So came what was bound to happen, and what Hans Castorp would not have dreamed of experiencing here just a short time ago: winter was coming, the local winter that Joachim already knew, since the previous one was still in full force when he arrived here but which Hans Castorp was a bit afraid of, although he knew he was well prepared for it. His cousin tried to calm him down.

‘You don’t have to imagine it too grim,’ he said, ‘not exactly arctic. You hardly feel the cold because of thedry air and no wind. If you pack well, you can stay on the balcony late into the night without freezing. It’s the story of the temperature reversal above the fog line, it’s getting warmer at higher altitudes, we didn’t know that before. It’s more likely to be cold when it’s raining. But you’ve got your couch bag now, and it’s also heated a bit if the man is in need.”

Incidentally, there was no question of being taken by surprise and using violence, the winter was coming mildly, for the time being it didn’t look very different from many a day that midsummer had already brought with it. A southerly wind had blown for a few days, the sun was oppressive, the valley seemed shortened and narrowed, the Alpine scenery at the exit was close and sober. Then clouds came up, advanced from the Piz Michel and Tinzenhorn to the north-east, and the valley darkened. Then it rained heavily. Then the rain became impure, whitish-grey, snow had mixed in, finally it was just snow, the valley was filled with flurries, and since it went on for a long time and the temperature had dropped considerably in the meantime, the snow couldn’t melt away completely , he was wet, but he lay there, the valley lay in thin, damp, damaged white robe, against which the needle-roughness of the backs contrasted black; in the dining room the tubes warmed up tepidly. That was early November, around All Souls’ Day, and it wasn’t new. It had been like that in August, too, and people had long since gotten out of the habit of regarding snow as a privilege of winter. Always and in all weathers, even if only from afar, one had one in mindhad, because remains and traces of it always shimmered in the crevices and chasms of the rocky Rätikon chain, which seemed to lie in front of the valley entrance, and the most distant mountain majesties of the south had always greeted across in the snow. But both continued, the snowfall and the drop in temperature. The sky hung pale gray and low over the valley, flaking away in flakes that fell silently and incessantly, with an exaggerated and slightly disconcerting profusion, and hourly it grew colder. The morning came when Hans Castorp had seven degrees in his room, and the next day it was only five. That was the frost, and it was limited, but it was. It had been freezing at night, now it was also freezing during the day, from morning to night, although it continued to snow, with brief interruptions on the fourth, fifth and seventh day. The snow was now gathering powerfully, it was becoming an embarrassment. Walkways had been dug on the official way to the bank at the watercourse, as well as on the road down into the valley; but they were narrow, there was no way to avoid them, when you met you had to step aside in the snow bank and sink up to your knees. A snow-roller of stone, pulled by a horse haltered by a man, trundled down the streets of the spa town all day long, and a sledge-tram, yellow and of an old Frankish stagecoach-like appearance, with a snow-plow in front, shoveling aside the white masses threw, operated between the Kurhaus district and the northern part of the settlement called the “village”. The world, the narrow, high, and secluded world of those above, now appeared thickly furred and padded,the steps to the Berghof portal disappeared, turned into a sloping plane, heavy, humorously shaped cushions weighed heavily on the branches of the pine trees, here and there the mass slipped, atomized and drifted between the trunks as a cloud and white mist. The mountains lay snow-covered all around, rough in the lower regions, softly covered the variously shaped peaks that towered above the tree line. It was dark, the sun was only a pale glow behind the veil. But the snow gave an indirect and mild light, a milky brightness that dressed the world and people well, even if the noses were red under the white or colored wool caps.

In the dining room, at the seven tables, the onset of winter, the great season of these regions, dominated the conversation. Many tourists and sports people, it was said, had arrived and populated the hotels of “Dorf” and “Platz”. The height of the thrown snow was estimated at sixty centimetres, and its quality was ideal for the skier. A lot of work is being done on the bobsleigh run, which leads down the north-western slope from the Schatzalp to the valley. It could be opened in the next few days, provided that the foehn doesn’t thwart the plans. People looked forward to the activity of the healthy, the guests from below, which would now develop again here, to the sports festivals and races, which one intended to attend even against bans by skipping the rest cure and escaping.would be pulled standing by horses. You wanted to escape. – There was also talk of Christmas.

From Christmas! No, Hans Castorp hadn’t thought of that. It was easy for him to say and write that, based on medical evidence, he would have to spend the winter here with Joachim. But that included, as it now turned out, that he was supposed to spend Christmas here, and that undoubtedly had something frightening for the mind, if only because, but not solely because he had never spent this time anywhere else than at home, in the bosom of the family. In God’s name then, that now had to be accepted. He wasn’t a child anymore, Joachim didn’t seem to take offense at it either, but put up with it without weeping, and where not everywhere in the world and under what circumstances had Christmas already been celebrated!

In spite of all this, he seemed a little hasty in talking about Christmas before the first advent; there were still a good six weeks to go. This, however, was skipped and devoured in the dining room – an inner process that Hans Castorp had already learned to understand on his own hand, even if he was not yet used to practicing it in such a bold style as his older, established contemporaries. Such stages in the course of the year, such as Christmas, seemed just right to them as points of reference and gymnastics equipment, on which they could flexibly vault over empty intervals. They all had a fever, their metabolism was increased, their bodily life strengthened and accelerated – in the end it might well have had something to do with the fact that they drove through the time so quickly and en masse. He wouldn’t have been surprised ifthey had already considered Christmas to be over and immediately talked about New Year’s and Shrovetide. But the Berghof dining room was by no means so easy-going and unsettled. People stopped at Christmas, there was cause for concern and headaches. They discussed the joint gift, which, according to existing institutional practice, was to be presented to the boss, Hofrat Behrens, on Christmas Eve, and for which a general collection had been initiated. Last year a suitcase was given as a gift, according to those who had been here for more than a year. This time there was talk of a new operating table, a painter’s easel, a walking fur, a rocking chair, an ivory and somehow “inlaid” ear trumpet, and Settembrini, when asked, recommended the donation of a supposedly nascent lexicographical work called “Sociology of Suffering”; but only one bookseller, who had recently been sitting at Kleefeld’s table, struck him. An agreement had not yet been reached. The communication with the Russian guests offered difficulties. The collection split. The Muscovites declared that they wanted to give presents to Behrens themselves. For days, Ms. Stöhr was extremely uneasy about a sum of money, ten francs, which she had carelessly laid out for Ms. Iltis when she collected it, and which she “forgot” to refund to her. She “forgot” it – the intonations with which Frau Stöhr gave this word were graded in many ways and all calculated to express the deepest disbelief in a forgetfulness, who seemed to want to defy all the allusions and fine memory goads, which Frau Stöhr, as she assured her, did not lack. Renounced several timesMs. Stöhr and declared that she would give the polecat the amount she owed. “So I pay for me and for her,” she said; “Well, the shame isn’t mine!” Finally, however, she had found a way out, which she told the table company to everyone’s amusement: she had paid out the ten francs on the “administration” and had the polecat billed, – whereby the lazy debtor was outwitted and at least this matter was settled.

It had stopped snowing. Partially the sky opened; grey-blue clouds that parted let in glimpses of the sun that tinted the landscape bluish. Then it became completely serene. Clear frost reigned, pure, assured winter splendor around mid-November, and the panorama behind the arch of the balcony box, the powder-covered forests, the softly filled gorges, the white, sunny valley under the bright blue sky was magnificent. Even in the evening, when the almost rounded moon appeared, the world was enchanted and became wonderful. Crystalline flicker, diamond glitter reigned far and wide. The woods were very white and black. The parts of the sky far from the moon lay dark, embroidered with stars. Sharp, precise, and intense shadows that seemed more real and meaningful than things themselves fell from the houses, the trees, the telegraph poles on the glittering surface. It was seven or eight degrees frost a few hours after sunset. The world seemed spellbound in icy purity, its natural uncleanliness covered and frozen in a dream of a fantastic death magic.

Hans Castorp stayed in his balcony box above the enchanted winter valley until late at night, far longer thanJoachim, who retired at ten o’clock, or not much later. His exquisite lounge chair, with its three-piece cushion and bolster, was drawn close to the wooden railing, on which lay a pillow of snow; the electric lamp was on on the little white table next to it, and next to a pile of books stood a glass of fat milk, the evening milk that was brought to the rooms of all the residents of the “Berghof” at nine o’clock, and into which Hans Castorp poured himself a shot of cognac, to make them more bite-sized. He had already summoned all available means of protection against the cold, the whole apparatus. Up to his chest he was in the buttoned fur sack, which he had bought in good time in a shop in the spa town, and had wrapped the two camel’s hair blankets around it according to the rite.

What kept him out so long, until around midnight (when the bad Russian couple had long since left the neighboring box), was probably also the magic of the winter night, especially since music wove into it until eleven o’clock, coming from near and far from the valley – but mainly indolence and excitement, both at the same time and in combination: namely, the indolence and tiredness of his body, which was inimical to movement, and the busy excitement of his mind, which cannot rest from certain new and fascinating studies into which the young man has embarked wanted. The weather got to him, the frost had a tiring and consuming effect on his organism. He ate a lot, used thecolossal Berghof meals of garnished roast beef followed by roast geese, with that extravagant appetite that was quite the order of the day here, and even more so in winter, it turned out, than in summer. At the same time, somnolence dominated him, so that he often fell asleep during the day and in the moonlit evenings over the books he was poring over, and after a few minutes of unconsciousness continued his research. Lively speaking – and he tended here more than formerly in the lowlands to quick, unreserved and even daring chatter – lively talking with Joachim during their official walks in the snow exhausted him very much; Dizziness and trembling, a feeling of numbness and drunkenness came over him, and his head was hot. His curve had risen since the onset of winter, and Hofrat Behrens had dropped something about injections which he used to give in cases of obstinate excess temperature, and which two-thirds of the guests, including Joachim, had to undergo regularly. But the increased heat production in his body, thought Hans Castorp, had something to do with the mental excitement and activity that kept him in his deckchair until late in the glittering, frosty night. The reading that fascinated him suggested such explanations. certainly had to do with the mental excitement and activity that kept him on his deck chair until far into the glittering, frosty night. The reading that fascinated him suggested such explanations. certainly had to do with the mental excitement and activity that kept him on his deck chair until far into the glittering, frosty night. The reading that fascinated him suggested such explanations.

Not a little was read on the loungers and private balconies of the international sanatorium “Berghof” – especially by beginners and short-term; because those who had lived for many months or even several years had long since learned to destroy time without distraction and occupation of the head and to get it over with by virtue of inner virtuosity, yes, they declared it to be the clumsiness of bunglers,clinging to a book. At most, one may have one on one’s lap or the side table, that’s quite enough to feel cared for. The institution’s library, polyglot and rich in pictorial works, the extended entertainment inventory of a dental waiting room, offered itself for free use. Volumes of novels from the “Platz” lending library have been exchanged. Now and then a book appeared, a piece of writing that people scrambled for, and for which even those who no longer read stretched their hands with only feigned phlegm. At the time we stop, a poorly printed pamphlet introduced by Mr. Albin, entitled The Art of Seduction, is circulating. It was translated very literally from French, even the syntax of that language was retained in the translation, through which the lecture gained a lot of poise and sparkling elegance, and developed the philosophy of love of the body and lust in the spirit of a urbane, life-friendly paganism. Mrs. Stöhr soon read it and found it “intoxicating”. Mrs Magnus, the same one who was losing protein, agreed wholeheartedly. Her husband, the brewer, claimed to have benefited a lot from reading it for himself, but regretted that Mrs. Magnus absorbed the writing, because such things “coddle” women and teach them immodest concepts. This statement increased the desire for the book not a little. Between two ladies from the lower berth who arrived in October, Frau Redisch, the wife of a Polish industrialist, and a certain widow Hessenfeld from Berlin, each of whom claimedunpleasant, actually violent scene, which Hans Castorp had to listen to in his balcony box, and which ended with a hysterical screaming fit of one of the two ladies – it could be Redisch, but it could also be Hessenfeld – and the taking of the insane to her room. The youth had taken possession of the treatise earlier than the more mature cohorts. They sometimes studied it together after supper in different rooms. Hans Castorp saw how the boy with his fingernail handed it to a young, newly arrived, slightly ill, Franzchen Oberdank, a blond-haired house daughter who had only recently been brought up by his mother.

Perhaps there were exceptions, perhaps those that filled the hours of lying-down duty with some serious intellectual pursuit, some study beneficial in some way, if only to keep in touch with life on the plains, or give the time a little heaviness and depth, so that it is not pure time and nothing else at all. Perhaps apart from Herr Settembrini, with his efforts to eradicate the ailments, and the honorable Joachim with his Russian exercise books, there was someone else who did it, if not among the inmates of the dining room, which was really improbable, then possibly among them the bedridden and moribund – Hans Castorp was inclined to believe it. As for himself, he had at that time since Ocean steamshipshad nothing more to say to him, together with his winter needs, also a few books that had an impact on his life’s work, scientific engineering, shipbuilding,bring up from home. These volumes, however, lay neglected in favor of other textbooks belonging to a completely different division and faculty, the subject of which the young Hans Castorp Lust had composed. They were books on anatomy, physiology and life sciences, written in various languages, German, French and English, and one day the local bookseller sent them up to him, apparently because he had ordered them, and that on his own hand, silently, occasionally a walk that he had taken without Joachim (since he had just been ordered for an injection or to be weighed) down to Platz. Joachim saw the books in his cousin’s hands with surprise. they had been expensive how scientific works are; the prices were still written on the inside of the covers and on the covers. He asked why Hans Castorp hadn’t borrowed it from the Hofrat, who certainly had a good selection of this literature, if he already wanted to read something like that. But Hans Castorp replied that he wanted to own it himself, it was quite a different reading when the book belonged to you; he also loves to go in and mark with a pencil. For hours Joachim listened in his cousin’s box to the sound of the paper knife cutting the pages of the paperback. it is a completely different reading when the book belongs to you; he also loves to go in and mark with a pencil. For hours Joachim listened in his cousin’s box to the sound of the paper knife cutting the pages of the paperback. it is a completely different reading when the book belongs to you; he also loves to go in and mark with a pencil. For hours Joachim listened in his cousin’s box to the sound of the paper knife cutting the pages of the paperback.

The volumes were heavy, unwieldy; Hans Castorp supported her lying down with the lower edge against her chest and stomach. It was pressing, but he put up with it; with half-open mouth he lowered his eyes over the scholarly pages, which were illuminated almost unnecessarily by the reddish glow of the shaded lamp, since they might have been readable in the strong moonlight–followed with his head,until his chin rested on his chest, a posture in which the reader paused, pondering, slumbering, or half-slumbering, before raising his face to the next page. He researched deeply, he read, while the moon made its measured path over the crystal-like glittering high mountain valley, about organized matter, the properties of the protoplasm, the sensitive substance that remained in a strange state of suspension between structure and decomposition and its formation from the initial, but always present basic forms, read with an urgent interest from life and its sacred and impure mystery.

what was life You didn’t know. It was aware of it, no doubt once it was life, but it didn’t know what it was. Consciousness as sensibility, no doubt, awoke to some degree at the lowest, most illiterate stages of its occurrence, it was impossible to link the first appearance of conscious processes to any point in its general or individual history, such as consciousness by the existence of a nervous system condition. The lowest animal forms had no nervous system, let alone a cerebrum, but no one dared deny their ability to sense stimuli. One could also anaesthetize life, life itself, not just special organs of stimulus sensitivity that it might develop, not just the nerves. One could temporarily stop the irritability of any living substance in the plant or animal kingdom, one could anesthetize eggs and seminal fibers with chloroform, chloral hydrate or morphine. Consciousness of oneself was therefore simply a function ofmatter ordered to life, and with higher amplification the function turned against its own bearer, became a striving to explore and explain the phenomenon that it produced, a hopeful-hopeless striving of life for self-knowledge, a digging in itself of nature, in vain in the end, since nature cannot be absorbed in knowledge, life cannot overhear itself in the end.

what was life Nobody knew. No one knew the natural point at which it sprang up and ignited. Nothing was unmediated or ill-mediated in the realm of life from that point on; but life itself appeared suddenly. If anything could be said about it, it was this: it must be of such a highly developed design that there is nothing remotely like it in the inanimate world. Between the pseudo-footed amoeba and the vertebrate the distance was slight, insignificant, compared with that between the simplest manifestation of life and that nature which did not even deserve to be called dead because it was inorganic. For death was only the logical negation of life; But between life and inanimate nature there was an abyss which research tried in vain to bridge. Efforts were made to close it with theories, which it devoured without losing the least bit of depth and breadth. In order to find a connecting link, one had condescended to the absurdity of assuming structureless living matter, unorganized organisms that fused together in the protein solution like the crystal in the mother liquor – while organic differentiation remained both a prerequisite and a manifestation of all life, and while exhibiting no living beingwas that did not owe its existence to parental procreation. The end of the jubilation with which the primordial slime had been fished from the deepest depths of the sea had been shame. It turned out that gypsum deposits were mistaken for protoplasm. But in order not to have to stop short of a miracle – for life, which was built up from the same substances and disintegrated into the same substances as inorganic nature would have been, suddenly, a miracle – one was nevertheless forced to use spontaneous generation, which meant on the emergence of the organic from the inorganic, which incidentally was also a miracle. So people went on devising intermediate stages and transitions, assuming the existence of organisms that were lower than all known, but for their part had more original attempts at life as precursors, samples,

So what was life? It was heat, the heat product of form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of incessant decomposition and regeneration of protein molecules that were unsustainably complex and artificially constructed. It was the being of what could not actually be, of what could only be balanced on the point of being with sweet-painful-precise distress in this entangled and feverish process of decay and renewal. It wasn’t material and it wasn’t spirit. It was something between the two, a phenomenon carried by matter, like the rainbow on the waterfall andequal to the flame. But although not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and disgust, the shamelessness of matter that had become self-sensitive and irritable, the lewd form of being. It was a secret, sensitive stirring in the chaste cold of space, a voluptuous, furtive uncleanliness of nourishment and excretion, an excretory breath of carbonic acid and evil substances of hidden origin and nature. It was the proliferation, unfolding and formation of something bloated out of water, protein, salt and fats, which was made possible by overbalancing its impermanence and bound by innate laws of formation, which was called flesh, and which became a form, a high image, beauty, but at the same time was the epitome of sensuality and desire. For this form and beauty was not spirit-borne, as in the works of poetry and music, also not supported by a neutral and spirit-eating material that innocently sensualizes the spirit, like the form and beauty of the sculptures. Rather, it was carried and formed by the substance awakened to lust in an unknown way, the organic, decaying matter itself, the smelling flesh…

Young Hans Castorp, who rested above the glittering valley in his body warmth saved by fur and wool, saw the picture of life in the frosty night illuminated by the glow of the dead star. It floated before him, somewhere in space, enraptured and yet close to the senses, the body, the body, matt whitish, fragrant, steaming, sticky, the skin, in all the impurity and imperfection of its nature, with spots, papillae, yellowing, cracks and grainy -scalyLands smothered in the delicate currents and eddies of vestigial lanugo fluff. It was leaning, isolated from the cold of the inanimate, in its hazy sphere, lazily, its head crowned with something cool, horny, pigmented that was a product of its skin, its hands clasped behind its neck, and peering out from under lowered lids, out of eyes, which made a variety of eyelid skin appear crooked, with half-open, slightly pursed lips towards the viewer, supported on one leg, so that the supporting hip bone protruded strongly in its flesh, while the knee of the limp leg, slightly bent, at up the toed foot nestled against the inside of the loaded one. It stood thus, smiling turned, leaning in its grace, gleaming elbows spread forward, in the paired symmetry of his limb structure, his bodily marks. The night of the womb corresponded in a mystical triangle to the sharp, steaming darkness of the armpits, just as the red-epithelial mouth opening corresponded to the eyes, and the vertically stretched navel to the red blossoms of the breast. Under the impetus of a central organ and motor nerves originating in the spinal cord, the abdomen and chest stirred, the pleuroperitoneal cavity expanded and contracted, the breath, warmed and moistened by the mucous membranes of the respiratory tract, saturated with excretory substances, flowed out between the lips after binds its oxygen to the hemoglobin in the blood for internal respiration in the air cells of the lungs. Because Hans Castorp understood that this life body in the mysterious symmetry of its blood-nourished,inner structure of tubular bones filled with fat marrow, of leaf, vertebrae and root bones, which had attached themselves from the original supporting substance, the gelatinous tissue, with the help of lime salts and glue, in order to carry it; with the capsules and slippery lubricated cavities, ligaments and cartilages of its joints, its more than two hundred muscles, its central organ formations serving nutrition, respiration, stimulus signaling and transmission of stimuli, its protective membranes, serous cavities, glands rich in secretions, the tubes and slits of its entangled , inner surface opening into outer nature through bodily openings: that this ego was a unit of life of a high order, far from the type of those simplest beings who breathed with their entire body surface, fed and even thought,

The body that he had in mind, this individual being and life ego, was therefore an enormous multitude of breathing and nourishing individuals, which, through organic classification and special purpose design, had lost their egoic existence, freedom and immediacy in life to such a high degree, so much anatomical elements, that the performance of some was limited solely to sensitivity to light, sound, touch, heat, while others only understood it, their form through contractionto change or to produce digestive secretions, still others for protection, for support, for the transport of the juices or for reproduction were one-sidedly trained and competent. There were loosenings of this organic plurality united in the higher ego, cases in which the multiplicity of sub-individuals was combined only in a light and dubious way into the higher unity of life. The student brooded over the appearance of the cell colonies, he heard about semi-organisms, algae, whose individual cells, only covered in a coat of jelly, were often far apart, multicellular formations at least, but which, when challenged, would not have been able to say whether they wanted to be recognized as a settlement of single-celled individuals or as a unitary being and would have wavered strangely in their self-statement between the I and the we. Here nature showed a middle class between the highly social union of countless elementary individuals to form tissues and organs of a superior ego – and the free individual existence of these simplifications: the multicellular organism was only one manifestation of the cyclical process in which life took place, and the one cycle from generation to generation. The act of fertilization, the sexual fusion of two cell bodies, stood at the beginning of the construction of every plural individual, just as it stood at the beginning of every generation of elementary creatures living alone and led back to itself. For this act was sustained through many generations, who had no need of it to multiply in repeated divisions, until a moment camethe circle was closed. Thus was the multiple life-state, arising from the nuclear fusion of two parental cells, the coexistence of many asexually created generations of cell individuals; its growth was their reproduction, and the circle of procreation was closed when sex cells, elements developed for the special purpose of reproduction, had established themselves in it and found the way to a new life-driving intermixture.

Supported by an embryological volume in the pit of the heart, the young adventurer followed the development of the organism from the moment when the seminal thread, one of many and this one first, propelled by the whipping movements of its abdomen, struck the gelatinous shell of the egg with the tip of its head and burrowed into the conception hill, which the protoplasm of the egg cortex arched towards its approach. No grimace or farce could be thought of that nature would not seriously have indulged in in the modification of this standing process. There were animals where the male parasitized on the female’s intestines. There were others in which the arm of the procreator of the procreator reached inward through the pharynx to deposit its seeds there, whereupon, bitten off and spat out, ran away alone on his fingers, to the infatuation of science, which had long thought it necessary to address him in Greek-Latin as an independent being. Hans Castorp heard the scholarly schools of ovists and animalculists quarreling, some of whom had claimed that the egg was a complete little frog, dog or man and that the seed was only the exciter of its growth, while others in the seminal thread, the head, arms and legspossessed, saw a preformed being for which the egg served only as a breeding ground—until it was agreed to accord equal merit to the egg cell and the sperm cell, which had arisen from originally indistinguishable reproductive cells. He saw the unicellular organism of the fertilized egg on the way to transforming itself into a multicellular one by furrowing and dividing, saw the cell bodies nestle together to form a lamella of the mucous membrane, the germinal vesicle invaginate and form a cup and cavity that does the business of feeding and digestion began. That was the intestinal larva, the primal animal, the gastrula, the basic form of all animal life, the basic form of flesh-borne beauty. Their two layers of epithelium, the outer and the inner, the inner layer of the skin and the layer of the intestinal gland, proved to be primitive organs, from which the glands, the tissues, the sense organs, the bodily processes were formed by invaginations and protrusions. A strip of the outer germ layer thickened, folded into a groove, closed into a nerve tube, and became the spine, the brain. And as the fetal mucus attached itself to fibrous connective tissue, to cartilage, in that the gelatinous cells began to produce glue substance instead of mucin, he saw in certain places the connective tissue cells absorb calcium salts and fats from the surrounding fluids and ossify. The human embryo crouched hunched over, tailed, indistinguishable from that of the pig, with immense stalk and stubby formless extremities, the facial larva bent over the bloated paunch, and its becoming appeared to a sciencetribal history. Temporarily he had gill pouches like a Roche. It seemed permissible or necessary to infer from the stages of development through which he passed the unhumanistic sight which the perfected man had offered in primeval times. His skin was equipped with twitching muscles to ward off insects and was thickly hairy, the expansion of his olfactory mucosa was enormous, his protruding, flexible ears, which actively participated in facial expressions, were more adept at catching sounds than at present. At that time his eyes, protected by a third nodding lid, had stood on the side of his head, except for the third, of which the pineal gland was a rudiment, and which had been able to watch over the upper air. This person also had a very long intestinal tube,

Anatomy skinned and prepared the limbs of the human body for our researcher, she showed him their superficial and their deep, posterior muscles, tendons and ligaments: those of the thighs, the foot and especially the arms, the upper and lower arm, taught him the Latin names , with which medicine, this shadow of the humanistic spirit, had nobly and gallantly named and differentiated them, and let him advance to the skeleton, the formation of which provided him with new points of view, from which the unity of everything human, the resolution of all disciplines within it looked at. For here he found himself strangely reminiscent of his actual – or one must say earlier – profession, the scientific charge, to which he belonged when he arrived up hereintroduced himself to the people I met (Dr. Krokowski, Mr. Settembrini). In order to learn anything – it hadn’t really mattered what – he had studied this and that at colleges about statics, about pliable supports, about loading and about construction as an advantageous management of the mechanical material. It would have been childish to think that the engineering sciences, the rules of mechanics, had been applied to organic nature, but neither could it be said that they were derived from them. They just found themselves repeated and reinforced in it. The principle of the hollow cylinder prevailed in the construction of the long tubular bones in such a way that the static requirements were satisfied with the exact minimum of solid substance. A body, Hans Castorp had learned, which, according to the demands that are to be placed on it by tension and pressure, is composed only of rods and bands of a mechanically usable material, can withstand the same load as a solid body of the same material. In the same way, in the formation of long bones, it was possible to follow how, in step with the formation of compact substance on their surface, the inner parts, since they became mechanically unnecessary, were transformed into fatty tissue, the yellow marrow. The femur was a crane, in the construction of which organic nature, through the direction it gave the bony trabeculae, had almost exactly executed the same pull and pressure curves that Hans Castorp had to correctly enter in the graphic representation of a device used in this way would have. He saw it with pleasurenature in general, now already stand in three different relationships: the lyrical, the medical and the technical – so great was his excitement; and these three relations, he found, were one in the human, they were variations of one and the same urgent concern, humanistic faculties…

Despite all this, the achievements of the protoplasm remained quite inexplicable, life seemed denied the ability to understand itself. Most of the biochemical processes were not only unknown, but by their very nature eluded insight. Almost nothing was known about the structure, the composition of the life unit, which was called the “cell”. What did it help to show the components of the dead muscle? The living one could not be examined chemically; even those changes brought about by rigor mortis were enough to make all experimentation meaningless. Nobody understood metabolism, nobody understood the nature of nerve function. To what properties did the tasting bodies owe their taste? What was the varied excitement of certain sensory nerves by the odorous substances? In what the sniffability at all? The specific smell of animals and people was based on the evaporation of substances that no one could have named. The composition of the secretion, which was called sweat, was not well understood. The glands which secreted it produced aromata, which undoubtedly played an important part among mammals, and of the importance of which in man professed to be ignorant. The physiological significance of apparently important parts of the body was shrouded in obscurity. You could leave the appendix aside, The composition of the secretion, which was called sweat, was not well understood. The glands which secreted it produced aromata, which undoubtedly played an important part among mammals, and of the importance of which in man professed to be ignorant. The physiological significance of apparently important parts of the body was shrouded in obscurity. You could leave the appendix aside, The composition of the secretion, which was called sweat, was not well understood. The glands which secreted it produced aromata, which undoubtedly played an important part among mammals, and of the importance of which in man professed to be ignorant. The physiological significance of apparently important parts of the body was shrouded in obscurity. You could leave the appendix aside,which was a mystery, and which was regularly found in the rabbit filled with a mushy content, of which there was no telling how it might get out again or be renewed. But what about the white and gray matter of the head cord, what about the optic hillock that communicated with the optic nerve, and the gray deposits of the “bridge”? The substance of the brain and spinal cord was so decomposable that there was no hope of ever fathoming its structure. What prevented the cerebral cortex from working when you fell asleep? What hindered the self-digestion of the stomach, which indeed sometimes happened in cadavers? One answered: life; a special power of resistance of the living protoplasm – and pretended not to notice that this was a mystical explanation. The theory of such a common phenomenon as fever was contradictory. The increased metabolism resulted in increased heat production. But why didn’t the heat output increase to compensate, as usual? Was the paralysis of sweat secretion based on contraction states of the skin? But these were only detectable in the case of a fever, because otherwise the skin was rather hot. The “heat stroke” identified the central nervous system as the seat of the causes for the increased turnover as for a skin condition that one was content to call abnormal because one did not know how to determine it. compensatory the heat output? Was the paralysis of sweat secretion based on contraction states of the skin? But these were only detectable in the case of a fever, because otherwise the skin was rather hot. The “heat stroke” identified the central nervous system as the seat of the causes for the increased turnover as for a skin condition that one was content to call abnormal because one did not know how to determine it. compensatory the heat output? Was the paralysis of sweat secretion based on contraction states of the skin? But these were only detectable in the case of a fever, because otherwise the skin was rather hot. The “heat stroke” identified the central nervous system as the seat of the causes for the increased turnover as for a skin condition that one was content to call abnormal because one did not know how to determine it.

But what was all this ignorance compared with the perplexity one faced at phenomena like that of memory, or that wider and more amazing memory called the inheritance of acquired traits? The impossibility, even the slightest notion of a mechanical oneTo grasp the explainability of such achievements of the cell substance was perfect. The seminal thread, which transmitted innumerable and intricate species and individual characteristics of the father to the egg, was visible only under the microscope, and even the highest magnification was not sufficient to make it appear anything but a homogeneous body and to enable its parentage to be determined; for one animal looked like another. These were organizational conditions which forced the assumption that the cell was no different from the higher body it was building; that it was already a superordinate organism, which in turn was made up of living parts, individual life units. So you went from the supposedly smallest to the smaller again, one was forced to break down the elementary into sub-elements. No doubt, as the animal kingdom consisted of different species of animals, like the animal-human organism consisted of a whole animal kingdom of cellular species, so that of the cell consisted of a new and varied animal kingdom of elementary life-units, the size of which was well below the limit of the microscopically visible, which grew automatically, automatically, according to the law that each could only produce its own kind, multiplied and, according to the principle of the division of labour, together served the next higher order of life.

Those were the genes, the bioblasts, the biophores – Hans Castorp was delighted to make their acquaintance by name on the frosty night. Only, in his excitement, he wondered what their elemental nature might be like, with lighting improved again. Since they bore lifethey had to be organized, for life depended on organization; but if they were organized, they could not be elementary, for an organism is not elementary, it is multiple. They were life units below the life unit of the cell that they organically built. But if that was the case, they had to be “built up” themselves, although small beyond all conceptions, and indeed organically, as a way of life, “built up”; for the concept of the life unit was identical with that of building up from smaller, subordinate life units, that is, life units ordered to a higher life. As long as the division yielded organic entities possessing the qualities of life, viz., the abilities of assimilation, growth, and reproduction, there were no limits to it. As long as there was talk of life units,ad infinitum the co-concept of subordinate-constructive unity, and elementary life, i.e. something that was already life but still elementary, did not exist.

But although without logical existence, something like this had to be real in the end, because the idea of ​​spontaneous generation, that is, the emergence of life from non-living things, could not be dismissed out of hand, and that gap that one could see in outer nature in vain tried to close, namely between life and lifelessness, had to be filled out or bridged in some way in the organic interior of nature. At some point the division had to lead to “units” which, although composed but not yet organized, mediated between life and non-life, groups of molecules, forming the transition between the order of life and the mereChemistry. Coming only to the chemical molecule, one already found oneself close to an abyss that yawned far more mysteriously than that between organic and inorganic nature: close to the abyss between the material and the non-material. Because the molecule was made up of atoms, and the atom was no longer large enough to even be described as extraordinarily small. It was so small, such a tiny, early and transitory agglomeration of the immaterial, of the not yet material but already material-like, of energy, that it was hardly or hardly any longer thought of as material, rather as the middle and boundary point between the material and the immaterial had to become. The problem of another spontaneous generation, far more puzzling and adventurous than the organic one, arose: the spontaneous generation of matter from the immaterial. In fact, the chasm between matter and non-matter was just as urgent, if not more so, than that between organic and inorganic nature. There had to be a chemistry of the immaterial, immaterial compounds from which the material arose, just as organisms arose from inorganic compounds, and the atoms might represent the specimens and moners of matter – material in their nature and not yet. But when it came to “not even small anymore”, the scale slipped; “not even small anymore”, that was already as much as “extremely big”; and the step to the atom proved, without exaggeration, to be fatal in the highest degree.

The atom was a cosmic system charged with energy, in which celestial bodies rotated around a sun-like center, and through whose etheric space camets passed at light-year speeds, which the force of the central body forced into their eccentric orbits. That was just as little a comparison as calling the body of multicellular beings a “cell state.” The city, the state, the social community organized according to the principle of the division of labor were not only comparable to organic life, they repeated it. Thus, in the innermost part of nature, the macrocosmic world of stars was repeated in the widest reflection, whose swarms, heaps, groups, figures, pale from the moon, hovered above the frosty glittering valley at the head of the hooded adept. Was it forbidden to thinkmade life ? For a somewhat tipsy young adept with an “abnormal” complexion, who no longer lacked any and all experience in the field of the forbidden, this was not only a nonsensical, but even obtrusively obvious, highly plausible speculation of logical truth character . The “smallness” of the inner-worldly stellar bodies would have been a very improper objection, because the scale of large and small was lost at the latest when the cosmic character of the “smallest” pieces of material had revealed themselves, and the concepts of the outside andInside, their stability had also suffered. The world of the atom was an outside, as most likely the Earth star we inhabited was, considered organically, a deep inside. Had not a researcher’s dreamy boldness spoken of “Milky Way animals”—cosmic monsters whose flesh, leg, and brain were made up of solar systems? But if that was the way Hans Castorp thought, then the moment you thought you’d come to the end, the whole thing started all over again! Then maybe in the deepest and deepest innermost of his nature lay himself, young Hans Castorp, once again, a hundred times more, wrapped warmly,

Pathological Anatomy, a volume of which he held aside in the red glow of his table lamp, instructed him through a text interspersed with illustrations on the nature of parasitic cell union and infectious tumors. These were tissues – particularly luxuriant tissues – brought about by the intrusion of alien cells into an organism which had proved receptive to them and which in some way – but, one might say, in some slovenly way – offered favorable conditions for their thriving . Less that the parasite deprived the surrounding tissue of nourishment; but by changing substance, like every cell, it produced organic compounds which proved astonishingly poisonous and inevitably fatal to the cells of the host organism.knew how to isolate the toxins and to present them in a concentrated state, and found it amazing in which small doses these substances, which simply belonged to the series of protein compounds, brought into the animal’s circulation caused the most dangerous symptoms of poisoning, tearing spoilage. The outer essence of this corruption was tissue proliferation, the pathological growth, namely as a reaction of the cells to the stimulus exerted on them by the bacilli settled between them. Nodules the size of millet-seeds were formed, composed of mucosal tissue-like cells, between or in which the bacilli nested, and some of which were extraordinarily rich in protoplasm, gigantic, and filled with many nuclei. But this merriment soon led to ruin, for now the nuclei of the monster cells began to shrink and disintegrate, their protoplasm to perish from coagulation; other parts of tissue in the vicinity were seized by the foreign stimulus; inflammatory processes spread and affected the adjacent vessels; white blood-corpuscles migrated, attracted by the place of disaster; death from clotting progressed; and meanwhile the soluble bacterial toxins had long since intoxicated the nerve centers, the organism stood at a high temperature, with heaving breasts, so to speak, staggering towards its dissolution. their protoplasm to perish from coagulation; other parts of tissue in the vicinity were seized by the foreign stimulus; inflammatory processes spread and affected the adjacent vessels; white blood-corpuscles migrated, attracted by the place of disaster; death from clotting progressed; and meanwhile the soluble bacterial toxins had long since intoxicated the nerve centers, the organism stood at a high temperature, with heaving breasts, so to speak, staggering towards its dissolution. their protoplasm to perish from coagulation; other parts of tissue in the vicinity were seized by the foreign stimulus; inflammatory processes spread and affected the adjacent vessels; white blood-corpuscles migrated, attracted by the place of disaster; death from clotting progressed; and meanwhile the soluble bacterial toxins had long since intoxicated the nerve centers, the organism stood at a high temperature, with heaving breasts, so to speak, staggering towards its dissolution.

As far as pathology, the theory of illness, the emphasis on pain in the body, which, however, as an emphasis on the physical, was also an emphasis on pleasure – illness was the indecent form of life. And life for its part? Was it just an infectious disease?of matter – how what one could call the spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps just disease, an overgrowth of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward lust, and toward death was doubtless to be taken where, provoked by the tickle of an unknown infiltration, that first increase in density of the spiritual took place, that pathologically luxuriant proliferation of its tissue, which, half pleasure, half repulsion, the earliest precursor of the substantial, formed the transition from the immaterial to the material. That was the fall of man. The second spontaneous generation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only a terrible increase in physicality to the consciousness of how the illness of the organism was an intoxicating increase and uncivilized overemphasis on its physicality -:

The books were piled up on the little lamp table, one was lying on the floor, next to the deck chair, on the mat of the loggia, and the one that Hans Castorp was researching the last time lay on his stomach and made it hard for him to breathe, but without that his cerebral cortex would have given orders to the responsible muscles to remove it. He had read down the page, his chin had reached his chest, his lids had drooped over his simple blue eyes. He saw the picture of life, its blooming limbs, the flesh-borne beauty. She had loosened her hands from behind her neck, and her arms, which she opened, and on their insides, especially under the tender skin of the elbow joint,the vessels, the two branches of the great veins, stood out bluish—these arms were of unspeakable sweetness. She leaned towards him, leaned towards him, over him, he felt her organic scent, felt the pounding of her heart. Hot tenderness encircled his neck, and while, dying of pleasure and horror, he laid his hands on her outer upper arms, where the grainy skin spanning the triceps was blissfully cool, he felt the wet suction of her kiss on his lips.