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Part 4, Chapter 2: Excursus on the Sense of Time
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Magic Mountain, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Time
Coming of Age
Death and Illness
East vs. West
Abstract Ideals vs. Lived Experience
Summary
Analysis
Hans still has a lot to get used to at the sanatorium, even as he gradually memorizes the goings on of daily life there. One day he learns that the balloon-shaped containers he’d noticed his first day there are filled with oxygen. They’re used to temporarily revitalize patients just before they die. Behrens calls the dying patients the morbundi. Hans runs into him one day in the hall, and Behrens expresses regret that Hans won’t be staying at the Berghof through the winter. Then he heads into a room to tend to a dying patient. Hans glimpses the moribundus as Behrens steps into the room. It’s the first dying person Hans has seen at the sanatorium, and the pale, frail figure in the bed shocks and disturbs him.
Little by little, Hans grows more accustomed to life at the Berghof, and this reflects the growing hold the place has on him. Though he initially laughed at details about the place that didn’t make sense to him or made him feel uncomfortable, as when Joachim described how bobsleds are used to transport dead bodies down the mountain, now Hans actively tries to learn about how patients are treated, and he even voluntarily gazes upon a dying patient.
Themes
Hans doesn’t really get to know anybody well those first few days, still feeling like a visitor and thus not seeing the point. One day, though, Joachim introduces him to a nurse who patrols their floor. She loves to talk, blabbering on about her family back home, mostly her cousins, and the tedious details of her day. The other person Hans meets is the pale, Mexican lady dressed in black, whom people call Tous-les-deux. Hans and Joachim encounter her on one of their walks one day, and she greets them with her characteristic “Tous le dé.” Hans, having known that this is what she’d say, replies, “Et je le regrette beaucoup.” At this, her eyes widen, and Hans senses her emit a “fainted, wilted odor.” He feels a sudden “warmth” in himself. She says thanks and walks away.
Despite Hans’s growing familiarity with the place, his ambivalence persists, as his reluctance to get to know any of the other residents suggests. He almost seems in denial about the fact that he’s getting used to—and perhaps even a bit enchanted by—the Berghof and the alternate way of life its setting offers him. Meanwhile, his calculated effort to engage with Tous-les-deux, replying, Et je le regrette beaucoup (“And I regret that very much”) to acknowledge her grief over her sick and dying sons, shows that he is making a calculated effort to ingratiate himself with the broader Berghof community—even as he denies that he’s anything more than a visitor passing through.
Themes
After Tous-les-deux has gone, Hans tells Joachim he does well with people like the woman, getting along with sad people better than happy people. It doesn’t make him feel uncomfortable. He goes on about how illogical it is for the local women to feel so uncomfortable and nervous about death and about how much he loves coffins. He thinks that when people need to feel more spiritual, they ought to go to a funeral rather than to church. Suddenly he pauses and asks Joachim if the French he spoke with Tous-le-deux was okay. Joachim says it was.
Hans’s remark about getting along better with sad people than happy people reiterates his belief that suffering affects a person in significant and predictable ways, imbuing them with a higher knowledge that ordinary, happy people lack. Despite Settembrini’s warning, he still wants to believe that the best way to learn about life is through a fixation on death.
Themes
