Throughout The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp encounters many new philosophical and scientific ways of looking at the world and finding meaning in life. This becomes especially vital—and complicated—over the course of his stay at the Berghof due to its remove from the real world. Situated in the Swiss Alps, the Berghof exists out of place and time, in a world that has no relationship to the goings on of society. Residents of the sanatorium spend their days tracking their temperatures and taking their “rest cures,” and they have minimal contact with the outside world. As a result, many long-term residents inevitably descend into a state of malaise and apathy. Life at the Berghof compels its residents to exist in a state of abstract unreality, in which the concerns of ordinary life become irrelevant. Some patients spend their days absorbed in tedious activities designed to pass the time, playing cards or spreading mindless gossip. Others, like Settembrini and Naphta, lecture on their respective philosophical ideals. Hans Castorp initially gravitates toward this latter camp, absorbing himself in scientific and philosophical texts to feed his curiosity about the world and often retreating to a nearby meadow to engage in indulgent philosophical musings.
Ultimately, however, the novel reveals the intellectual engagement that Settembrini, Naphta, Hans, and others gravitate toward to be just as tedious and meaningless as any of the other mindless hobbies that Berghof residents pick up. Despite Hans’s sincere curiosity about the world, and despite Settembrini’s staunch commitment to progress and rationality, both characters fail to translate their abstract beliefs and interests into real action. In other words, their engagement with the world remains just as nonexistent as uncurious Berghof residents who waste their days playing with silly gadgets in the social lounge, spreading gossip, or sleeping. In contrast, the novel presents Hans’s cousin, the soldier Joachim, as an example of a character who models a good and productive way of being. Joachim’s uncurious nature and subservience to authority ironically do not render him passive and unengaged with reality. To the contrary, his commitment to his ideals of honor and duty motivate him to act and rejoin society, leaving the unreal bubble of the Berghof behind to return to the flatlands and his military service. Ultimately, the novel celebrates Joachim’s ability to demonstrate his commitment to his ideals through decisive action, a feat no other character manages to do.
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Abstract Ideals vs. Lived Experience ThemeTracker
Abstract Ideals vs. Lived Experience Quotes in The Magic Mountain
“Quickly and slowly, just as you like,” Joachim replied. “What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t really pass at all, there is no time as such, and this is no life—no, that it’s not,” he said, shaking his head and reaching again for his glass.
“You said ‘actually.’ But ‘actually’ doesn’t apply,” Hans Castorp responded. He was sitting with one thigh hiked up on the railing; the whites of his eyes were bloodshot. “There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly, then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.” He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.
Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it’s passed—for you and me and everyone.”
On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagining how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace—and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.
Illness is, rather, a debasement—indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration—imprint that on your minds!—an aberration and the beginning of all intellectual aberrations.
“Illness makes people even more physical, turns them into only a body.”
“The only healthy and noble and indeed, let me expressly point out, the only religious way in which to regard death is to perceive and feel it as a constituent part of life, as life’s holy prerequisite, and not to separate it intellectually, to set it up in opposition to life, or, worse, to play it off against life in some disgusting fashion—for that is indeed the antithesis of a healthy, noble, reasonable, and religious view. […] Death is to be honored as the cradle of life, the womb of renewal. Once separated from life, it becomes grotesque, a wraith—or even worse. For as an independent spiritual power, death is a very depraved force, whose wicked attractions are very strong and without doubt can cause the most abominable confusion of the human mind.”
“Analysis is good as a tool of enlightenment and civilization—to the extent that it shakes stupid preconceptions, quashes natural biases, and undermines authority. Good, in other words, to the extent that it liberates, refines, and humanizes—it makes slaves ripe for freedom. It is bad, very bad, to the extent that it prevents action, damages life at its roots, and is incapable of shaping it. Analysis can be very unappetizing, as unappetizing as death, to which it may very well be linked—a relative of the grave and its foul anatomy.”
“Well, my good engineer, how did you like the pomegranate?”
“Oh, you and your learning! You’re always learning up here—about biology and botany and slippery turning points. And you started in on ‘time’ your first day here. When what we’re here to do is to get healthier, not more clever—healthier, until we’re truly healthy, so they can finally let us go free and send us back to the flatlands cured.”
His form is logic, but his nature is confusion.
“Yes, you’re cured. The spot at the upper left isn’t worth talking about. Your temperature has nothing to do with it. I can’t tell you what causes that. I assume it’s of no further importance. As far as I’m concerned, you may leave.”
And that was the end of the attempt by the flatlands to reclaim Hans Castorp. The young man admitted quite openly to himself that such total failure, which he had seen coming, was of decisive importance for his relationship to the people down there. For the flatlands it meant a final shrug, the abandonment of any claim; for him, however, it meant freedom finally won, and by now his heart no longer fluttered at the thought.
Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill.
But honor was the death of him, or—if you turn it the other way around—death did him the honor.
There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?
