Occasionally, amid the drudgery of daily life, the rest cures of the early 20th century start to sound pretty nice, give or take an incurable lung disease. A couple weeks or months ‘taking the airs,’ whether on the shore (extreme lowland) or the peak (way up there), reading, relaxing: ah, that’s the life. Maybe the closest I’ve ever come to it was going to the beach during the summer months of 2020, where every other cooped up pandemic apartment dweller was enjoying the sea breezes, appropriately spread apart and extra attentive to their health. None of the the pressure of a vacation – I have to go see and experience things! – and doctor’s orders to be a slug: what could be better for us layabouts? For all except the wealthiest among us, though, whatever brief spell of rest we can get must end, whether after a weekend or a week off, and back to work we go. Unless…?
Unless the lure of the rest cure was so great as to induce a psychosomatic illness and keep you there for as long as you ‘need,’ as happens to young Hans Castorp, the platonic ideal of German young man in need of some bildung at the center of Thomas Mann’s monumental 1922 novel The Magic Mountain. As the narrator describes, Castorp is somewhat inclined to indolence, and a
a regular, healthy lad, a passable tennis-player and oarsman, although on summer evenings, instead of manning an oar, he preferred sitting on the terrace of the Uhlenhorst Boathouse, a refreshing drink in hand … if you just saw him there, so blondly correct, his hair nicely trimmed, his head with the stamp of something classic about it, his hair cool and languid, suggesting an inherited, unconscious arrogance, then you could not doubt that this Hans Castorp was an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it…
And then later, Mann’s narrator – quite charming and old-fashioned, as you can tell from the “blondly correct” and “stamp of something classic” – hones in on Hans’ essential everymanness:
Hans Castorp was neither a genius nor an idiot, and if we refrain from applying the word “mediocre” to him, we do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his intelligence and little or nothing to do with his prosaic personality, but rather out of deference to his fate, to which we are inclined to attribute a more general significance. He was bright enough to meet the demands of a modern secondary school without overtaxing himself; in fact, under no conceivable circumstances would he have been willing to do that, no matter what the goal – not so much out of ear that it might be painful as because he saw absolutely no reason why he should, or to put it better: no unequivocal reason.
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