NL.06 — The Magic Mountain, part II

You’ll not have forgotten Hans, I trust. Hans Castorp.¹

Whenever he can be pried free of taking the cure on his balcony, and those fevered dreams of Mme Chauchat, he hikes down to the village. Down in the valley below the sanatorium. There is only one path between. Hans and his cousin Joachim invariably meet fellow guests along the way, the characters in life’s play. Gossip fills the air. There are incessant updates on the state of this or that person’s health, on the treatment regime, on thermometers and other measuring devices, on the passage —and, as we explored last time, the very concept— of time. Herr Settembrini lurks around every corner, perched on a bench, waiting to joust with all comers. One is either going down or coming up, leaving or returning. Precisely because it’s not really much of an excursion —it’s not away away— trips to the village matter. They are outings of monumental significance.

For our Hans on his magic mountain, striking out for the village means the opportunity for a cigar. The only thing better than the Kulmbacher beer is one or perhaps two of his cigars. And not just any cigar. It’s the “unclouded enjoyment of his Maria Mancini,” the cigar fabricated in Bremen, specially ordered and shipped in bulk for his singular delight. Hans has “two hundred Maria Mancinis [packed] in his trunk.” The anticipation is part of it, as if before a late-night assignation with a lover. But it’s the cigarly accoutrements, too, and their place in a reverent performance. He relishes “his automobile-leather case, with its silver monogram.” From its perfection Hans draws out a Maria. The most “beautiful specimen” comes from the top layer, “flattened on one side as he particularly liked it.” The tip of the cigar, he cuts off at a slant, using “a sharp little tool he wore on his watch chain,” before “striking a tiny flame with his pocket apparatus,” and puffing away. Finally he’s free from petty distraction, the tug of anxiety, and the wildness of his “mixed up dreams.” He can concentrate at last. “With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe,” Mann’s Hans ruminates, “nothing can touch him.”²

One doesn’t need to seek a village or a smoke to get the point.

When I cannot work any more —when I need to retreat from my retreat— most of my Hans-like excursions find me in one or another favourite haunt. There are “villages” even in Amsterdam. I meet people and I converse, and sometimes I go along with others. But mostly I read and observe, chance a photograph, and I draw and paint.

* photographs, drawings, and watercolours by Kenneth Mills.

Thanks for reading and seeing, for listening in.

1. I rejoin a theme taken up in NL.02 — The Magic Mountain, part I. Hans Castorp is the main character, and perspective taken, in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924, S. Fischer Verlag as Der Zauberberg). I quote from Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter’s translation from the German, first published in 1927 by Alfred Knopf.

2. Mann, The Magic Mountain, 13, 40, 44, 63-64; “mixed-up dreams.”