It is disheartening, esteemed reader, how the word “mask” in our time has lost its innocence – if it ever possessed any. For masks were once what one wore at carnival: a piece of cloth or papier-mâché, a peephole, a ribbon at the nape, and with it: permission. Permission to break the rules without endangering the person; permission to say something one otherwise would not be allowed to say; permission, for once, not to be oneself, since being oneself, as one knows, does not always do one good.
Today, however, people wear masks in order to follow rules; they wear them to protect the person, and they protect the person by hiding it. People wear masks for hygiene, out of caution, out of duty; they wear masks out of fear; and it is one of the ironic achievements of modernity that it can even turn fear into an accessory.
In Venice, the word “mask” is of course even older, and its age makes it more dangerous. For Venice has known masks not only as festive decoration, but as a way of life. Masks here do not belong merely to carnival, they belong to the city: to the way it reveals and conceals itself; how it displays decay as beauty and hides beauty as decay; the way it mixes the smell of rot with perfume and then pretends it is only a scent.
Hans Castorp did not think of all this in concepts – he was not a man of concepts, but of sensations – but he felt it as soon as he opened his eyes in the morning.
The air was heavy. It was not cold like up above, not clean like up above, not “healthy” in the way a brochure claims; it lay in the room like a damp cloth. Hans Castorp lay still for a moment, not from tiredness, but from that cautious sluggishness one develops when waking up in a foreign climate and not yet knowing whether the body will treat it as friend or foe.
Outside, the water gurgled.
It did not gurgle loudly; it gurgled as if it did not want to disturb, and that was exactly what was disturbing. For sounds that apologize are often the most persistent.
Hans Castorp turned his hand.
The ring gleamed.
It did not shine – it was not one of those garish, showy screens that turn the wrist into a billboard. It was discreet, almost polite. And yet, in its discretion, it was an eye: an eye that never sleeps, even when the wearer sleeps.
Hans Castorp tapped.
The numbers appeared.
They were friendly.
They said:
Sleep: 6 hours 28 minutes.
REM: 17 %.
Wake times: 2.
Stress indicator: elevated.
He stared at these sentences made of digits.
He did not feel like someone who has slept “6 hours 28 minutes”. He felt like someone who has lain in damp air that feels like a dream. And he thought – and that was already System 2, because it took effort – that numbers are different in this city. Down here, where the water carries time, even precise values seem like masks: they pretend to be truth and are yet only a form.
He did not take off the ring.
He never took it off.
That is, esteemed reader, perhaps the first indication that a mask is not always what one puts on; sometimes it is what one does not take off.
