Archives: Deaths

The Captain, since being deprived by the death of another soldier, a friend of his who was also a captain in the same regiment, of the satisfaction of fighting a duel with him at least once a week, had gone into a melancholy decline which had killed him in a matter of months.

And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?

There were moments when, as you ‘played king’, you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body.

Things were no longer as they had been once, when, after first establishing sudden clarity, Herr Settembrini would sit down at the bedside of a horizontal Hans Castorp and attempt to influence him by correcting his opinions about matters of life and death.

This death, which would never have been of great emotional consequence to Hans Castorp—and indeed after an estrangement of so many adventurous little years, all emotional content had been reduced to almost nothing—seemed to him nevertheless very like the breaking of yet another tie, a last connection, to the world below, bringing to perfection what… Read more »

Those idealistic powers of resistance to illness and death, whose defeat by the overwhelming forces of base nature so pained Herr Settembrini, were absolutely alien to little Naphta; and his method for coping with the deterioration of his body was not sorrow and gloom, but scornful high spirits and an unparalleled aggressiveness, a mania for… Read more »

How cool like death it feels, how soft like silk, like flour.

A vision here, a death there—at least you could see some sort of satisfactory connection.

It was a fruit of life, sired by death and pregnant with death.

But to feel spiritual and intellectual sympathy with it was to feel sympathy with death.