The self-experiment was cheerless because it did not look like a transgression but like reason.
Since Zieser had led him into the GYMcube and, out of helplessness, had done repetitions, Hans Castorp had grown accustomed to taming things you cannot do by means of rules. Zieser had said: Measure what matters. And: A sentence is only finished when it is written down.
Hans Castorp had taken in these sentences the way one, in church, takes in commandments: not because one loves them, but because one needs them in order to hold oneself together. And now he thought that sleep must likewise be made to hold itself together.
He looked for methods without looking, because methods are everywhere today. They leap out at you, they are in brochures, in programs, in conversations, in the casual remarks of the people who, up here, in the shared effort of self‑improvement, reassure one another that they are on the right path.
He tried the obvious: going to bed early. Darkness. No alcohol. No fireworks. In the evening he no longer even drank the second cup of tea, because he suddenly found everything suspicious that “stimulates”. Before going to bed, he sat down in the armchair by the window, looked down into the valley where the lights lay, and thought: Down there it runs, the highway. Thoughts, vehicles. Meanings, headlights.
Then he lay down and said to himself: Now you sleep.
He said it as if sleep were a soldier to whom one gives an order.
And he waited.
He waited, and while he waited, he thought about the waiting. And while he thought about it, he noticed that the waiting only made the highway brighter.
He tried breath‑counting. He tried not feeding the thoughts. He tried letting them pass by like vehicles. But every vehicle that passed had its license plate: War. Woman. Name. Lie. Zieser. Porsche. Normal high.
He felt how his body, which had just been tired, tensed up again. He felt his heartbeat, and as soon as he felt it, he was no longer calm. He felt the ring on his finger, this discreet metal, and it was as if he felt a foreign hand on his night.
He switched off the handset – or pretended to. For switched off today often only means: silent. And silent means: later.
He turned onto his side. He turned back. He pulled the blanket higher. He put it down again. Suddenly he felt the fabric as too warm and the air as too cold, as people feel when they do not sleep: Everything is wrong because you yourself are wrong.
When he finally fell asleep, it was not a falling into depth but a drifting away into a zone in which, if one is honest, one does not know whether one is sleeping or merely no longer has the strength to be awake. He did not dream; or he did not remember. And when he saw the evaluation again in the morning, it was – kindly – hardly any better.
Sleep onset latency: 41 minutes.
Wake times: 4, totaling 66 minutes.
REM: 13 %.
And again: stress indicators elevated.
Hans Castorp stared at the numbers as if they were looking at him.
“Stress,” he said softly. “So that is what I am.”
And then something happened that is very modern: He became stressed by the fact that he was stressed.
He sat at the breakfast table, looked at the “honest” dark bread, the salmon, the token dot of butter, and he noticed that even chewing in such establishments is no longer simply chewing. It is nutrient intake. It is macro‑management. It is, if one is strict, a kind of temporary self‑administration.
And in the midst of all this administration, he became aware of how little he actually knew.
Dr. Porsche had said: Hypertrophy, nutrition, stress reduction, sleep. He had named values, terms, programs. But he had not, as doctors like to do because they leave the concrete to the staff, said: How?
Zieser had given him the how for the day: eight, ten, twelve. But for the night no one had given him a scheme.
And Hans Castorp, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, was a person who does not become heroic in helplessness but – as cheerless as it sounds – polite. He endures it for a while, and then he looks for an authority.
So he turned, helpless, to the doctor.
