There is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, in the modern custom of self-improvement a peculiarity that is at once touching and unsatisfying: that the human being, this time-bound creature wavering between hunger and idea, on certain dates – preferably on the first of January, but also on Mondays, birthdays, the beginnings of vacations and, when things get really intense, after a particularly embarrassing evening – believes he can begin himself anew, as if he were a device that you switch off, reset, and switch on again, whereupon it will then, spruced up and fresh, have forgotten the old malfunction.
The resolutions belong to these dates, to these small switching points of morality. One makes them because one would like to believe that life can be treated like a plan; and one writes them down because one would like to believe that writing has power over blood, habit, and that stubborn inertia of the mind that one likes to call “character”, although it is often only fear that has made itself at home. And so the old, solemn matter of vows – once spoken in the monastery, before God and death – has in our time been transformed into bullet points, into clear lists, into “Notes” apps that can be provided with a little checkmark.
That is unsatisfying because it sounds petty; but it is also touching because it is true. For the human being can, if he can do anything at all, change himself only through repetition. He does not become good through enlightenment, but through practice. And practice, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is the inconspicuous sister of grace: not as beautiful, not as solemn, but reliable.
Hans Castorp did not know that. Or he knew it without knowing it, as he knew many things since he had been living in this house of programs, in which even the air was entered in a calendar. In recent months – and how fast months pass when you do not count them, and how slow when you do count them! – he had become a kind of exemplary guest: not because he distinguished himself through speeches, but through the quieter, nowadays almost obtrusive distinction that one calls “consistency”.
He had adopted rituals: the longevity ceremony in the morning, the training in the GYMcube, the steps, the meals, the measurements, the little chemical sacraments. With a mixture of childlike obedience and bourgeois resourcefulness, he had placed himself into an order whose promise was not healing but optimization – and he had, it may be said, derived benefit from it.
But in the last night he had, from an impulse that lay deeper than defiance, left a small white spot.
The ring, Dr. Porsche’s discreet eye, had indeed carried him; or perhaps he had not worn it – the memory was, as so often, less a film than a feeling. In any case, something had come between him and the knowledge. He had not recorded. He had not checked. He had not laid the value like a host in the logbook. A line remained empty, a small nothing in the order, and this nothing had, strangely enough, had weight.
In the morning the ring lay – whether on his finger or on the table, that is not decisive, for what is decisive is that it was there – and Hans Castorp felt, before he saw anything at all, that slight unease of the modern consciousness: the unease that something has not been measured.
It is unsatisfying, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, how quickly the morality of devices moves into us. One believes one is free because one decides; and only notices late that one decides because a small circle of metal and algorithm expects it.
Hans Castorp lay in bed for a moment, looked at the lighter strip that the curtains cut into the room, and thought, without thinking it: Perhaps not knowing is also a form of hygiene. Perhaps it is even the only one that is not sold.
Then he got up, showered, got dressed – no longer hastily, no longer ashamed, but with that calm matter-of-factness that arises when the body has found an order in which it does not have to apologize all the time – and went downstairs to breakfast.
