There is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a kind of cleanliness that no longer has anything to do with water, indeed not even with soap, that old-fashioned, almost proletarian substance that foams and smells and yet, for all its sensuality, only does what it has always had to do: It removes the dirt, and afterwards the human being may once again consider himself innocent for a moment.
Our time has invented a different cleanliness. It is drier, more silent, made of numbers. It does not come from washing, but from measuring. It does not require a towel, but a protocol. And it has, like all new virtues, the tendency to dress itself in moral concepts so that no one notices how very much it is born of fear.
Hans Castorp had, since the visit to Dr. Wendelin Porsche, this warm‑fatherly and at the same time cracked figure of the house, who spoke of health as if it were a business model and a conscience at the same time, had the experience that one does not have to be healthy in order to come under supervision. It is enough to be “normally high”.
“Normally high” – what an expression! It is the modern form of suspicion. It says: There is nothing, and yet there is something; and because there is something, it becomes a task. The value that occupied Hans the most was not, as one might expect, the pressure itself, but the way it slipped into his life: not as pain, not as a symptom, but as a duty. The diastole, just over eighty, was like a small, correctly dressed man who knocked on the door every evening, shortly before sleep, and said: Good evening. I am still here as well.
And then there had been this other number, which one does not feel and which yet, once one has heard it, begins to live in the head like a rumor: the arterial stiffness, slightly elevated, expressed on the right and left in meters per second, as if the human being were a pipe in which life runs like a wave that can be too fast or too slow. Hans Castorp, who had never been a man of concepts but of sensations, had caught himself feeling numbers: as coldness, as pressure, as a fine uneasiness.
He had, if one may call it that, become a patient of prevention. And the patient of prevention is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, a peculiar figure: He has nothing, and precisely for that reason he has everything to do.
