Settembrini's Concern for Hans Castorp (MM29) (2024) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann _ The Magic Mountain – Part 29

“Seven and four,” Hans Castorp said. “Eight and three. Jack, queen, king. It's going to work. You bring me luck, Herr Settembrini.” The Italian said nothing. Hans Castorp could feel those black eyes, that gaze of reason and morality, resting in deep mourning upon him, but went right on laying out his cards for a while, before he finally laid his cheek in one hand and stared up with a naughty child's sullen look of false innocence.
“Your eyes,” his mentor said, “try in vain to conceal that you know how things stand with you.”
“Placet experiri,” Hans Castorp had the impudence to reply, and herr Settembrini departed – and then, to be sure, once left to his own devices, the young man did not lay out his cards again, but sat for a long time at the table in his white room, his head propped in his hand, brooding, gripped by the horror of the eerie and skewed state in which he saw the world entrapped, by the fear of the grinning demon and monkey-god in whose crazed and unrestrained power he now found himself – and whose name was “The Great Stupor.”
A fearful, apocalyptic name, very much calculated to instill secret terrors. Hans Castorp sat and rubbed his brow and the area around his heart with the palms of his hands. He was afraid. It was as if “all this” could come to no good end, as if the end was surely a catastrophe, a rebellion of patient nature, a thunderstorm and a great cleansing wind that would break the spell cast over the world, wrench life from its “dead standstill,” and overturn the “doldrums” in a terrible Last Judgment. He longed to flee, as noted – it was just lucky that medical authority had, as mentioned before, kept an “unblinking eye” on him, that it had known how to read the expression on his face and was intent on diverting him with new, fertile hypotheses.

(English translation by John E. Woods)

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Thomas MannThe Magic MountainDer Zauberberg