Outside, in front of the house, lay the world.
It did not lie there in the sense of a possession, but in the sense of an openness. The Sonnenalp – this large complex of wood, glass, paths, ponds, programs – sat in the green like an orderly animal; an animal that had been tamed by offering it wellness.
The meadows were bright, lush, and in them here and there still lay white patches – small remnants of snow in hollows, shadows, under bushes. The white was no longer winter; it was memory. And Hans Castorp, who had just been talking about “blue grass”, thought how pretty and unsatisfying it is that reality does not care about our fables: The grass was green. And on top of it lay, in patches, white.
He walked along a path that gently drew away from the house, past a pond, past a fence behind which cows stood and chewed with that patient indifference that every optimizer secretly envies: They live in repetition, and they call it life.
The sky was clear. In the distance stood mountains that still carried snow; white on top, green below. That too was a curve: top/bottom, order/inversion, as in The Magic Mountain – only that here it was not illness that justified the top, but comfort.
Hans Castorp stopped and looked back.
From this perspective the Sonnenalp no longer lay there like a lobby, but like a city; several wings, roofs, terraces, paths, bodies of water. An order in the green. A program in nature.
He heard his breathing.
He noticed how his body – trained, restrained, best formed – automatically fell into rhythm. The steps had a cadence. The gait was light. He could, without wanting to, have counted the steps, because the body has learned to monitor itself. It is unsatisfying how quickly one gets used to controlling oneself.
He raised his hand, looked at the ring.
The ring was there. The ring had become warm. The ring was satisfied.
And Hans Castorp suddenly felt a kind of resistance, not against the ring itself, but against the feeling that the ring is satisfied. For what is a device’s satisfaction if not obedience?
He stopped.
He turned the ring on his finger, once, twice.
Then he took it off.
It was a small, almost ridiculous act. A piece of metal from a finger. A gesture that appears in no moral theory and in no religion – and which yet, in a time of measurement, is a provocation.
The skin underneath was paler, a narrow ring of white: an imprint, a sign of belonging. Another white patch.
Hans Castorp held the device in his hand, looked at it. It lay heavier in it than he had expected.
He put it in his pocket.
Not thrown away. Not destroyed. Only: not visible. Not active.
Then he walked on.
And suddenly, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the walking became different.
Not because the ring had mechanically changed him – it is no magic, it is only a sensor –, but because walking without measurement has a different quality: It is no longer part of a program, it is once again an event. The path is no longer “step count”, it is once again path.
Hans Castorp felt the grass under his shoes, the slight dampness that still came from the snow in the shadows; he smelled earth. He heard a bird calling somewhere, and he thought: If I don’t record this, is it then less true?
That, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is the modern question: We no longer trust experience if it is not documented.
He walked, and he noticed how his head, that monkey in a suit, immediately began to work: How many steps? How many minutes? What heart rate?
He had to laugh.
“System one,” he murmured, and it sounded as if he were speaking to a pet that one must not scold because it only does what it can.
He forced himself to think slowly. System two.
I am walking, he thought. That is enough.
It was exhausting.
