Imagine, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a library that does not look like a library, but is supposed to have the effect of a library. For books today, like so many things, are less objects of use than signs; one does not put them there in order to read them, but in order to be read – by the eyes of others, who look at the rooms, the halls, the shelves and draw the conclusion from them: Here is culture, here is calm, here is class, here one may, without being ridiculous, feel like a person with an inner life.
But this library, for all its desire to make an impression, was still a real one: It lay high above the reception hall, on a surrounding gallery, as if a wreath of silence had been placed above the busyness of coming and going; and the silence was not complete, it was permeable, for it let the sounds of the hall rise up – the clinking of glasses, the muffled rolling of suitcases, the soft hum of that technical warmth which, in this house, curates the cold.
Hans Castorp went up.
He did not walk quickly. He walked in that manner which creates the impression of self‑determination and in truth is nothing other than a submitting. His feet found the steps, and his body, that incorruptible chronicler, reported, as it moved, the reverberation of the night: a slight pulling at the temples, a dryness in the mouth that did not come from the alcohol alone, but from that inner tension which the body develops when it defends itself against memories. He thought of the fireworks, of the tearing of the sky, of the echo of his heartbeat – and he thought that when one deserts, one may indeed escape from a war, but not from the sound of war.
