It is called the music room, esteemed reader, esteemed reader, and that is already the first little joke. For music – real music, not the muffled background noise from invisible speakers – is in such houses mostly a décor, a sign of culture, just as lilies are a sign of dignity and the chandelier above the reception hall is a sign of solemnity. Music is, if one is honest, here less art than assertion: We are not only wellness, we are also world.
The music room was a large room with parquet flooring, with red columns which, in their friendly robustness, had something of theatre scenery; at the front a low stage, on it a black grand piano, groomed like an animal kept for ornament. In front of it stood tables and chairs, not in strict rows, but in that cosy disorder that simulates cosiness, although of course it is also planned. The large windows looked out onto the park – or onto what one calls a park when one tends it like a calling card; behind it one saw trees and meadow, and this meadow was, on this evening, no longer white. One may, if one wishes, see in it a sign that the season was shifting. One may also simply say: The grass was green.
Hans Castorp did not come because he had a passion for lectures. He came because, since Dr. Porsche had called his diastole “normally high” and the ring on his finger presented this “stress” to him daily like a polite judgment, he had developed a particular receptiveness to everything that sounded like a solution. And because he – this is important – was a person who, when he becomes at a loss, does not rebel, but turns to an authority. The lecture was an authority that one could visit without shame: One simply sat there and pretended it was about general matters, while in truth one hoped for something very private.
He did not sit at the front, but at the edge. He sat as he always sat: so that he could take part without being completely visible. Visibility was for him, since the war, an ambivalent category; in bourgeois life it meant recognition, in military life detection – and in the modern world, which is both at once, something third that one cannot yet quite name, but that manifests itself in cameras, rings, data and QR codes.
The ring sat on his finger like a seal. It measured – and that was the uncanny thing – not only what he did, but also what he was: heart rate, temperature, movement, sleep. It measured the time of the body, which in earlier times one only felt. And Hans Castorp, who had learned on the Magic Mountain that one cannot narrate time without thereby negotiating it, now began to suspect that one can also no longer live time without measuring it.
When the guests had taken their seats, and when the murmuring – that light, bourgeois sound that arises when people, in shared expectation, briefly assert their individuality once more – subsided, Prof. Frank Zieser stepped onto the stage.
They called him professor, and nobody asked of what. In such houses the title is less an academic fact than a tone. Zieser also did not look like a professor in the classical sense; he did not have that slightly stretched-out scholarly shape that comes from sitting and thinking, but a shape that comes from standing and repeating. Slim, sinewy, with a posture that was not military and yet betrayed discipline; a face that seemed shaped in the sun and in the mirror, not by vanity alone, but by a will to line. He did not wear training clothes, but something that, in such houses, is called “smart casual”: as if to say that even simplicity has a dress code.
