The Hermetic Magic (MM38) (2024) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain – Part 38

In truth, in the recent past of which we speak, there had been a total abrogation of every emotional bond between him and the flatlands. He wrote and received no letters. He no longer ordered his Maria Mancinis from there. He had found another brand up here, one that suited him and to which he was now as faithful as he had once been to his former girlfriend – a brand that would even have helped polar explorers get over their worst hardships in the ice and that when you smoked it made you feel as if you were lying on the beach and would be able to carry on. It had an especially well cured wrapper and was named Oath of Rütli; somewhat stubbier than Maria, mouse gray in color with a bluish band, it was very tractable and mild by nature; it had a snow-white durable ash that still showed the veins of the wrapper. It drew so evenly that it could easily have served as an hourglass for the man enjoying it, and indeed, given Hans Castorp's need, did serve as such, for he no longer carried his pocket watch. It had stopped, having fallen from his nightstand one day, and he had refrained from having it put into measuring rotation again – for the same reasons he had long ago dispensed with calendars, whether the kind you tear off each day or the kind that provide an instructive preview of days and feasts, for reasons of “freedom,” that is. It was his way of honoring the stroll by the shore, the abiding ever-and-always, the hermetic magic, to which, once withdrawn from the world, he had proved so susceptible – the magic that had been his soul's fundamental adventure, in which all the alchemistic adventures of that simple stuff had been played out.

(English translation by John E. Woods)

Related themes

Thomas MannThe Magic MountainDer Zauberberg