CAN one tell—that is to say, narrate—time, time itself, as such, for its own sake?
That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: “Time passed, it ran on, the time flowed onward” and so forth—no one in his senses could consider that a narrative. It would be as though one held a single note or chord for a whole hour, and called it music. For narration resembles music in this, that it fills up the time. It “fills it in” and “breaks it up,” so that “there’s something to it,” “something going on”—to quote, with due and mournful piety, those casual phrases of our departed Joachim, all echo of which so long ago died away. So long ago, indeed, that we wonder if the reader is clear how long ago it was. For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are inextricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration—like music—even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.
So much is clear. But it is just as clear that we have also a difference to deal with. For the time element in music is single. Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly enhancing and ennobling what it fills. But a narrative must have two kinds of time: first, its own, like music, actual time, conditioning its presentation and course; and second, the time of its content, which is relative, so extremely relative that the imaginary time of the narrative can either coincide nearly or completely with the actual, or musical, time, or can be a world away. A piece of music called a “Five-minute Waltz” lasts five minutes, and this is its sole relation to the time element. But a narrative which concerned itself with the events of five minutes, might, by extraordinary conscientiousness in the telling, take up a thousand times five minutes, and even then seem very short, though long in relation to its imaginary time. On the other hand, the contentual time of a story can shrink its actual time out of all measure. We put it in this way on purpose, in order to suggest another element, an illusory, even, to speak plainly, a morbid element, which is quite definitely a factor in the situation. I am speaking of cases where the story practises a hermetical magic, a temporal distortion of perspective reminding one of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life. We have records of opium dreams in which the dreamer, during a brief narcotic sleep, had experiences stretching over a period of ten, thirty, sixty years, or even passing the extreme limit of man’s temporal capacity for experience: dreams whose contentual time was enormously greater than their actual or musical time, and in which there obtained an incredible foreshortening of events; the images pressing one upon another with such rapidity that it was as though “something had been taken away, like the spring from a broken watch “from the brain of the sleeper. Such is the description of a hashish eater. Thus, or in some such way as in these sinister dreams, can the narrative go to work with time; in some such way can time be dealt with in a tale. And if this be so, then it is clear that time, while the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. Therefore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea as it just now seemed. We freely admit that, in bringing up the question as to whether the time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view in the present work. And if we touched upon the further question, whether our readers were clear how much time had passed since the upright Joachim, deceased in the interval, had introduced into the conversation the above-quoted phrases about music and time—remarks indicating a certain alchemistical heightening of his nature, which, in its goodness and simplicity, was, of its own unaided power, incapable of any such ideas—we should not have been dismayed to hear that they were not clear. We might even have been gratified, on the plain ground that a thorough-going sympathy with the experiences of our hero is precisely what we wish to arouse, and he, Hans Castorp, was himself not clear upon the point in question, no, nor had been for a very long time—a fact that has conditioned his romantic adventures up here, to an extent which has made of them, in more than one sense, a “time-romance.”
How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long—dismissing Joachim from our calculations—Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans
Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking himself. If they had been put him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known—a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Settembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age. All which may sound preposterous; yet there are conditions under which nothing could keep us from losing account of the passage of time, losing account even of our own age; lacking, as we do, any trace of an inner time-organ, and being absolutely incapable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by ourselves, without any outward fixed points as guides. There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering between hope and fear, to be some three days. It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made the time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would appear, then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under-rather than over-estimate time.
No doubt Hans Castorp, were he wishful to do so, could without any great trouble have reckoned himself into certainty; just as the reader can, in case all this vagueness and involvedness are repugnant to his healthy sense. Perhaps our hero himself was not quite comfortable either; though he refused to give himself any trouble to wrestle clear of vagueness and involution and arrive at certainty of how much time had gone over his head since he came up here. His scruple was of the conscience—yet surely it is a want of conscientiousness most flagrant of all not to pay heed to the time!
We do not know whether we may count it in his favour that circumstances advantaged his lack of inclination, or perhaps we ought to say his disinclination. When Frau Chauchat came back—under circumstances very different from those
Hans Castorp had imagined, but of that in its place—when she came back, it was the Advent season again, and the shortest day of the year; the beginning of winter, astronomically speaking, was at hand. Apart from arbitrary time-divisions, and with reference to the quantity of snow and cold, it had been winter for God knows how long, interrupted, as always all too briefly, by burning hot summer days, with a sky of an exaggerated depth of blueness, well-nigh shading into black; real summer days, such as one often had even in the winter, aside from the snow—and the snow one might also have in the summer! This confusion in the seasons, how often had Hans Castorp discussed it with the departed Joachim! It robbed the year of its articulation, made it tediously brief, or briefly tedious, as one chose to put it; and confirmed another of Joachim’s disgusted utterances, to the effect that there was no time up here to speak of, either long or short. The great confusion played havoc, moreover, with emotional conceptions, or states of consciousness like “still” and “again”; and this was one of the very most gruesome, bewildering, uncanny features of the case. Hans Castorp, on his first day up here, had discovered in himself a hankering to dabble in that uncanny, during the five mighty meals in the gaily stenciled dining-room; when a first faint giddiness, as yet quite blameless, had made itself felt.
Since then, however, the deception upon his senses and his mind had assumed much larger proportions. Time, however weakened the subjective perception of it has become, has objective reality in that it brings things to pass. It is a question for professional thinkers—Hans Castorp, in his youthful arrogance, had one time been led to consider it—whether the hermetically sealed conserve upon its shelf is outside of time. We know that time does its work, even upon Seven-Sleepers. A physician cites a case of a twelve-year-old-girl, who fell asleep and slept thirteen years; assuredly she did not remain thereby a twelve-year-old girl, but bloomed into ripe womanhood while she slept. How could it be otherwise? The dead man—is dead; he has closed his eyes on time. He has plenty of time, or personally speaking, he is timeless. Which does not prevent his hair and nails from growing, or, all in all—but no, we shall not repeat those free-and-easy expressions used once by Joachim, to which Hans Castorp, newly arrived from the flat-land, had taken exception. Hans Castorp’s hair and nails grew too, grew rather fast. He sat very often in the barber’s chair in the main street of the Dorf, wrapped in a white sheet, and the barber, chatting obsequiously the while, deftly performed upon the fringes of his hair, growing too long behind his ears. First time, then the barber, performed their office upon our hero. When he sat there, or when he stood at the door of his loggia and pared his nails and groomed them, with the accessories from his dainty velvet case, he would suddenly be overpowered by a mixture of terror and eager joy that made him fairly giddy. And this giddiness was in both senses of the word: rendering our hero not only dazed and dizzy, but flighty and light-headed, incapable of distinguishing between “now” and “then,” and prone to mingle these together in a timeless eternity.
As we have repeatedly said, we wish to make him out neither better nor worse than he was; accordingly we must report that he often tried to atone for his reprehensible indulgence in attacks of mysticism, by virtuously and painstakingly striving to counteract them. He would sit with his watch open in his hand, his thin gold watch with the engraved monogram on the lid, looking at the porcelain face with the double row of black and red Arabic figures running round it, the two fine and delicately curved gold hands moving in and out over it, and the little second-hand taking its busy ticking course round its own small circle. Hans Castorp, watching the second-hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, unheeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came on to again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should it not pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the tiny intervening unmarked strokes showed that all the figures and divisions on its path were simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on.—
Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashütte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.
How make plain to the sober intelligence of the flat-land the changes that took place in the inner economy of our young adventurer? The dizzying problem of identities grew grander in its scale. If to-day’s now—even with decent goodwill—was not easy to distinguish from yesterday’s, the day before’s or the day before that’s, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused with the now which had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be mingled and rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with it into the always? However one might still differentiate between the ordinary states of consciousness which we attached to the words “still,” “again,” “next,” there was always the temptation to extend the significance of such descriptive words as “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” by which “to-day” holds at bay “the past” and “the future.” It would not be hard to imagine the existence of creatures, perhaps upon smaller planets than ours, practising a miniature time-economy, in whose brief span the brisk tripping gait of our second-hand would possess the tenacious spatial economy of our hand that marks the hours. And, contrariwise, one can conceive of a world so spacious that its time system too has a majestic stride, and the distinctions between “still,” “in a little while,” “yesterday,” “to-morrow,” are, in its economy, possessed of hugely extended significance. That, we say, would be not only conceivable, but, viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativity, and in the light of an already-quoted proverb, might be considered legitimate, sound, even estimable. Yet what shall one say of a son of earth, and of our time to boot, for whom a day, a week, a month, a semester, ought to play such an important rôle, and bring so many changes, so much progress in its train, who one day falls into the vicious habit—or perhaps we should say, yields sometimes to the desire—to say “yesterday” when he means a year ago, and “next year” when he means to-morrow? Certainly we must deem him lost and undone, and the object of our just concern.
There is a state, in our human life, there are certain scenic surroundings—if one may use that adjective to describe the surroundings we have in mind—within which such a confusion and obliteration of distances in time and space is in a measure justified, and temporary submersion in them, say for the term of a holiday, not reprehensible. Hans Castorp, for his part, could never without the greatest longing think of a stroll along the ocean’s edge. We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader’s recollections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk—never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished. O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale; we turn toward thee our thoughts, our love, loud and expressly we call on thee, that thou mayst be present in the tale we spin, as in secret thou ever wast and shalt be!—A singing solitude, spanned by a sky of palest grey; full of stinging damp that leaves a salty tang upon the lips.—We walk along the springy floor, strewn with seaweed and tiny mussel-shells. Our ears are wrapped about by the great mild, ample wind, that comes sweeping untrammelled blandly through space, and gently blunts our senses. We wander—
wander—watching the tongues of foam lick upward toward our feet and sink back again. The surf is seething; wave after wave, with high, hollow sound, rears up, rebounds, and runs with a silken rustle out over the flat strand: here one, there one, and more beyond, out on the bar. The dull, pervasive, sonorous roar closes our ears against all the sounds of the world. O deep content, O wilful bliss of sheer forgetfulness! Let us shut our eyes, safe in eternity! No—for there in the foaming grey-green waste that stretches with uncanny foreshortening to lose itself in the horizon, look, there is a sail. There? Where is there? How far, how near? You cannot tell. Dizzyingly it escapes your measurement. In order to know how far that ship is from the shore, you would need to know how much room it occupies, as a body in space. Is it large and far off, or is it small and near? Your eye grows dim with uncertainty, for in yourself you have no sense-organ to help you judge of time or space.—We walk, walk. How long, how far? Who knows? Nothing is changed by our pacing, there is the same as here, once on a time the same as now, or then; time is drowning in the measureless monotony of space, motion from point to point is no motion more, where uniformity rules; and where motion is no more motion, time is no longer time.
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages would have it that time is an illusion; that its flow in sequence and causality is only the result of a sensory device, and the real existence of things in an abiding present. Was he walking by the sea, the philosopher to whom this thought first came, walking by the sea, with the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We must repeat that, as for us, we have been speaking only of the lawful licence of a holiday, of fantasies born of leisure, of which the wellconducted mind wearies as quickly as a vigorous man does of lying in the warm sand. To call into question our human means and powers of perception, to question their validity, would be absurd, dishonourable, arbitrary, if it were done in any other spirit than to set bounds to reason, which she may not overstep without incurring the reproach of neglecting her own task. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settembrini, who with pedagogic dogmatism characterized metaphysics as the “evil principle,” to the young man in whose fate we are interested, and whom he had once subtly called “life’s delicate child.” We shall best honour the memory of one departed, who was dear to us, if we say plainly that the meaning, the end and aim of the critical principle can and may be but one thing: the thought of duty, the law of life. Yes, lawgiving wisdom, in marking off the limits of reason, planted precisely at those limits the banner of life, and proclaimed it man’s soldierly duty to serve under that banner. May we set it down on the credit side of Hans Castorp’s account, that he had been strengthened in his vicious time-economy, his baleful traffic with eternity, by seeing that all his cousin’s zeal, called doggedness by a certain melancholy blusterer, had but the more surely brought him to a fatal end?