An Iconography of Gravity

An audit of the Berghof is undertaken by Hans and Joachim after a gauntlet of nightmares; the waking reality doesn't appear to be an improvement to Herr Castorp. The insular rituals of the patients strike him as either bizarre or moribund. Meeting the chief physicians does little to mitigate these concerns, nor their analytical assertion that sometimes people become troublesome in their reluctance to die. An erotic twist to this palace of Reasoned Death is when a woman flirts with Hans through a clever use of her sealed lung (to allow it respite so that it might heal).

Thoroughly bewildered and unable to even enjoy a pleasures of a cigar (which I am afforded BTW at this very moment) Hans and his cousin encounter Settembrini, an Italian man of letters who is able and willing to lyricise the sanitorium in a most sardonic manner. Hans is quickly destablized by this slashing wit and takes offense.

"somebody must have some esprit,"
is Settembrini's retort with an exaggerated bow and then provides the flesh of his homespun ontology.

"Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment."

Though it is early in the tome, barely a tenth of its 700 page girth. What is being outlined is a struggle, one which will be echoed in such disparate sources as Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards: the perplexity of how reason, codified agency can provide Civillization but it also threatens our organic sense, our elan vital.