On the morning of that day on which the matter of hypertrophy began to take shape – a word that sounds as if it were wearing an ancient Greek garment, and yet in truth is nothing other than the modern form of working on the body –, Hans Castorp performed for the second time the longevity ceremony that Dr. Porsche had recommended to him.
One must not imagine this as cheerful self-care, smiling as it does in brochure pictures; one must think of it as a ritual that hovers between kitchen and altar. It began with the weighing, and how unedifying the weighing already is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, because it binds the human being to the scale, to that authority that never flatters and yet is worshipped by vanity. Three to three and a half grams of the dark yellow powder that lay in a glass like ground-up sun: turmeric, ginger, black cumin, amla, coriander – and pepper, as if somewhere in the background there stood a small, sharp “but”.
He mixed it with water. He did not drink it like a beverage, but in individual sips, and before each sip he gargled, as if the throat itself, this transition from outside to inside, had to be cleansed. Bitter drops followed, dissolved in lemon juice, and after that the hibiscus white tea prepared the evening before, deep red like a solemn error in the order of the house. He strained blossoms and leaves, watched how the liquid flowed through the metal mesh, and thought that even the red in such houses has to be filtered.
Then came the grass-green powder that, in its color, appeared so indecently vital that Hans Castorp, who in Davos had known pallor and paleness as normality, involuntarily thought of spring and thus of something that up here occurs only as a claim. NMN, betaine, matcha – words that are like passwords. He stirred, he drank, he swallowed tablets that descended into him like a small, mute company: D3/K2, ASA, resveratrol, magnesium, the multi-all-inclusive-iodine capsule, Q10, metformin – and he wondered that one can press so much hope into so little volume.
The human being, he thought, is a creature that likes to calm itself with things it can hold in its hand. Formerly they were rosaries. Today they are capsules.
And while he swallowed in this way, as one fits oneself into a program, it suddenly became clear to him what had been lacking in Dr. Porsche’s recommendations: They were, for all their precision, too little concrete in one respect that Hans Castorp knew from the old cure days. Back then they had measured temperatures, drawn curves, and the body had, so to speak, been translated into lines. Here they measured as well, certainly – but what was he supposed to do, apart from drinking, swallowing, counting?
Dr. Porsche had spoken of hypertrophy. And Hans Castorp had, polite as he was, nodded without knowing what he was accepting.
Hypertrophy – that sounded like enlargement. And enlargement, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, is in human life always an ambiguous promise: it can be salvation or ridiculousness.
Hans Castorp was at a loss.
He did not hate being at a loss; he was too sluggish to hate it. But he felt it as a kind of cold that cannot be treated. And so he did what he had by now learned to do in this house: when something becomes cold, one looks for a department.
