He does not obey the will, and he does not obey virtue. At most he obeys exhaustion, and even that is no reliable command.
Hans Castorp had trained. He had stood at the rack, he had done eight, ten, twelve repetitions, he had sweated, he had written, he had measured, he had – as Zieser called it – “ordered” himself. And in the evening he had dutifully put the cuff around his arm and let the small, correctly dressed man knock at the door, who is called “normally high”.
The diastole, just over eighty, had come as always: polite, unshakable. It had placed itself in his series of numbers as if it were a family member. Hans Castorp had noted it down. And then, after all this order, he had wanted to sleep.
That was the mistake.
For wanting to sleep is, as one learns when one gets older, an activity that drives sleep away. Sleep does not come when you call; it comes when you stop calling.
Hans Castorp lay in bed, in that modern hotel-bed shell that is at once soft and impersonal, and he felt how his mind – the bourgeois administrator of reasons – did not clock off, but rather started work in earnest. He heard the humming of the ventilation, that even, soulless breathing noise of the building; he heard, somewhere, the muffled rolling of a cart on the carpet; he heard the distant clink of a glass, as if someone were testifying that even after midnight there is still a program taking place.
And he heard – loudest of all – his own thinking.
It was as if, deep beneath the building, deep beneath the snow, deep beneath the cultivated quiet, there were a highway; and on this highway thoughts drove, restless, glaring, with headlights of memory that never dim. They drove in convoys, they overtook each other, they braked, they accelerated – and Hans Castorp, who in his life had so often tried to escape from orders, realized: from the order of one’s own head one escapes less easily than from a war.
He thought of the war without wanting to think of it. He thought of the fireworks that are war without blood, and of how his body had flinched. He thought of the woman who had said “Oui”, and of how a single word can awaken an entire past. He thought of the question about the name, of the little wooden stick, of the smudging.
And, as if that were not enough, he also thought about what he was thinking – and that is, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, the true hell of modern man: meta-thinking, the surveillance of surveillance.
When he finally, after an indeterminate time, fell into a dozing state, he was not sure whether it was sleep or only slackening. And when he woke up again – or believed he woke up – he saw in the dark a faint glow: the display of the handset, which pretended to be asleep but in truth was only waiting.
Hans Castorp turned over, pulled the blanket higher, as if he could defend himself against light with fabric. And then, at some point, morning came.
