Read Online The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Thomas Mann
Tags: Literary Fiction
Ads: Link
as if he could sense the gentle draft of places where as you walked, hat in hand, you fell into a certain reverential, forward rocking motion, your heels never touching the ground; and he also thought he could hear the remote, cloistered silence of those reverberating spaces. At the sound of those somber syllables, religious feelings got mixed up with a sense of death and history, and all of it together somehow left the boy with a pleasant sensation—indeed, it may well have been that it was solely for the sake of that sound, just to hear it and join in reciting it, that he had once again asked to be allowed to see the baptismal bowl.
Then his grandfather would put the basin back on its tray and let the boy look into its smooth, soft golden hollow, which began to shimmer as it caught the light falling from above.
“And it will soon be eight years now,” he said, “since we held you over it and the water with which you were baptized trickled down into it. Lassen, the sexton from Saint Jacob’s, poured it into the cupped hands of our good Pastor Bugenhagen, and then it ran down over your hair and into the bowl here. But we had warmed it first, so that you wouldn’t be frightened and start crying, and you didn’t, either, quite the contrary, you had been bawling beforehand, making it difficult for Bugenhagen to give his homily, but then came the water, and you fell silent, and that was out of respect for the holy sacrament, let us hope. And in a very few days now, it will be forty-four years since your dear departed father was the baby being baptized, and water ran down from his head into this same bowl. That happened here, in his parents’ home, across the way in the drawing room, in front of the middle window, and it was old Pastor Hesekiel who baptized him, the same one who almost got himself shot by the French when he was a young man, for preaching against their looting and burning—he’s been resting in the Lord for a long, long time now. But seventy-five years ago, it was me they baptized, that was in the drawing room, too, and they held my head over this same bowl sitting on its tray here, and the pastor spoke the same words that were spoken over you and your father, and warm, clear water ran down over my hair, too—there wasn’t much more of it in those days than I have on my head now—and flowed into this golden basin.”
The boy looked up at his grandfather’s narrow gray head which was bent over the bowl again, just as it had been in that long-vanished hour he was talking about, and a familiar feeling stole over him—a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something and a dizzying, everlasting sameness, a feeling that he knew well from previous occasions and that he had been waiting for, hoping it would touch him again. It was partly for the sake of that feeling that he had contrived to have this abiding, mutable heirloom shown to him.
When considering it later, as a young man, he realized that the image of his grandfather was imprinted much more deeply, clearly, and significantly in his memory than that of his parents—and this may possibly have had its basis both in mutual sympathy and a special physical affinity, because the grandson did look like his grandfather, to the extent that a lad with down on his rosy cheeks can resemble a sallow and stiff septuagenarian. Probably the most significant factor, however, was that without question the old man had been the central figure in the family, its picturesque personality.
From the viewpoint of the outside world, time had made Hans Lorenz Castorp’s character and convictions obsolete long before his passing. He was a most Christian gentleman, a member of a Reformed parish, with strict traditional opinions, so stubborn an advocate of restricting qualifications for those who govern to the aristocracy that it was as if he were
Then his grandfather would put the basin back on its tray and let the boy look into its smooth, soft golden hollow, which began to shimmer as it caught the light falling from above.
“And it will soon be eight years now,” he said, “since we held you over it and the water with which you were baptized trickled down into it. Lassen, the sexton from Saint Jacob’s, poured it into the cupped hands of our good Pastor Bugenhagen, and then it ran down over your hair and into the bowl here. But we had warmed it first, so that you wouldn’t be frightened and start crying, and you didn’t, either, quite the contrary, you had been bawling beforehand, making it difficult for Bugenhagen to give his homily, but then came the water, and you fell silent, and that was out of respect for the holy sacrament, let us hope. And in a very few days now, it will be forty-four years since your dear departed father was the baby being baptized, and water ran down from his head into this same bowl. That happened here, in his parents’ home, across the way in the drawing room, in front of the middle window, and it was old Pastor Hesekiel who baptized him, the same one who almost got himself shot by the French when he was a young man, for preaching against their looting and burning—he’s been resting in the Lord for a long, long time now. But seventy-five years ago, it was me they baptized, that was in the drawing room, too, and they held my head over this same bowl sitting on its tray here, and the pastor spoke the same words that were spoken over you and your father, and warm, clear water ran down over my hair, too—there wasn’t much more of it in those days than I have on my head now—and flowed into this golden basin.”
The boy looked up at his grandfather’s narrow gray head which was bent over the bowl again, just as it had been in that long-vanished hour he was talking about, and a familiar feeling stole over him—a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something and a dizzying, everlasting sameness, a feeling that he knew well from previous occasions and that he had been waiting for, hoping it would touch him again. It was partly for the sake of that feeling that he had contrived to have this abiding, mutable heirloom shown to him.
When considering it later, as a young man, he realized that the image of his grandfather was imprinted much more deeply, clearly, and significantly in his memory than that of his parents—and this may possibly have had its basis both in mutual sympathy and a special physical affinity, because the grandson did look like his grandfather, to the extent that a lad with down on his rosy cheeks can resemble a sallow and stiff septuagenarian. Probably the most significant factor, however, was that without question the old man had been the central figure in the family, its picturesque personality.
From the viewpoint of the outside world, time had made Hans Lorenz Castorp’s character and convictions obsolete long before his passing. He was a most Christian gentleman, a member of a Reformed parish, with strict traditional opinions, so stubborn an advocate of restricting qualifications for those who govern to the aristocracy that it was as if he were
Similar Books
