Free The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Page A

the comings and goings of doctors. But from its outcome, which he now found displayed before him in the dining room, he gathered that his grandfather had now received solemn dispensation from his interim stage and had finally returned to the form appropriate to him—an event of which he could only approve, though old Fiete wept and constantly shook his head, even though Hans Castorp himself wept, just as he had wept at the sight of his unexpectedly deceased mother and, a short time later, of his father lying there equally serene and strange.
    For this was now the third time within so few months and at such a young age that little Hans Castorp’s mind and senses had been affected by death—his senses in particular. The sight of it, the impression it left, was no longer new to him, but really quite familiar, and just as on the first two occasions he had behaved responsibly and kept his composure—with no sign of nervous weakness, although much distressed, as is only natural—he did so now as well, but to an even greater degree. Unaware of the practical implications of these events on his life, or perhaps regarding them with childish indifference while trusting that the world would take care of him one way or the other, he betrayed a similarly childish reserve and businesslike attentiveness when viewing coffins, which on this third occasion took on nuances of precociousness, both in his emotional reaction and the look of knowledgeable experience on his face—it being unnecessary likewise to describe his natural reaction of being caught up in the frequent tearful outbursts of others. Within three or four months after his father died, he had forgotten death; now he remembered it, and all the impressions from before reemerged simultaneously—in every precise, piercing, and incomparable detail.
    Analyzed and put into words, his feelings might have been expressed as follows: there was something religious, gripping, and sadly beautiful, which was to say, spiritual about death and at the same time something that was the direct opposite, something very material, physical, which one could not really describe as beautiful, or gripping, or religious, or even as sad. The religious, spiritual side was expressed by the pretentious lying-in-state, by the pomp of flowers and palm fronds—which he knew signified heavenly peace—and also, and more to the point, by the cross between the dead fingers of what had been his grandfather, by the blessings a copy of Thorvaldsen’s Christ extended from the head of the coffin, and by two towering candelabra on either side, which on an occasion like this also took on an ecclesiastical character. The explicit and well-intended purpose of all these arrangements was apparently to show that Grandfather had now passed on forever to his authentic and true form. But they also served another purpose—one that little Hans Castorp likewise noted, if not admitting it to himself in so many words; in particular, the masses of flowers and more especially the very well represented tuberoses were there for a more sobering reason—and that was to gloss over the other side of death, the one that is neither beautiful nor sad, but almost indecent in its base physicality, to make people forget it or at least not be reminded of it.
    It was this aspect of death that made his dead grandfather look so strange, not really like his grandfather at all, but like a life-size wax doll that death had slipped into the coffin in his place and for which this whole solemn show was being put on. The man who lay there, or better, what lay there, was not Grandfather himself, but a shell—which, as Hans Castorp knew, was not made of wax, but of its own material. It was just stuff, and that was what was indecent, and so not really even sad—no sadder than things that have to do with the body, and only with it, are sad. Little Hans Castorp gazed at the stuff out of which this life-size dead figure was made, at this waxy, yellow, smooth