Now that Hans himself has fallen ill, time moves differently. Every day is the same and it’s as if a single day has stretched out to become one impossibly long day. There’s not much difference between day and night when you are forced to spend all of your time resting in bed.

He has a lot of time to think. He’s always taken a serious attitude towards life but now he’s rethinking all that. What seemed important “down there” in “the flatland” doesn’t seem so important here. His fellow resident Settembrini still holds on to, and speaks at length about, notions of “progress” and “freedom,” but Hans seems to have been lulled somehow by the magic of the mountain, causing him to question the importance of these things. Settembrini is a windbag who takes himself too seriously.

Joachim points out that they just can’t know when they will be well enough again to return to life below. Hans sees that his cousin means this in a pessimistic sense, but “I don’t know” is really a neutral thing to say; if we really don’t know then it might be sooner than we expect. Hans is beginning to embrace neutrality towards things as everything in life seems to become less and less serious. You might say he’s becoming more cheerful.

It’s not just that he’s neutral in his expectations; he’s neutral towards the outcome too. He’s starting to take a neutral stance towards time itself, so that whether it’s seven weeks, months, or years that he spends up here, it will be all the same.

The magic of the mountain has the same effect on Hans as a disease; the mountain is a place of both magic and disease. Hans has granted himself all the time in the world to think things over, to reassess his life, and if external factors don’t eventually intervene, perhaps he’ll spend the rest of his life just contemplating the various possibilities of the life he might have lived below.

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