“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin ironically on the third day…

It was a terrible storm.

The second day that the guest had spent all the way up here had been gloriously summery. The sky shone deep blue above the lance-like top shoots of the spruce trees, while the village at the bottom of the valley shimmered glaringly in the heat and the bells of the cows, who strolled around plucking the short, warmed mat grass of the leanings, filled the air cheerfully and contemplatively. The ladies had already turned up for breakfast in delicate wash blouses, some even with open sleeves, which did not all dress equally well – Frau Stöhr, for example, dressed decidedly badly, her arms were too spongy, the clothes just weren’t very light for her. The gentlemen of the sanatorium had also taken the beautiful weather into account in their exterior in various ways. Lustrous jackets and linen suits had appeared, and Joachim Ziemssen had worn ivory flannel trousers with his blue coat, a combination that gave his appearance a wholly military stamp. As for Settembrini, he had repeatedly expressed his intention to change suits. “Hell!” he had said when he promenaded down into town with his cousins ​​after lunch, “how the sun burns! I see I’ll have to dress lighter.” But though it was eloquently put, he had ‘ he had said as he sauntered down into town with his cousins ​​after lunch, ‘how the sun burns! I see I’ll have to dress lighter.” But though it was eloquently put, he had ‘ he had said as he sauntered down into town with his cousins ​​after lunch, ‘how the sun burns! I see I’ll have to dress lighter.” But though it was eloquently put, he hadstill wearing his long fleeces with the large lapels and his checkered trousers—probably that was all he had as a wardrobe.

On the third day, however, it was exactly as if nature were being tumbled and every order turned upside down; Hans Castorp couldn’t believe his eyes. It was after main meal, and they had been resting for twenty minutes, when the sun hurriedly disappeared, ugly peat-brown clouds came up over the south-eastern ridges, and a wind of strange air quality, cold and chilling the bones as if from unknown ones , icy regions, suddenly swept through the valley, the temperature plunged and opened a whole new regiment.

“Snow,” said Joachim’s voice behind the glass wall.

“What do you mean by ‘snow’?” asked Hans Castorp. “You’re not saying it’s going to snow now, are you?”

“Sure,” Joachim replied. “We know the wind. When it comes, there will be a toboggan run.”

“Nonsense!” said Hans Castorp. “If I am right, we write at the beginning of August.”

But Joachim had spoken the truth, initiated as he was into the situation. Because within a few moments, with repeated thunderstorms, a violent snowstorm set in – a flurry so dense that everything seemed shrouded in white steam and one could hardly see anything of the town and valley.

It snowed on all afternoon. The central heating was turned on, and while Joachim was using his fur sack and did not allow himself to be disturbed on his spa duties, Hans Castorp fled into his room.pushed a chair to the heated pipes and looked out from there at the mess, shaking his head frequently. The next morning it no longer snowed; but although the outside thermometer showed a few degrees of warmth, the snow had stayed a foot deep, so that a perfect winter landscape spread out before Hans Castorp’s astonished eyes. The heating had been turned off again. The room temperature was six degrees above zero.

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin with bitter irony…

“You can’t say that,” Joachim replied matter-of-factly. “God willing, there will still be beautiful summer days. Even in September this is still very possible. But the thing is, the seasons aren’t that different here, you know, they sort of mix and they don’t follow the calendar. In winter the sun is often so strong that you sweat and take off your skirt to go for a walk, and in summer, well, you can see how it is here sometimes in the summer. And then the snow – it messes everything up. It snows in January, but not much less in May, and it snows in August too, as you notice. All in all one can say that not a month goes by without it snowing, that’s a statement to which one can hold fast. In short, there are winter days and summer days and spring days and autumn days

“That’s a nice confusion,” said Hans Castorp. He went down to the village with his cousin in overshoes and winter palets to get blankets for the rest cure, because it was clear that in this weather he would wear his plaidwon’t get along. For a moment he even considered buying a fur sack, but then refrained from doing so, in fact he shied away from the idea, so to speak.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘let’s stick to the blankets! I’ll have use for them again downstairs, and blankets are everywhere, nothing else special or exciting about it. But such a fur sack is something too special – understand me correctly, if I buy a fur sack, I would feel as if I wanted to settle down here and already belonged to you, so to speak… In short, I want to to say nothing more than that it would absolutely not be worthwhile to buy a fur sack especially for the few weeks.”

Joachim agreed, and so they bought two such camel hair blankets as Joachim had, a particularly long and wide, pleasantly soft natural color, in a nice, rich shop in the English Quarter, and ordered them to be sent immediately to the sanatorium should be, to the international sanatorium “Berghof”, room door 34. This afternoon Hans Castorp wanted to use them for the first time.

Of course it was around the time after second breakfast, otherwise the agenda offered no opportunity to go down to the village. It was raining now, and the snow on the streets had turned to splattering slush. On the way home they caught up with Settembrini, who was also heading for the sanatorium under an umbrella, albeit bareheaded. The Italian looked yellow and was obviously in an elegiac mood. In pure and shapelyWords he wailed about the cold, the wet, from which he suffered so bitterly. If only there was heating! But these miserable rulers turned off the heating as soon as it stopped snowing – a stupid rule, a mockery of all common sense! And when Hans Castorp objected that he thought that a moderate room temperature was one of the principles of the cure – one obviously wanted to prevent the patient from being spoiled, Settembrini replied with the most violent mockery. Indeed, the principles of the cure. The noble and inviolable spa principles! Hans Castorp really speaks of them in the right tone, namely in that of religiosity and subservience. It is only striking – albeit striking in a thoroughly gratifying sense – that precisely those among them enjoyed such unconditional veneration

“My father,” he said slowly and enthusiastically – “he was such a fine man – sensitive in body as in soul! How he loved his small, warm study room in winter, he loved it with all his heart, it had to be twenty degrees Réaumur in it at all times, thanks to a red-hot stove, and when you came down the hallway of the little house on cold, wet days or on such days when the biting Tramontana wind was blowing came in, the warmth wrapped itself around one’s shoulders like a gentle cloak, and one’s eyes filled with pleasant tears. The little room was crammed withBooks and manuscripts, among which were great treasures, and among the spiritual treasures he stood in his blue flannel dressing gown at the narrow desk and devoted himself to literature – petite and small in person, a good head shorter than me, imagine! but with thick tufts of gray hair at the temples, and a nose so long and delicate… What a Romanist, gentlemen! One of the first of his time, a connoisseur of our language like few, a Latin stylist like no other, a uomo letteratoafter Boccaccio’s heart … The scholars came from afar to confer with him, one from Haparanda, another from Cracow, they came expressly to Padua, our city, to pay their respects to him, and he received them kindly Would. He was also a poet of distinction, who in his leisure hours composed stories in the most elegant Tuscan prose – a master of the idioma gentile‘ said Settembrini with the utmost pleasure, slowly letting the native syllables melt on his tongue and shaking his head from side to side. “He built his little garden after the example of Virgil,” he continued, “and what he spoke was wholesome and beautiful. But he had to have it warm, warm in his little room, otherwise he would tremble and might well shed tears of anger at being left to freeze. And now imagine, Engineer, and you, Lieutenant, what I, my father’s son, must suffer in this damned and barbaric place, where in the height of summer the body trembles with cold and humiliating impressions constantly torment the soul! Ah, it’s hard! What guys that surround us! That foolish servant of the devil from Hofrat. Krokowski” – and Settembrini acted ashe had to break his tongue – “Krokowski, this shameless confessor who hates me because my human dignity forbids me to indulge in his clerical mischief… And at my table… What society in which I am forced to dine ! To my right sits a brewer from Halle – Magnus is his name – with a mustache resembling a haystack. ‘Leave me alone with literature!’ he says. ‘What does she offer? Beautiful characters! What do I do with beautiful characters! I’m a practical man, and beautiful characters are almost non-existent in life.’ This is the idea he formed of literature. Beautiful characters … O Mother of God! His wife, across from him, sits and loses protein as she sinks more and more into dullness. It’s a filthy pity.

Without having reached an understanding, Joachim and Hans Castorp were of one mind about these speeches: they found them self-pitying and uncomfortably rebellious, admittedly also entertaining, even educational in their bold and eloquent rebelliousness. Hans Castorp laughed good-naturedly at the “haystack” and also at the “beautiful characters”, or rather at the droll, desperate way in which Settembrini spoke of it. Then he said:

“God, yes, the society is probably a bit mixed in such an institution. You can’t choose your neighbors at the table – where is that supposed to lead? There’s a lady like that sitting at our table too… Frau Stöhr, I think you know her? She’s murderously uneducated, you have to admit, and sometimes you don’t really know where to look when she babbles like that. And she complainsvery much about her temperature and that she is so limp, and unfortunately it is probably not an easy case. It’s so strange – sick and stupid – I don’t know if I’m expressing myself correctly, but it strikes me as very strange when someone is stupid and then also sick, when it all comes together like this, that’s probably the saddest thing in the world World. You really don’t know what kind of face you should put on it, because you want to show seriousness and respect to a sick person, don’t you, sickness is something venerable, if I may say so. But when stupidity always intervenes with ‘fomulus’ and ‘cosmic institution’ and such blunders, you really don’t know anymore whether to cry or laugh, it’s a dilemma for human feelings and it’s so pitiful that I have to can’t say at all. I mean, it doesn’t rhyme, it doesn’t go together, you’re not used to imagining it together. One thinks that a stupid man must be healthy and ordinary, and illness must make man subtle and clever and special. That’s how you usually think of it. Or not? I’m probably saying more than I can answer for,” he concluded. “It’s just because we happened to think of it…” And he got confused.

Joachim, too, was a little embarrassed, and Settembrini remained silent, eyebrows raised, pretending to wait out the end of the speech out of politeness. In reality, he intended to throw Hans Castorp completely off balance before replying:

“Sapristi, engineer, you are displaying philosophical gifts that I would never have guessed from you! According to your theory, you should be less healthythan you make it seem like thereYou apparently possess spirit. But allow me to tell you that I cannot follow your deductions, that I reject them, that I am actually hostile to them. I am, as you see me, a little intolerant of spiritual things and would rather allow myself to be scolded by a pedant than leave unchallenged views which seem to me as worthy of fighting as those you have developed…”

“But, Mr. Settembrini…”

“Allow me… I know what you’re trying to say. You want to say that you didn’t mean it that seriously, that the views you represent are not necessarily your own, but that you just picked up one of the possible views that were floating in the air in order to irresponsibly try your hand at it. So it correspondsYour age, which still lacks manly determination and may make attempts with all sorts of points of view for the time being. Placet experiri ,” he said, taking the c from “ Placet‘ softly, in Italian dialect. “A good sentence. What puzzles me is just the fact that your experiment is moving in this direction. I doubt that coincidence rules here. I fear the existence of a tendency that threatens to take root in character if left unchecked. So I feel obliged to correct you. They said that sickness combined with stupidity was the saddest thing in the world. I can tell you that. I, too, prefer a witty patient to a consumptive fool. But my protest begins when you associate illness with stupidity in a sense as a stylistic errorregard, as a taste aberration of nature and a dilemma for the human feeling , how you liked to express yourself. If you seem to think of sickness as something so noble and – how did you say it – venerable that you dwell on stupidity utterly that it just doesn’t mix. This was also your expression. Well then, no! Illness is by no means noble, by no means venerable – this conception is itself illness, or it leads to it. Perhaps the safest way to arouse your disgust for her is to tell you that she is old and ugly. It stems from superstitious contrite times, in which the idea of ​​what was human was degenerated into a caricature and degraded, anxious times in which harmony and well-being were considered suspicious and devilish, while resilience was then tantamount to a license to the kingdom of heaven. Reason and enlightenment, however, have driven away these shadows that lay on the soul of mankind – not yet completely, they are still fighting them today; but this fight means work, sir, earthly work, work for the earth,

Great weather, thought Hans Castorp, dismayed and ashamed, that’s an aria! How did I challenge that? By the way, it seems a little dry to me. And whatever he wants with work. He’s always concerned with work, although it doesn’t quite fit here. And he said:

“Very well, Mr. Settembrini. It’s downright worth hearing how you know how to say it. It couldn’t be put any more . . . more vividly, I mean.”

“Reclining,” resumed Settembrini, hoisting his umbrella over the head of a passer-by, “spiritual reclining into the visions of those dark, tormented times — believe me, Engineer, that is disease — a well-studied disease, for which science has different names, one from the language of beauty and the science of the soul and one from that of politics – school terms that are irrelevant and which you are free to do without. But since everything is connected in spiritual life and one thing results from the other, since one must not give the devil the little finger without him taking the whole hand and the whole person at the same time … since, on the other hand, a healthy principle always produces nothing but healthy things can, no matter what you put at the beginning,Humiliation means – yes, a painful humiliation of the human being that offends the idea, which one may spare and take care of in individual cases, but the spiritually honorable aberration to be honored – remember that! – is an aberration and the beginning of all spiritual aberration. This woman, whom you mentioned – I refrain from remembering her name – Frau Stöhr, then, thank you very much – in short, this ridiculous woman – it does not seem to me that it is her case, the human feeling, how You said put in a dilemma. Sick and stupid, – for God’s sake, that’s herMisery itself, the matter is simple, there is nothing left but mercy and a shrug. The dilemma, sir, the tragedy begins where nature has been cruel enough to break the harmony of personality—or to make it impossible in the first place—by combining a noble and vital spirit with an unfit body. Do you know Leopardi, engineer, or you, lieutenant? An unfortunate poet of my country, a hunchbacked, sickly man with an originally great soul, but constantly humiliated by the misery of his body and dragged down into the lowlands of irony, whose lamentations tear the heart. Hear this one!”

And Settembrini began to recite in Italian, letting the beautiful syllables melt in his mouth, moving his head from side to side and occasionally closing his eyes, unconcerned that his companions could not understand a word. It was evidently his concern to enjoy his memory and his pronunciation himself and to bring them to bear in front of the audience. Finally he said:

“But you don’t understand, you hear without grasping the painful meaning. The cripple Leopardi, gentlemen, feel this, above all, lacked love for women, and this was probably what made him unable to control the atrophy of his soul. The splendor of fame and virtue faded from him, nature seemed evil to him—by the way, it is evil, stupid and evil, I agree with him about that – and he despaired – it is terrible to say – he despaired of science and progress! Here you have tragedy, engineer. Here you have your ‘dilemma for human feeling’, – not with that woman there – I refuse,to trouble my memory for her name… Don’t tell me about the ‘spiritualization’ that disease can bring about, for God’s sake, don’t! A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrid as a body without a soul, and by the way the former is the rare exception and the latter the rule. As a rule, it is the body that overgrows, that grabs all importance, all life, and emancipates itself in the most repulsive way. A person who lives as a sick person is only a body, that is what is inhuman and degrading – in most cases it is nothing better than a cadaver …”

“Strange,” Joachim said suddenly, leaning forward to look at his cousin, who was walking on Settembrini’s other side. “You said something very similar the other day.”

said Hans Castorp. “Yes, it’s possible that something similar has been going through my head.”

Settembrini was silent for a few steps. Then he said:

“The better, gentlemen. All the better if that is the case. It was far from my intention to present you with any original philosophy – that is not my job. If our engineer has already made consistent remarks on his part, this only confirms my suspicion that he is mentally dilettantish, that for the time being he is only making experiments with the possible views in the manner of gifted youth. The talented young person is not a blank slate, he is rather a sheet on which everything is already written with sympathetic ink, the right as well as the bad, and it is up to the educator to develop the right, but the wrong, that wants to emerge, through appropriate influence onalways extinguish. The gentlemen have gone shopping?” he asked in a changed, light tone…

“No, nothing more,” said Hans Castorp, “that means…”

“We got some blankets for my cousin,” Joachim replied indifferently.

“For the rest cure … With this dog cold … I’m supposed to join in for a few weeks,” said Hans Castorp, laughing and looking down.

“Ah, blankets, rest cure,” said Settembrini. “Well, well, well. Oh, oh, oh. In fact: placet experiri !” he repeated with Italian pronunciation and said goodbye, because they had entered the sanatorium, greeted by the limping concierge, and in the hall Settembrini turned into the conversation rooms to read the newspapers in front of the tables, as he said. He seemed to want to skip the second rest cure.

“God forbid!” said Hans Castorp as he stood in the elevator with Joachim. “He’s really a pedagogue – he said it himself the other day that he has a streak like that. You have to be extremely careful with him that you don’t say a word too much, otherwise there will be detailed teachings. But it’s worth hearing how he knows how to speak, every word jumps out of his mouth so round and appetizing – I always have to think of fresh rolls when I listen to him.”

Joachim laughed.

“Don’t tell him that. I think he would be disappointed to know that you have rolls in mind when he teaches you.”

“Do you think? Yeah, that’s not even certain. I always have the impression that he is not entirely alonedoing the lessons is, perhaps only secondarily, but especially speaking, the way he lets the words bounce and roll … as elastic as rubber balls … and that he is not at all uncomfortable when you especially pay attention to it. Beer brewer Magnus is probably a bit stupid with his ‘beautiful characters’, but Settembrini should have said what is actually important in literature. I didn’t want to ask, so as not to expose myself, I don’t know much about it either, and I had never seen a man of letters before. But if it’s not the beautiful characters that count, it’s obviously the beautiful words that count, that’s my impression in Settembrini’s company. What vocabulary he uses! Without any embarrassment he speaks of ‘virtue’ – please!virtus ‘ in the book. Something tightened inside me, I have to say. And then it makes me a little nervous when he scolds like that, at the cold and at Behrens and at Frau Magnus because she is losing protein, and in short, at everything. He’s an opposition man, I knew that straight away. He hacks into everything that already exists, and there’s always something unkempt about it, I can’t help it.”

“That’s what you say,” Joachim answered carefully. “But then there’s also something proud about it, which doesn’t seem neglected at all, on the contrary, he’s a person who keeps to himself, or to people in general, and I like that about him, there’s something decent about it in my opinion.”

“You’re right,” said Hans Castorp. “There’s even something severe about him – it often makes you uncomfortable because you feel – let’s say controlled, but that’s not a bad name at all. Do you want to believe I always got the feeling that he didn’t like the fact that I bought blankets to lie in, that he objected and somehow dwelt on it?”

“No,” said Joachim, amazed and level-headed. “How could that be. I can’t imagine that.” And then, with the thermometer in his mouth, he went with bag and baggage to the rest cure, while Hans Castorp immediately began to clean and change his clothes for lunch – anyway it was only a short one hours until then.