,” as he styled himself. Hans Castorp thought him well over, with his gift of the gab, his florid harangue on the combination of dullness and disease, and how he, Hans Castorp, had been taken to task for calling it a “dilemma for the human intelligence.” What about him? Would the thought of him be anyway efficacious? Hans Castorp recalled how several times, in the extraordinarily vivid dreams that visited his sleep in this place, he had taken umbrage at the dry and subtle smile curling the Italian’s lip beneath the flowing moustache; how he had railed at him for a hand-organ man, and tried to shove him away because he was a disturbing influence. But that was in his dreams⁠—the waking Hans Castorp was no such matter, but a much less untrammelled person; not disinclined, either, on the whole, to try out the influence upon himself of this novel human type, with its critical animus and acumen, despite the fact that he found the Italian both carping and garrulous. After all, Settembrini had called himself a pedagogue; obviously he was anxious to exercise influence; and Hans Castorp, for his part, fairly yearned to be influenced⁠—though of course, not to an extent which should cause him to pack his trunk and leave before his time, as Settembrini had in all seriousness proposed.