Un joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide (MM6) (2023) Peinture par Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain – Part 6

The only thing this prosaic young man had retrieved from his hour of adventure, however, had been the shadowy token of a pledge – the possibility, bordering on a probability, that Frau Chauchat would return here, sooner or later, for a fourth stay, just as the illness, which indeed gave her such freedom, might dispose. But whether sooner or later, Hans Castorp would in any case “be gone long before that,” as she told him again as they parted; and the note of sarcasm in her prophecy would have been even harder to bear had he not understood that some prophecies are made not so that something may come true, but as a kind of spell to prevent it from coming true. By predicting what form the future will take, prophets of this sort mock the future by shaming it into not taking that form. And if in the course of both conversations, recorded and unrecorded, the genius of the place had called him, Hans Castorp, a “joli bourgeois au petit endroit humide” – in its way a translation of Settembrini's phrase “problem child of life” – the question then was: which part of this mixed character would prove the stronger, the bourgeois or the other?

(English translation by John E. Woods)

Thèmes connexes

Thomas MannThe Magic Mountain