Joining two words of opposite meaning in one short expression, like "sweet bitterness".
In The Magic Mountain
the strange impression, somewhere between dreamy and distressing, of something that filed past without moving, that changed and yet remained, something that was as much reiteration as dizzying monotony
Two words of opposite meaning join in "dizzying monotony": dizziness suggests rapid movement, monotony suggests nothing changing. The expression captures what the boy feels before the baptismal basin, everything the same and spinning at once.
Chapter II: The Baptismal Basin and the Two Figures of the Grandfather, the narrator
Seeing disquieting, pernicious things, and knowing what he saw before him: it was life without time, life without cares or hopes, life as abjection that moves as it stagnates, dead life.
Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom and the Thunder, the narrator
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