“Unpleasant” was, in this sense, also: funny. Funny not as a mere joke, but as a form of cognition. This laughter that does not redeem, but exposes. It is funny that in a house of life one sets up lilies of all things, which smell so solemnly as if they were already meant for a farewell. It is funny that one says “hygiene” when one actually means “fear”. It is funny that the device that measures us is made so discreet that it looks like jewelry – and that with it, with a kind of elegant indecency, control is laid on the heart, as if it were an ornament. It is funny that a person who no longer wants to be the donkey sees of all things a blue circle light up on the display of his ring: blue grass, truth and algorithm in one small, cold contradiction.
But the word was something else as well, and perhaps that was its real service: It was the sign for those places where things become not only annoying, not only funny, but morally uncomfortable; those places where one no longer just gets annoyed, but feels caught.
I have called it “unpleasant” when Hans Castorp smiles and knows that he is smiling. This awareness of one’s own expression – this little theater that we play in front of others and in front of ourselves – is not only vain, it is also sad. I have called it “unpleasant” when a man eats slowly, not out of pleasure, but because slow eating is the last form of control when the night has taken control. I have called it “unpleasant” when one lives in numbers: when the cuff buzzes and the value appears and one feels, despite all reason, as if one were no longer a human being, but a curve. For numbers are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the most polite form of threat: they do not scream; they remain.
And then, in the second part of the novel, in the lagoon, this word takes on a coloring that can hardly be called annoying anymore, but rather sickly sweet. There the beautiful becomes unpleasant. There the familiar becomes unpleasant, that which one knows in advance before one sees it – that kind of beauty that has already been delivered to us as a postcard, as a film, as a sound, as longing, and which therefore, when it finally stands before us, no longer has innocence, but entitlement. In Venice, the realization that beauty is noise becomes unpleasant; that it does not calm the inner self, but keeps it busy; that with its moist, golden manner it does not comfort a person, but binds them.
Staying also becomes unpleasant.
That is, if one thinks it through to the end, the great line that this word draws in the novel: It marks the transition from a world that annoys us to a world that seduces us – and both times, as different as the feelings are, it is about the same question: Who has power over my time?
The mountain – we have known this since The Magic Mountain – is a place of other time. It is school, seduction, excuse, insight. And the Sonnenalp, as real and familiar and at the same time literarily alienated as it is, has taken over this time: first as comfort, then as program, then as optimization. And in the end, in the lagoon, optimization becomes a mask: a form that protects but also isolates; a form that makes the body strong and yet does not bring the inner self to rest.
At these points “unpleasant” was my stop sign. It was the word for: Something tips here. Here something becomes true that one would rather not have true. Here irony becomes morality.
And now, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the question arises that one must not avoid in an epilogue without being ashamed in front of oneself: If “unpleasant” could accomplish so much – then what, conversely, is “pleasant”?
