In the afternoon Hans Castorp saw the beautiful apparition.
It did not happen in a dramatic moment. It did not happen, as one would say, “all at once”. Beauty, esteemed reader, dear reader, rarely appears as it does in brochures and paintings; it sneaks in, it arises from a constellation: light, angle of view, movement, and – this is crucial – from the willingness of the observer to recognize it as beauty.
Hans Castorp was ready.
Perhaps he was even too ready.
He had been with Gustav von A. in a salon that was in the hotel and that, like such salons, pretended to be for music, while in truth it was for glances. A piano stood there, black, polished, as if it were not an instrument but a piece of cultural furniture. In the corner sat people who pretended to be thinking. On the walls hung pictures of lagoons and gondolas, like an ironic doubling of reality: one paints what is outside in order to pretend inside that one has seen outside.
Gustav von A. did not sit.
He stood at the window, looking out as if he wanted to take in the city not through his eyes but through an inner discipline. Hans Castorp sat down, because in such situations he likes to sit: on the edge, observing, half involved, half not.
Then a door opened.
A person entered.
And Hans Castorp felt, without knowing why, that his body gave an impulse.
The ring, which otherwise only counts, reported – if you will – a small, insignificant spike.
The person was an adult.
This is important, esteemed reader, dear reader, because in stories we are all too quickly inclined to confuse beauty with innocence, and innocence with youth. But this person carried no innocence; they carried a kind of perfected form that was not childlike but conscious, elaborated, as if life itself had worked on them like a sculptor.
They were slender, but not thin; they were upright, but not stiff. The shoulders stood as if they knew what they were doing. The face was calm. The hair – light, almost white in the light – lay in such a way that one could not say whether it naturally fell so or whether a hand had placed it so. The clothing was simple: a light shirt, light trousers, nothing conspicuous. And precisely this simplicity made the apparition so compelling, because it showed: Here nothing is adorned. Here is what is.
The person did not walk quickly.
They walked like someone who knows they are being seen without wanting it.
Or without admitting it.
Hans Castorp looked at them.
And in this looking there was something that he, with Dr. AuDHS in his ear, immediately recognized as danger. For the gaze that contemplates beauty is never innocent. It turns beauty into an object, and it turns itself into a perpetrator, even if it does nothing but look.
Gustav von A. turned around.
He saw the person.
He said nothing.
But Hans Castorp saw Gustav von A. press his lips together very briefly, as if, for a moment, he had forgotten to breathe.
That was, thought Hans Castorp, the truth.
And it was beautiful.
And unsatisfying.
The person did not sit down.
They walked through the room as if it did not belong to them, and then sat down at a table where others were already sitting: an older woman, proper, well-groomed, with a posture that smelled of responsibility; a man who carried his forehead too high; two other people who were laughing. It was an ordinary circle. But the person who had just entered made it unusual, because they sat in it like a point of light.
Hans Castorp did not take his notebook.
He first took, as he had learned, System 2.
He said to himself, very slowly: That is only a person.
He said to himself: That is not truth just because it is beautiful.
He said to himself: You are not here to look.
And while he said it to himself, he looked.
Such is the human being, esteemed reader, dear reader: they know, and they do it anyway.
