The Thunderbolt

Me as Hans Castorp in 1967:
The 'slanting' on the balcony outside Room 34.

The Thunderbolt
"They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being “asked” any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further—"

Like Peeperkorn, he is "settled". With his 'brand' of 'Maria' (or memory of Clavdia, rather than Ellen's 'child'?). But...
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"His watch had fallen from his night-table; it did not go, and he had neglected to have it regulated, perhaps on the same grounds as had made him long since give up using a calendar, whether to keep track of the day, or to look out an approaching feast: the grounds, namely, of his “freedom.” Thus he did honour to his abiding-everlasting, his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become the fundamental adventure of his life, in which all the alchemistical processes of his simple substance had found full play."

The cruise-ship Berghof becomes indeed the Titanic, as flat-land becomes War, and we lose our hero amid its congestivities of human infamy.
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"...their wild, chaotic contents pressed up out of the depths to his very balcony,"

"...laden with death, slopes earthward thirty paces in front of him...[...] Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake,"

And thus my real-time reviewing reaches Hiraeth.

ABOVE IS AN EXCERPT FROM REAL-TIME REVIEW OF 'THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN' BY THOMAS MANN HERE.