They walked on, along the path that wound gently downhill, past a small stream that came out of the golf course, groomed, canalized, and yet remained water: cold, running, indifferent.
Dr. AuDHS spoke the way he spoke when he felt that a moment was instructive – and he never spoke as if he wanted to lecture, but as if he wanted to make the matter itself start speaking.
“You know”, he said, “why leeches work?”
“Because they suck”, said the older girl and giggled.
“Yes”, said Dr. AuDHS. “But why can they suck? Because you don’t notice that you’re bleeding. It is not pain, it is not violence. It is…” He searched for a word the children would understand. “…it is quiet.”
Hans Castorp thought of the vibrating phone. Quiet. Discreet. Modern.
“And why don’t you notice it?”, Dr. AuDHS continued, and now he was speaking more to the adults. “Because your system one interprets it as ‘social’: as duty, as guilt, as niceness. Niceness is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader – pardon, I am quoting myself –, one of the most dangerous drugs of the bourgeois soul. One wants to be liked. One does not want to be the bad one. One does not want to be the lion who says: Go away with your grass question.”
Morgenstern nodded. “I don’t want to…” He faltered. “…I don’t want to be hard.”
“You confuse hard with clear”, said Dr. AuDHS. “Clarity is hygiene. Hardness is ego. You need clarity, not hardness.”
Hans Castorp heard the word hygiene and thought of hypertrophy, of muscles, of rituals. It was strange how everything in this house came down to hygiene: hygiene for the vessels, hygiene for the muscle, hygiene for sleep – and now hygiene for the relationship.
“And the lilies”, said Dr. AuDHS, and he indicated with a movement of his head the children, who were now showing each other a pebble as if it were a treasure. “The lilies are sensitive. They don’t need you to be perfect. They need you to be there. And to be there sometimes means: leaving the phone in your pocket.”
Frau Morgenstern looked at Dr. AuDHS, and in her gaze there was something that was neither gratitude nor skepticism, but something third: recognition. She had probably thought these sentences, in another form, many times before. It was only rare that a man said them without making himself the hero in the process.
Hans Castorp walked beside them and felt something working inside him. Not the muscle – that was moving; not the vessel – that was pulsing; but something he had not trained for a long time: the idea that a good life does not consist of values, but of glances.
The glance, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader: that inconspicuous, immeasurable, often abused thing that nevertheless carries everything. Hans Castorp saw Morgenstern, how he, after the phone, consciously looked at his children. He saw Frau Morgenstern, how she perceived this glance. He saw how, in this small scene, a security was established that no ring can measure.
He thought of himself. He thought of the night in which he had not asked the ring. And suddenly he understood, with a clarity that was almost embarrassing to him: The white space he had left was directed not only against the device, but against loneliness. For one measures when one is alone. One measures because there is no one else there to hold one.
And he, Hans Castorp, was alone.
He was alone in a house full of people, which is the most unsatisfying form of loneliness.
