“It’s a fact⁠—it is very lively! Why do you object to that?” Hans Castorp asked. “But I only happened to mention it. I only meant to say that it is disturbing and unpleasant to have the body act as though it had no connection with the soul, and put on such airs⁠—by which I mean these senseless palpitations. You keep trying to find an explanation for them, an emotion to account for them, a feeling of joy or pain, which would, so to speak, justify them. At least, it is that way with me⁠—but I can only speak for myself.”

“Yes, yes,” Joachim said, sighing. “It is the same thing, I suppose, as when you have fever⁠—there are pretty lively goings-on in the system then too, to talk the way you do; it may easily be that one involuntarily tries to find an emotion which would explain, or even halfway explain the goings-on. But we are talking such unpleasant stuff,” he said, his voice trembling a little, and he broke off; whereupon Hans Castorp shrugged his shoulders⁠—with the very gesture, indeed, which had, the evening before, displeased him in his cousin.