A paradox: standing around waiting is a kind of rushing ahead. Though the queue barely crawls forward, your mind is rushing ahead to the future, consuming every present moment greedily as if to move more quickly towards the anticipated event. The queue is of no interest to you; you just want to go in and enjoy the concert. And of course the future event, when it arrives, will become just another present moment, to be greedily consumed as fast as all the previous ones were. The concert turned out to be just a pleasant blur of sights and sounds, becoming one long moment to be consumed in one bite.

Hans Castorp is in love, and so of course he is happy to consume every present moment that isn’t spent with her, in his hurry to see her again. And then their meeting is over in a flash. It’s a foolish way to live, because all anyone has is the present moment. It’s foolish to squander everyting you have. But love makes a person foolish.

The narrator of The Magic Mountain tells us that a person who is awake is more moral than one who dreams. Thomas Mann means this literally; we do wild things in our dreams that we would never contemplate in real life. But it also reflects the “reality” of the magic mountain itself, a dreamlike reality where ordinary morals seem suspended, as people carry on their affairs and become indifferent to the deaths of other patients. Hans Castorp takes advantage of this dreamlike looseness of the mountain as he pursues his affair; the only person who can break the spell is the rationalist Settembrini, who questions Hans’s ideas. Hans is beginning to find Settembrini’s clarity of thought to be a real source of discomfort.

Hans talks to Settembrini about getting “used in time to not getting used,” which means getting used to the fact that a situation is intolerable. A paradoxical way to describe a sensible idea: if you can’t change something you feel is intolerable, what are you going to do but eventually accept it? Perhaps Hans is talking about his own affair when he says this; if every present moment is intolerable, perhaps it makes some kind of sense to gobble them all up quickly to arrive at the one moment of peace every week that love brings. Hans has found a solution to the problem of the intolerability of the moment. Settembrini shakes his head at Hans’s carelessness of time, but Mann makes sure that his readers can see the logic of it.

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