On the “magic mountain,” what once seemed serious to you will become trivial. Death, for example: Joachim thinks that illness and death might “just be a sort of loafing about” and nothing really to worry about. We’re born, we live our lives, and then we get eternity to just lie around. And what’s eternity, here on the magic mountain? If “time” doesn’t mean anything here then neither does “eternity.”

Hans Castorp says: first you are interested in something, and then comes understanding of it. The people here on the mountain become uninterested in time and death; it’s engineered that way, since when a person dies at the clinic it’s all kept very quiet so as not to shock anyone. Losing interest in these big themes, understanding of them dies off too; the anxieties of life “down there” become incomprehensible to those of us up here on the mountain. But a lack of interest in one thing means that attention is focused on something else. As interest is drawn away from the bigger things, it becomes directed towards the trivial. Hans is thinking about his cigars and the meal he just ate and perhaps soon he’ll come to some interesting conclusions.

Cigars don’t taste good up here, says Hans. That bothers him. A trivial concern but we get the sensation that it points to something bigger, and we’ve got another 600 pages to learn what it is. Hans will surely soon learn to live without his cigars; just one of the many changes that can occur up here. A trivial change, but important and serious enough to Hans. Though his focus is on a plain old cigar, he’s pondering the meaning of it, of this change in his appetite. He is still clinging on to the notion that something big and essential lies behind mere appearances.

Isn’t this a lot like how it feels to be a writer? The big themes are pushed aside once you get to the business of actually trying to tell a story. The writer tends to focus on the everyday and the ordinary. If it’s not ordinary then who will relate to it? The trick of good writing seems to be to make the big themes shine through the little things.

Joachim says: “lately” to refer to a thing that happened eight weeks ago. He mocks Hans for his fussy precision when it comes to talking about time. It seems to me that Joachim is far from where an artist would want to be: he is wholly focused on the ordinary and immediate, and the big themes are lost to him. It is Hans who is more the artist at this point, though by profession he is an engineer; it’s through his artist’s eye that we see the events of the story; as a new guest at the mountain, as an outsider, he still stands between the serious and the trivial, seeming almost to find the secret of time, transformation, and death – all in the strange taste of a once familiar cigar.

(I’ve been reading H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)