There are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, words that feel as if they were translated from English because one is ashamed of them in German. “Guest Relations” is such a word. It sounds like smiling servitude, like a warm hand on the elbow, like a discreet “May I help you?”, and yet, if you look closely, it is an administrative term: relation is relationship, yes, but relation is also file, note, assignment, a kind of mathematical proposition in which A stands in relation to B – and in modernity that is never only affection, but always also access.
In the past, when hotels were still allowed to be hotels, they had porters. Porter – that sounds like door, like threshold, like the one who opens and closes, who guards the transition and pretends he is only being polite. Today there are Guest Relations Managers. That sounds like psychology, like bonding, like “experience”, and precisely for that reason it is more dangerous. For whoever manages relationships does not only manage luggage, but people; not only suitcases, but stories.
Since he had been living in this highland of comfort, Hans Castorp had learned that every new word can be a new law. “Recovery mode” was a law, “program” was a law, “longevity” was a law; and “bestforming” – this little, ridiculous artificial word that pretended to be a friendly, sporty imperative – was in the end nothing other than the modernized form of the old Magic Mountain principle: Stay, so that we may be allowed to explain you.
He sat in the morning – it was a morning that already smelled of spring and yet did not yet have the courage of summer – at his table, on which the logbook lay. The ring, this discreet eye, sat on his finger, matte and unobtrusive, as if it wanted to claim it was jewelry. Next to it lay the little wooden stick; and next to that, in a way that seemed like a bad joke, the yellow can and the green can: sun and grass, thought Hans Castorp; and despite everything he had to think briefly of Morgenstern, of the display on which the grass had been blue.
At the top of the page, in somewhat scrawly handwriting, it said:
The five resolutions.
Below that was white.
White is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a strange color. It is cleanliness and omission at the same time; it is the color of the blanket on the deck chair and the color of what is kept quiet. It is snow – and it is paper. You can write anything on white. And you can leave everything unwritten. Both are dangerous.
Hans Castorp held the little wooden stick between thumb and forefinger as if it were a pen and a weapon at the same time. He thought of Dr. AuDHS’ sentence: “Then you have to find out what lily is for you.” Lily. The word had something solemn, almost ridiculous, and yet it had stuck with him, like a scent that does not want to go away.
He had no lilies. No wife. No children. No bourgeois obligation that could immediately force him, like Morgenstern, into system two. Instead, he had rituals. And rituals are a substitute family: they are reliable, they do not contradict, they do not demand that you apologize. They are – if one is strict – the most comfortable form of loneliness.
He placed the tip of the little wooden stick on the paper.
He wrote nothing.
He put it down again.
Then he stood up.
Standing up had become easy in his body. The months of hypertrophy that Zieser had taught him – the squat as archaic humility, the bench press as bourgeois confrontation, the pull-up as great-ape logic, the king’s set as a small, daily coronation – had made him into a man whose back no longer looked like retreat. His shoulders stood differently. His ribcage was no longer the gentle, pale surface of the temperature person, but a kind of decision given form. And yet – that was the irony – inwardly he was still the same man of the in-between spaces: between name and alias, between guilt and self-protection, between visibility and mask.
