Here on the magic mountain, the seasons get all mixed up. Hans can’t believe that on the third day of his visit, after days of hot sun, suddenly there is cold and snow. Joachim explains to him: yes the seasons work differently here; every month, January to December, has a bit of snow, a bit of summer sunshine. You get all the seasons here, but not in the usual order.

Rather than making things exciting, not knowing what the weather will be like one day to the next in fact creates a kind of monotony; every month, with its identical mixture of summer and winter days, is the same as every other. All this adds to the illusion that time passes strangely up here, or doesn’t pass at all.

Hans is still resisting the pressure to take up the ways of the inmates here. He will get himself some extra blankets to help fend off the cold, but he won’t get one of the “sacks” that everyone else has here. If he buys some blankets he can always take them home with him, but a fur sleeping sack would be a strange thing to have down below, being an item that seems uniquely fit for the purpose of living up here on the mountain.

It’s not just Hans who resists the magic of the mountain. Settembrini, a resident here, is always complaining about the strange rules and practices of this place. He openly defies the doctors here, doing as he pleases in many regards. For example, he skips the doctor’s Sunday lectures; Settembrini doesn’t need instruction from someone like him. While the doctor engages in bizarre, occult theories, Settembrini is a rationalist who believes in science and progress.

But it’s the doctor who thinks himself the practical one and the man of science. His lecture is all about conscious drives and what happens when they are suppressed; it sounds like it is very much informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Of course, a lot of people today are very sceptical about Freud, his ideas being no longer at the cutting edge, and so perhaps Settembrini is ahead of his time.

Another character, a brewer who Settembrini happens to talk to, says literature is just about “beautiful characters.” Settembrini, a man of letters, cannot agree. If literature were just about making pretty stories then a rationalist like Settembrini would have no interest in it. For Settembrini, art is a serious pursuit in direct opposition to the foggy-mindedness encouraged on the magic mountain, as he will explain at length if you’ll let him. After their conversation, Hans is still confused about what Settembrini thinks the point of literature is if not “beautiful characters”; he thinks it must be “beautiful words.” But I think it’s clear to us, as readers, that this can’t be true either; that would still be too shallow a concept of literature. The clue to Settembrini’s actual belief can be found in what Hans says next, when he calls Settembrini a “born objector,” in other words a complainer; the whole point, not just of literature but of a rational existence of any kind, is to question things, to tear holes in reality and make the world new and better by revealing what possibilities lie beyond, through the gaps that we create. Why passively accept things as they are? In an imperfect world, we should be open to new possibilities, and so it’s rational to make the attempt to create new stories for ourselves.

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