When they parted – Morgenstern with a brief handshake, Dr. AuDHS with a curt nod – Hans Castorp remained standing for a moment and watched them go.
It is, dear female reader, dear male reader, a strange thing with friendships in such houses: You meet because you are in the same program. You talk because you have the same fear. You part because you have to go back into your own optimization cell. And yet these encounters are sometimes the only thing that does not seem optimized.
Hans Castorp went back into the house.
He did not go to the room right away. He did not go to the gym. He did not go to eat. He went – and this is perhaps the first small act of system two in his life for a long time – to the library.
For there, among books, the gaze is not just a gaze. It becomes language. And language, he now knew, is perhaps the only form of training that does not immediately give birth to numbers.
He sat down.
He opened a notebook – not the logbook, not the chart, but an empty notebook.
And he wrote, slowly, as if he had to teach the pen that it was allowed to do more than numbers again:
System 2.
Then he paused.
He thought of the donkey. Of the tiger. Of the lion.
He thought of Morgenstern and his lilies.
He thought of his own desertion.
And he thought – very briefly, like a shadow – of Gustav von A., who somewhere in this house was perhaps just writing “South”, because writing is also a form of going away.
Hans Castorp put the pen down.
He looked out of the window.
The grass was green.
And he, who had believed for so long that his talent was nodding, realized that it was perhaps something else:
seeing.
And deciding when to go away.
