The library lay, as always, above the hall, above the chandelier, above the arriving and departing bodies – and this place had, since Hans Castorp had been sitting here, something sanatorium-like: not because it smelled of medicine, but because it smelled of time.
Books smell of time.
They smell of dust, of glue, of other people’s hands. They smell of patience. And patience is, in a house of optimization, a subversive scent.
Hans Castorp came early. He was in a hurry and yet did not want to be in a hurry; one of those modern inner contradictions that arise when you have learned that you should reduce stress and at the same time have learned that you must keep appointments.
He sat down at a table by the window, from which one could look down into the hall. The chandelier hung down there like a frozen celebration. People came, people went. Kautsonik moved among them as if he himself were the invisible mechanics of the threshold.
Hans Castorp pulled out his notebook.
It was not big, not expensive. It was, strictly speaking, a bourgeois object: paper that refuses to glow by itself.
He had carried it in his pocket since Chapter 9 – since “System 2” – like a new kind of identity. For while the ring on his finger supplied him with numbers that both calmed and shamed him, this notebook gave him the opportunity to do something else: not measure, but say. Not record, but formulate.
He opened it.
On the first page it said, a bit crooked, a bit large, as if he had had to encourage himself:
System 2.
Below that, added later, in a different mood, in smaller handwriting:
Don’t count everything.
And below that – this was new, he had written it last night after Kautsonik had shown him the registers – there was a sentence that was so simple that it almost seemed embarrassing:
Walk.
He ran his finger over the word without noticing, as if one could practice walking by touching a word.
The ring on his finger gleamed.
He was, esteemed reader, in peak form.
This is a sentence that Hans Castorp could never have said about himself in the past, because he would have been either too vain or too modest to believe it; and because “form” in his old life was an imprecise concept, a vague feeling that fluctuated between tiredness and well-being. Now form was measurable. It was muscle share, sleep quota, step count, RHR, HRV, blood pressure curve. It was, as Dr. Porsche would have said, a task.
And he had fulfilled it – or was fulfilling it, day after day, with that bourgeois persistence that suddenly seems heroic in the gym because it produces sweat.
His body was no longer soft in that way that is sold as comfort in hotels. It was firm without being hard; the shoulders no longer stood defensively, but as a matter of course; the back was no longer just a support, but a feeling. The chest rose without boasting. The skin had become clear through cold and air and training. His legs, which had previously just been legs, had contour, as if they had a judgment of their own.
And yet, esteemed reader, it is precisely in such moments of supposed perfection that something else, something immeasurable, makes itself felt: the hunger for what cannot be optimized.
Hans Castorp, the deserter with the ring, sat there and looked at one word: South.
He thought of Gustav von A., who had written this word in a notebook as if he had to remind himself where he belonged. He thought of the tone in which Gustav had said: “Sentences.” He thought of the word “create”, which had fallen for him like a coin into an empty bowl.
For whoever creates is allowed to stay.
Whoever does not create remains suspect.
He thought of Morgenstern, of his lilies, of his leeches. He thought of the quiet heroism that lies in speaking respectfully every day when you actually want to be mocking; and of the loud heroism that lies in leaving when you actually want to stay.
He thought: Maybe leaving is also just an excuse.
Then he saw the door of the library open.
