Hans learns to fold his blankets. It is not as easy as it looks. He is also thinking about time.
1. Time
Dissertation on the nature of boredom: Do things new and interesting shorten or lengthen the experience of time ?
MM 4 : He tries out his conversational French
Hans has not yet settled in yet. It is only the fourth day. He starts to look at and understand details, minor things.
1. Bildung
Behrens tries to keep Hans at the sanatorium by describing Ladies – la crème de la crème – beautiful as birds of paradise who visit Davos in Winter. And amorous wohoooooo…
2. Death
Hans sees his first dying man, a man called Reuter. – waxen profile – large rolling eyes
“What dignity in the way the man lay his head…” Hans obviously hasn’t listened to one word of Settembrini.
Hans is imitating the big eyes of the dying man when he bumps into Clawdia Chauchat. He must have looked stupid to her – simply hilarious
Meeting with Tous-les-deux, Hans reacts perfectly “ Je le sais Madame…et le regrette beaucoup”. Well done Hans !, except that he is more concerned with how he handles this moment, than really empathize with the misery of that sad « Mater Dolorosa »
Hans finds that he gets along better with sad people
“ I feel in my element…”
Then he sounds like a genuine Ishmael, loving coffins and funerals
3. Notes
The potbellied containers he noticed already his first evening are canisters containing pure oxygen. They are used to rouse dying people – the moribundi – a last time. Behind the doors where those canisters are found, someone is dying
They meet sister Berta, caretaker of the moribundi in their last act.
