He went down later, after he had completed the morning liturgy (weighing powder, gargling, bitters, hibiscus and white tea, grass-green longevity powder, tablets like little promises), into the house, into those reception and intermediate rooms in which identity must constantly be reaffirmed so that it is not called into question.
The Sonnenalp was in one of those states that the hotel industry loves: neither quiet nor loud, but “pleasantly lively”. You could hear footsteps on stone, the discreet whirring of doors, the gentle clinking of glasses, and somewhere – as a reminder of the night, which up here is not really abolished, only decorated – the soft humming of a machine that generated warmth.
In the reception hall hung the chandelier.
It did not hang, it presided; a huge black hoop of iron, with candle lights on it – electric of course, but shaped as if wax were burning here. Thomas Mann, esteemed reader, dear reader, would have taken delight in this modern theatrics: one imitates the old in order to give the new a conscience.
Hans Castorp paused for a moment and looked up.
From below, in the red upholstered light and between the red columns, the chandelier looked like a sun. A sun of order, of repetition, of programmed brightness. And Hans Castorp thought, with that mild irony that sometimes visited him, that this chandelier was the only sun that would never become cloudy, would never set, would never be surprising.
He knew: above, over the chandelier, was the library.
He went up the stairs.
The wooden balustrade was warm under his hand, polished smooth by guests and years. In the niches stood books, neatly lined up, like a promise of spirit in a house that in truth primarily manages bodies. The red of the wall covering glowed quietly, as if, amid all the wood, it were the blood that one otherwise so gladly breaks down into numbers.
Hans Castorp took a book from the shelf, not because he wanted to read, but because reading in such moments is a posture: I am someone who takes books. It was, by chance or not, a thin volume whose title struck him like a faint stab: Tonio Kröger.
He held it in his hand for a moment.
Tonio – who stands between worlds, who is not quite bourgeois and not quite an artist, who longs for warmth and at the same time fears it. Hans Castorp, who had never been an artist, suddenly felt again that Tonio-like bitterness that he had once formulated after a training session: You can do a great deal, and it counts for nothing if no one reads it.
He put the book back.
Not out of rejection, but out of shyness. As if the title had looked him too directly in the face.
