La Tonya Jordan’s Reviews > The Magic Mountain > Status Update

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The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality - on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty.

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She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children - as she freely admitted to the cousins - for another man (still had a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover.

Castorp's arrival up here; when you wrote the date, you added another year.

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Hans Castorp disputed this emphatically - his cousin was talking almost like Settembrini, with no respect or reverence for suffering.

Sister Alfreda had already packed her bag and departed from the Berghof, having received an urgent call to report to another moribund patient at a different sanatorium.

"It is written, however: let the dead bury their dead," the Italian said.

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A whole world separated those who belonged to the society of 'people up here' from those warbling, walking-stick-swinging wandered, and he did not want to hear or know anything about them.

Just a little circuit from Monday to Sunday - and then it was Monday again.

They were sitting in clouds, Behrens said - there was no such thing as fog up here.

Some of the dying patients Hans and Joachim have seen: Fritz Rotbein, Leila Gerngross, Frau Zimmermann, Anto Karlovitch Ferge, Frau von Mallinckrodt, and Karen Karstedit, to name a few. Hans Castorp dislikes Fru Stohr's gossip attitude. The dying must be remembered and respected according to Hans Castorp.

Danse Macabre - Hans Castorp has decide he could be of service to the moribund and the very sick. He is sending plants or flowers to them, visiting them in the rooms for chats, and sending a note of "hope you will recover." This is supported by Dr. Behren's. This has uplifted Hans Castorp spirits. He is finding out more about the anatomy. Joachim is assisting him. This is the start of the present day hospice.

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A city, a state, a social community organized around the division of labor was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it.

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As long as one spoke of living entities, and discussion of elemental units was dishonest, because the concept of an entity carried with it, ad infinitum, the concept of the subordinate, organizing unit. There was no such thing as elemental life - that is, something that was both already life and yet elemental.

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He was delighted to see it, for he now realized that his relationship to the femur, and to organic nature in general, was threefold; lyric, medical, and technical.

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He read with burning interest about life and its sacred, yet impure mystery.

The night of its pubic region built a mystic triangle with the steaming pungent darkness of the armpits, just as the red epithelial mouth did with the eyes, or the red buds of the breast with the vertically elongated navel.