Placing opposing ideas or words side by side, so that one illuminates the other through contrast.
In The Magic Mountain
Three weeks mean almost nothing to us up here, but for you, who are only visiting and intend to stay just three weeks, it is a considerable portion of time. [...] "Going back in three weeks" is an idea from down below.
Joachim sets two measures of time against each other, "up here" and "down below." For someone who lives on the mountain, "three weeks" is "almost nothing"; for the visitor, "a considerable portion of time." The contrast separates the world of the guest from the world of the patient.
Chapter I: The Arrival at the Berghof, Joachim Ziemssen
death had two aspects, one pious, meaningful, of melancholy beauty [...] and at the same time had another, absolutely different and even opposed, a very physical, quite material aspect, which it was impossible to properly qualify as beautiful, meaningful, pious, nor even sad
Chapter II: The Baptismal Basin and the Two Figures of the Grandfather, the narrator
I say "yes" to the body, I honor it and feel love for it [...] I am not unaware that, within the antithesis of body and spirit, the former represents the evil and diabolical principle; for the body is nature, and nature [...] is evil: mystical and evil!
Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis and Walpurgis Night, Lodovico Settembrini
We already know that power is evil. But for the kingdom to come, the dualism between good and evil, this side and the beyond, spirit and arbitrariness must be momentarily suspended, and united in one principle that combines asceticism and dominion. This is what I call the necessity of terror
Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow and the Death of Joachim, Leo Naphta
the more sickly, the more human, and the genius of sickness is more human than the genius of health
Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow and the Death of Joachim, Leo Naphta
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