There are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, in the history of the bourgeois soul certain moments in which it goes, without admitting it, into a chapel. Not into a chapel of stone with altars and incense, but into one that consists of devices, brochures and kindly smiling programs; for our age has, just as it has transformed everything that was once called fate into service, also rebuilt the conscience into a department. It is no longer called confession, it is called check. No longer asceticism, it is called optimization. No longer penance, it is called prevention.
And because modern morality does not like to speak of sin – the word would be too heavy, too medieval, too unedifying –, it speaks of values. One has values as one has account balances; and as with the account balance, what is really bad is not poverty but deviation. One can be healthy, yes; but one can, in a single small incidental word, suddenly no longer be quite healthy, but “normal high”. One can, with a smile, be pushed into an intermediate space that is as comfortable as a hotel lounger and as persistent as a fate.
Hans Castorp had, at the end of the previous day – that day in the blue, which, between chlorine and snow, had exhausted him more than any real exertion – slept a little, not deeply, not long, but honestly. Honesty is easier in a bathrobe, as we know, than in a dinner jacket; and perhaps it is generally easier when one lies warm and outside the world is white.
When he awoke, his head was clearer, but not free. The night had withdrawn into him like an animal into its cave: you do not see it, but you know it is there. He was still lying on that lounger in the relaxation room, which stood on wheels like a compromise between freedom and patienthood; the brown blanket lay over him, heavy and soft, as if it wanted to say to him: Stay. The windows were no longer fogged up; the snow outside lay like a freshly stretched bandage, and somewhere in the building the technology was humming that soothing hum that says: Everything is under control.
Hans Castorp pulled his hand out of the pocket of his bathrobe.
The little wooden stick was still there.
He held it between thumb and forefinger and looked at it as if it were an ID. In a certain sense it was that too: an ID for an encounter that was not allowed to be documented; and an ID that in this building, for all the camera and program order, there are things that take place only between two people – and are therefore dangerous.
He put it back in.
Then he stood up.
