There is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a kind of morning that does not feel like morning, but like continuation; and indeed not as a continuation of what one has done – for one has often done little –, but as a continuation of what one has not done: not gone, not spoken, not stopped. The body gets up, the mind remains seated; and in the space between these two, in this small, inconspicuous corridor of consciousness, that which will later be called “fate” begins, with astonishing punctuality, to work.
Hans Castorp awoke early.
He did not wake because the sun roused him – in the lagoon air light is not a blow, but a veil –, but because his ring on his finger, this discreet eye that counts the night, reminded him with a vibrating, polite displeasure of the fact that sleep in our time is no longer a state, but an achievement: something that one has accomplished or indeed not.
He lay still for a moment.
He felt the mattress, the blanket, the strange coolness of the sheets; he heard, through the window, the incessant, soft sound of the water, which here is not “water”, but an atmosphere, a second air. And he thought – at first without words – that he had stayed too long yesterday.
Staying too long: it sounds as if it were a matter of politeness. In truth it is a matter of life.
He sat up.
His movement was light; yes, one could say it was elegant. For Hans Castorp had – and this is, in the chronicle of this story, no small circumstance – arrived in a form that surprised even him. Not in that form one sees in brochures, spruced up, photographed, with the right shadow on the belly; but in a form that the body itself knows: elastic, firm, ready for work. He felt the tone in his thighs, the clear calm in his shoulders; his hands were warm, his feet steady. The weeks in the highlands, the Zieser sets in the cube, the steps, the sober meals, the sleep rituals, the sharp spikes of the fakir mat – all that had, as they say, “taken hold”.
And precisely for that reason it was cheerless: for this form gave him a feeling of invulnerability that any doctor would call an illusion, if he did not at the same time live from managing illusions.
Hans Castorp got up, went into the bathroom.
He stepped onto the cool tiles, and the coolness was, for a moment, beneficial, like a moral strictness. He looked at himself in the mirror.
There was the face one knows without knowing it: a little narrow, a little pale, the eyes no longer quite young, but not old either; and under the skin – he felt it, because he had by now learned to take feeling seriously – that small, watchful tension that had remained with him since the war, since withdrawal, since life with a name that is at once truth and mask.
