In the evening Hans Castorp went up once more into the library, above the chandelier.
He stepped up to the railing and looked down into the hall, the stage of coming and going, and he saw how people came, how people went, how people stood, how people waited. A hotel is a model of the world, because it shows us what we are: temporary.
The chandelier hung there, this great ring, and Hans Castorp thought that it had once seemed to him like an eye – and that now it seemed to him like something else: like a question.
Can one tell time?
Can one tell ending?
Or does one only tell movement?
He sat down at a table, took out his notebook, laid it on the wooden surface, as if he wanted to entrust to the wood, this old material, something that does not belong on a display.
He took the little wooden stick.
He wrote, slowly, and the handwriting was not beautiful, not professional, not creative in the Gustavian sense.
But it was there.
He wrote:
bestforming is a transitional form.
He paused.
He wrote:
One can improve oneself in order to be able to leave.
He paused.
He wrote, and now the handwriting became a little more slanted, as if the sentence were getting heavier:
One cannot leave if one always stays.
He closed the book.
He put the little wooden stick away.
He stood up.
And now, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, comes the moment in which one, as narrator, must commit an indecency: One must stop, because otherwise one never stops. Ending is always arbitrary. Ending is always an imposition. Ending is always a cut into a circle.
Hans Castorp went downstairs.
He walked through the hall.
He walked past the writing.
He walked outside.
Outside, at the edge of the pavement, lay the orange lifebuoy, half in the grass, half in the gravel, and on it stood – in black letters, friendly, brand-like – the name of the house, as if even salvation had to be branded.
Hans Castorp stopped.
He saw the ring.
He saw the ring in his pocket.
He did not see the circle in the sky – the sky is not a circle, it is an abyss –, but he felt that circles can be found everywhere if one looks for them.
He took out the finger ring.
He held it in his hand.
He could have thrown it away.
He could have worn it.
He did a third thing, which is so unspectacular that it seems almost ridiculous – and precisely for that reason human.
He put it away again.
Not as a god.
Not as a goddess.
Not as an eye.
As a thing.
As a thing which, together with a drawing that was already hovering before his mind’s eye, and which he did not intend to make with a little wooden stick or any other smudging thing, he would make into a work.
A work from a thing and a drawing, he thought and smiled. It was an honest smile, and not a joyless one.
Then he walked on.
Down.
Where he went, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, we do not know. Perhaps into a valley that swallows him. Perhaps into an order that finally registers him. Perhaps into a guilt that he no longer avoids. Perhaps into a life that is not curated. Perhaps into the general affair that cannot be optimized.
But he went.
And that was – unedifying enough – his first real progress.
