The Magic Mountain

Leaving on the day of Lent, Clavdia gives Hans the only token worthy of his ham-fisted declaration of love; a pocket-sized x-ray reproduction of her chest cavity. Ignoring her apparent indifference, he worries about when she’ll be back.

After a cool period, Hans begins to speak to Settembrini again. The older man announces his plans to leave the sanatorium and take a small apartment rented by the tailor Lukaček, in the nearby village of Dorf. Settembrini declares his intention to finish his part of the encyclopedia there.

People come and go from the sanatorium as the spring season arrives. Snowdrops blossom and are mistaken for snow. Through Settembrini, Hans and Joachim meet Leo Naphtha, who rents a large and richly appointed apartment in the tailor’s building. A scholar, Jesuit, and revolutionary, Naphta is Settembrini’s intellectual opposite. The two begin the first of many intellectual skirmishes in which they talk about Aristotle and the absolute (a concept which Naphta finds too bourgeois) and about workers and rebellion (which Settembrini finds anarchistic). “Antithesis, dualism—that is the motivating, passionate, dialectical, spiritual principle,” says Naphta (368). As this engagement with ideas progresses, Joachim becomes more removed and declares his impatience with Hans’s tendency towards grand ideas.