to speak only of "Clavdia," awaits each meal as a new meeting with the patient, and as he lies down for the rest he dismisses a love song as sentimental, but admits that his heart, which once beat inexplicably, now beats in step with what he feels when he thinks of her.

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Dawning Dread. Of the Two Grandfathers and the Evening Boat Ride

FormationReason

Section summary

In Hans Castorp's second week, heavy rain prevents excursions, and he tells Joachim he has no heart for them: he fears the stay will end too soon. What occupies him is the exchange of glances with Clavdia Chauchat at table. On the sixth occasion he pretends to examine with disgust a lady with an acne-scarred face, and when her napkin slides off her lap he jumps up to run to her; Clavdia, annoyed by the little panic, turns her back on him and for ten meals does not so much as glance at the room. He sees it all as a holiday adventure, but he deliberately lingers to cross her in the corridor, outside her room, and twice pretends to have forgotten his handkerchief in order to go up and meet her. The second time she looks at him closely, and he recognizes in Clavdia's eyes those of Pribislav Hippe, which gives him "a dawning dread."

Restless, he seeks support. Joachim, who badgers Behrens for leave to return to the plains and who, as Hans perceives, leaves the room because of Marusja, is too preoccupied with himself; Behrens, with his blue cheeks and watery eyes, does not inspire filial trust; that leaves Settembrini, whom Hans decides to hear out with "placet experiri." The Italian starts sitting at the cousins' table, mocks the brewer Magnus, provokes Mrs. Stöhr with the cinematograph and Captain Miklosich, and tells how Anton Schneermann's mother hauled him to the train, slapping him.

On walks and over dessert, Settembrini speaks of his grandfather Giuseppe, a Milanese lawyer and Carbonaro, exiled in Spain and Greece, who went about in black mourning for Italy. Hans compares him to his own grandfather, Hans Lorenz Castorp, also dressed in black, but out of piety, and the comparison brings to mind an evening boat ride, with the day in the west and the moon in the east. Settembrini defends technology as a moral path, recounts that his grandfather proclaimed that the three days of 1830 in Paris would be equal to the six days of creation (Hans bangs his fist on the table), opposes the Asian principle to the European, and dreams of the Universal Republic, beginning with the fall of Vienna. He speaks of his father's humanism, of Carducci, of Dante, and of the cult of the word, and closes with the word "civilization." Hans listens out of a sense of duty, but this duty gives him license to turn his thoughts back to Clavdia.

Analysis

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The Thermometer

IllnessTime

Section summary

In the third and last week foreseen for the stay, Hans Castorp reckons what the sanatorium costs and concludes that he pays his expenses with room to spare. He feels the holiday has flown by, avoids mentioning the departure set for the following Tuesday or Wednesday, out of pity for leaving Joachim alone, and says he will have to "rest from this rest." He has caught a bad cold on the night rests on the balcony, which he enjoys very much, with blankets, a cigar, and the music that rises from the valley at night. Joachim warns that nobody up there acknowledges colds, but the bureaucratic machinery works all the same: on Friday the head nurse, Miss von Mylendonk, a short woman with a shovel-shaped lower lip, appears in his room, says the catarrh does not come from the cold and that "cold" is "nonsense," asks whether he never takes his temperature, and sells him a thermometer for five francs (see the thermometer).

Hans Castorp uses it at once and, after seven minutes, reads 37.6, a fever nobody there has except the bedridden. Moved, he tells his cousin, who reads the thermometer at the washbasin and predicts that he will have to stay in bed; Hans Castorp retorts that 37.6 is 37.6, and if the others go about with it, so can he. At table, when he gives the temperature, everyone laughs and wags a finger at him, as if they know he is hiding something, and they reject the excuse of a cold, while Mrs. Stöhr discourses on the pleasures of coughing. Joachim suggests he take advantage of the monthly examination on Saturday, and the two of them, on returning from the walk, ask Dr. Behrens, who agrees to examine him on Saturday at two, after lunch, and praises his talent for fever.

On Saturday, at the end of lunch, when the clock in the room strikes two, Madame Chauchat, who had not looked toward the hall, turns her head over her shoulder and gives him a smile, as if to say it is time; Hans Castorp, who was thinking of giving up the examination, follows Joachim to the consulting room in the basement. Behrens examines Joachim first, tapping and listening, with Krokowski taking notes, and keeps the six-month term as a minimum. Then he examines Hans Castorp, asks about his parents and grandfather (his mother died of an embolism, his father and grandfather of pneumonia), notes old foci already healed and a harsh, moist breathing high on the left, and says that Hans has been "clandestinely one of ours" since the first day, and that the fact of having a sick cousin already sheds light on him. Hans Castorp turns pale, and Joachim, with his suspenders in hand, stands motionless. Behrens explains that the mountain air speeds up latent disease and that the catarrh is its eruption, and sends him to bed for weeks, until his interior can be photographed, warning that a case like his does not improve "between today and the day after tomorrow," and that he will have plenty of time to be a good patient. Krokowski warmly shakes his hand.

Analysis

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