“Being ill and dying aren’t serious at all just a sort of loafing about and wasting time; life is only serious down below . ”
Here the man shows his personal attitude to life and death, but meanwhile he shows the attitude of all inhabitants to this issue. In the sanatorium people don’t appreciate life. They actually don’t feel it: they think that they just waste the time of healthy people, who take care of them, waste food and money, for such the not serious “things” as they are.
“Thus what we call tedium is rather an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony. Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.”
Here Hans shows his attitude to time: it just flies in front of him when he does nothing: each moment of this life isn’t filled with something, so it is empty, and the emptier is something, the faster it passes.
“Love is the most unstable, the most unreliable of man’s instincts, the most prone of its very essence to error and fatal perversion . ”
Right after these words Hans fells in love with Frau Chauchat. And this phrase embodies in this love: Hans’ love isn’t “stable”, it isn’t common. Hans doesn’t even talk with Frau, but his love to her dements him. Neither the fact that they are not acquainted, nor the fact that she has another man, stops him from being deeply in love with the woman.
