“You are an author,” Hans Castorp said, “a literary man. It must be easy for you to understand a thing like that; you can feel how under those circumstances a man might not be of tough enough fibre to find that sort of cruelty quite natural, the cruelty of ordinary people, who go about joking and making money and filling their bellies.⁠—I don’t know if I am expressing myself”⁠—

Settembrini bowed. “You mean,” he interrupted, “that the early and repeated contact with death developed in you a tendency which made you sensitive to the harshness and crudity, let us say the cynicism, of our everyday, worldly existence.”

“Precisely!” cried Hans Castorp, in honest enthusiasm. “You have expressed it to a T, Herr Settembrini. Contact with death! I was sure that you, as a literary man⁠—”