There are, esteemed female reader, esteemed male reader, on old maps places that are not white because there is snow there, but because no one has been there \u2013 or no one who would have reported. The white is then not nature, but renunciation of knowledge; it is not cold, but not-knowing. These places were called, with a mixture of pride and shame, terra incognita; and small signs were placed in them \u2013 sea monsters, dragons, baroque warnings \u2013 in order to give the empty paper at least the gesture of the known.<\/p>\n
Our time, which no longer paints dragons, has another reflex: it cannot bear the white. It fills it, if not with experience, then at least with data. Where previously the unknown stood, today there is a bar \u201c0 %\u201d; where previously the legend was missing, today it says \u201cNo connection\u201d; and where previously a traveler could only say: I do not know, today a device says: No data. That is, strictly speaking, the same confession \u2013 only with less dignity.<\/p>\n
For the confession of not-knowing, of the unrecorded, of the unsaid was, as long as it was still considered a human limit, something that one \u2013 like a gap in the teeth \u2013 did not like to show, but at least accepted as a fact. Now, however, since life is laid out in rings, curves, scores and nicely rounded digits like a menu, the gap also becomes moral. A white spot is considered an omission. And an omission is, in a world of programs, already a kind of sin.<\/p>\n
Thus it was no coincidence that Hans Castorp, the man of the in-between spaces, the deserter, who had removed himself from the register, at some point could no longer shake off the question of whether his new form of life \u2013 this bestforming, this liturgy of powder, protocol and duty \u2013 was not precisely the opposite of what had once saved him: namely invisibility.<\/p>\n