Deliberate exaggeration, which no one takes literally, to give emphasis to a feeling or a situation.
In The Magic Mountain
Fast or slow, as you like [...] It doesn't pass at all, you know? Here there is no time and no life; there is simply nothing at all
Joachim pushes his weariness to the extreme: time "doesn't pass at all" and "there is simply nothing at all." The total denial, spoken in a fit of venting rather than as a theory, shows how empty of time and of life the place seems to him.
Chapter I: The Arrival at the Berghof, Joachim Ziemssen
Our feeling [...] is the virile force that awakens life [...] feeling, my young friend, is divine. Man is divine, as long as he feels [...] If man fails in feeling, the ignominy of God breaks out, the defeat of God's virility takes place, a cosmic catastrophe, an unimaginable horror
Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom and the Thunder, Pieter Peeperkorn
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