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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Hans Castorp had, since the visit to Dr. Wendelin Porsche, this warm\u2011fatherly 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 \u201cnormally high\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cNormally high\u201d \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n