Ema’s Reviews > The Magic Mountain > Status Update

I am actually enjoying this novel when Naphta is not making an appearance... I don't hate him, but I am not the right kind of audience for his verbal duels with Settembrini, either.

What is time? A mystery, a figment —and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married to and mingled with the existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there were no motion? No motion if no time? We fondly ask. Is time a function of space? Or space of time? Or are they identical? Echo answers.

[...] The patients of many months’ or years’ standing had long learned to kill time without mental effort or means of distraction, by dint of a certain inner virtuosity they came to possess. They even considered it beginners’ awkwardness to glue yourself to a book. It was enough to have one lying in your lap or on your little table, in case of need.

I can't stop reading, I like it much more than the Buddenbrooks! I'm bracing myself, though, for the confusion that lies ahead, hoping to make it through in one piece!