Chapter I: The Arrival at the Berghof
it is not really to time that the story owes its degree of antiquity
Explanation and analysis
Before the first scene, the narrator of "Purpose" makes a curious warning. The story he is about to tell, that of Hans Castorp and his years in a Davos sanatorium, is old, he says, but this oldness is not due to the time that has passed since the events occurred. The sentence dismantles the common idea that a story grows old by the calendar, and it opens the book with the mistrust that runs through it entirely: time is not a simple measure.
The explanation comes right after: the story unfolds before a turning point and a limit that, in the narrator's words, cut a deep furrow in the lives and consciences of men, in the world from before the Great War. It is this distance, not the years counted, that makes it a distant past. The narrator also speaks of the problematic character and the peculiar duplicity of that mysterious element, time, and thus hands the reader, before the first scene, the key to the novel.
The sentence can also be read as a warning about what is to come. Hans Castorp will spend seven years on a mountain where weeks cease to count as a measure, and the book will show that lived duration does not coincide with the clock's. When Joachim says three weeks are almost nothing "up here," and when the digression of chapter IV treats habit, the reader will already have heard the thesis from the narrator's mouth: the time of a story, and of a life, is measured by what happens in it, not by the number of days. The warning is brief, but it organizes the rest.
Two days of travel separate a man [...] from his everyday world, from everything he usually calls his duties, interests, cares, and projects; they separate him far more than this young man could imagine while a cab carried him to the station. The space that, turning and fleeing, stretches out between him and his place of origin reveals forces that are usually considered the privilege of time
Explanation and analysis
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Three weeks amount to almost nothing for us up here, but for you, who come to visit and intend to stay only three weeks, it is a great deal of time. [...] "Returning in three weeks" is an idea from down below.
Explanation and analysis
They've disinfected it, so everything's fine
Explanation and analysis
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
Explanation and analysis
Chapter II: The Baptismal Basin and the Two Figures of the Grandfather
the strange impression, half dreamy and anguished, of something that paraded without moving, that changed and yet remained, something that was as much reiteration as dizzying monotony
Explanation and analysis
Thus the boy approved in his heart that the grandfather should appear in full authenticity and perfection on the day when the hour came to say goodbye forever [...] the grandfather, solemnly released from that passing adaptation, had assumed definitively his genuine and deserved appearance
Explanation and analysis
death had two aspects, one pious, significant, of melancholy beauty [...] and at the same time it had another, absolutely different and even opposite, a very physical, quite material aspect, which it was impossible to call properly beautiful, significant, pious, or even sad
Explanation and analysis
Man does not live only his personal life as an individual; consciously or unconsciously, he also takes part in the life of his era and of his contemporaries
Explanation and analysis
this effect will be able to go beyond the domain of the soul and of morality, and affect the physical and organic part of the individual itself [...] For someone to undertake a work that goes beyond the measure of pure and simple necessity, without his time having a satisfactory answer to the question "What for?", an isolation and moral readiness are indispensable, something rare and of a heroic nature, or else a very robust vitality
Explanation and analysis
Chapter III: The First Full Day and the Arrival of Settembrini
Sometimes it occurs to me that this business of illness and death is at bottom not serious; it is rather a kind of relaxation.
Explanation and analysis
what if you packed your bags this very night and took tomorrow's train to set off and get away from here? [...] I bow before reason [...] I also bow before courage.
Explanation and analysis
Time has no nature of its own, none at all. When it seems long to us, it is long, and when it seems short, it is short, but no one truly knows its real extent.
Explanation and analysis
Incurable, ladies! Look at the man before you; he is an incurable case [...] I have nothing more to do; I no longer figure in the accounts; I can laugh at everything…
Explanation and analysis
Afterward, Hans Castorp dreamed that he was in the gymnasium schoolyard [...] and that he was about to ask Madame Chauchat, who was present too, for the loan of a pencil.
Explanation and analysis
Chapter IV: The Sense of Time, Hippe and the Thermometer
Illness is absolutely not noble, nor worthy of reverence, in no way whatsoever. [...] A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrifying as a body without a soul.
Explanation and analysis
Rich and interesting content is [...] capable of shortening the hour and even the day [...] so that years rich in events pass much more slowly than those other, poor, empty, light years, which are swept away by the wind and fly by. What is called boredom is therefore, in reality, rather a morbid brevity of time, brought on by monotony
Explanation and analysis
How like her, that woman up here!
Explanation and analysis
love oppressed by chastity was not dead, no; it lived and continued, in the darkness, in the deepest secret, aspiring to its fulfillment; it broke the magic circle of chastity and re-emerged, though in a metamorphosed form, very hard to recognize [...] In the form of illness. The symptom of illness is nothing but the disguised manifestation of love's power; and every illness is only love transformed
Explanation and analysis
"I arrived at a very firm opinion that you were, clandestinely, one of ours, and that you would eventually realize this fact, as so many others did who came here for amusement, studied the environment, turning up their noses, and one fine day found out that it would be advantageous for them [...] to abandon the attitude of careless curiosity and spend an extended stay here"
Explanation and analysis
Chapter V: Humaniora, the Analysis and Walpurgis Night
"It is the same day that repeats itself again and again; but precisely because it is always the same day, the term 'repetition' seems at bottom rather inadequate. It would be better to speak of monotony, of a now that has stopped, or of eternity. They bring you soup at lunchtime, just as they brought it yesterday and will bring it tomorrow. [...] times get confused, blend together in your mind, and what is revealed to you as the true form of existence is a present without extension, in which they bring you soup eternally"
Explanation and analysis
The text says that Hans Castorp saw what he should have expected, but what, in reality, is not for man to see, and what he would never have believed he could see: he cast a look into his own tomb. [...] and for the first time in his life he understood that he was destined to die.
Explanation and analysis
"I say 'yes' to the body, I honor it and feel love for it [...] I do not ignore that, within the antithesis of body and spirit, the first represents the evil and diabolical principle, for the body is nature, and nature [...] is evil: mystical and evil!"
Explanation and analysis
"a fever of matter that accompanied the process of incessant decomposition and reconstitution of albumin molecules [...]. It was neither matter nor spirit. It was something between the two, a phenomenon sustained by matter, just like the rainbow over the waterfall, and equal to the flame. [...] Illness was the licentious form of life"
Explanation and analysis
it referred, in a word, to her body, a languid and exalted body, accentuated to excess by illness and transformed by illness, once again, into body.
Explanation and analysis
Chapter VI: Naphta, the Snow, and Joachim's Death
Democracy has no other meaning than that of being an individualist corrective to every form of absolutism of the State. [...] The conquests of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, my lord, are called personality, the rights of man, liberty!
Explanation and analysis
"We already know that power is evil. But, for the kingdom to come, it is necessary to suspend momentarily the dualism between good and evil, this side and the beyond, spirit and arbitrariness, and to unite them in a principle that joins asceticism and dominion. That is what I call the necessity of terror"
Explanation and analysis
the sicker, the more human, and the genius of illness is more human than that of health
Explanation and analysis
"I do not want to grant death any power over my thoughts! For this is what goodness and philanthropy consist of, and nothing more. [...] Love confronts death; only it, and not reason, is stronger than it"
Explanation and analysis
What he had dreamed was on the verge of fading. And what he had thought, that very same night, he no longer quite understood
Explanation and analysis
"the patient mentioned with some haste that he must at once write and dispatch a request, asking for an extension of his leave. In the midst of these words the 'imperceptible passing' took place"
Explanation and analysis
Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom, and the Thunder
Can time itself, time as such, be narrated, in itself? No, indeed not, such a thing would be an insane daring!
Explanation and analysis
Our feeling [...] is the virile force that awakens life [...] feeling, my young man, 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, a cosmic catastrophe, an unimaginable horror
Explanation and analysis
He saw disturbing, pernicious things, and he knew 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.
Explanation and analysis
What was the world that opened up behind her, and that, according to Hans Castorp's inner presentiments, had to be the world of forbidden love? It was death.
Explanation and analysis
the thunder we all know of rumbled, that deafening detonation of the sinister mixture of boredom and irritation long accumulated [...] and the thunder that, for us, however, makes the magic mountain explode and casts our sleeper roughly before its gates.
Explanation and analysis
Will love still arise from this worldwide festival of death, and from the pernicious fever that inflames the sky of the rainy night?