Silence - We are living.

"A silent sister... it's a thermometer without any markings, and the doctor checks it by laying a scale up against it and draws the chart himself "
"...and he had a brilliant insight about what time actually is - nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale"
These are the thoughts of Hans Castorp, the main character in Thomas Mann's masterpiece The Magic Mountain (which I'm reading these days with great pleasure). One of the possible interpretations of this quote is that time is a subjective matter and all our attempts to quantify it in objective units of measurement are in fact irrelevant to the genuine human experience of it.
And oh, how relevant this philosophizing is to my current life. On the farms, one day often feels like a month in my "previous life", which at times consisted of "work > eat > sleep > repeat". I sometimes can't believe that something which had happened three hours ago did not in fact happen three days ago. I almost feel like farmers here have longer lives because of that - like their eighty-something years of life are fuller, in a way, than "normal" peoples'.

6:30 - I wake up, totally naturally, when the first rays of sun come through my window. No rooster in this farm, Grazie a Dio. I get ready for the day (3 minutes of taking off my pajamas, wearing the same work clothes as the day before and brushing my teeth) and go downstairs. I set the table for breakfast and then have a few cherished Internet moments for myself.

7:30 - everyone comes downstairs for breakfast. It's supposed to start at 7:30 but almost always somebody's late and I want to kill them. They say their prayers to thank God for the food on our plates, wishing that it will strengthen our bodies and souls, etc. It's quite a nice prayer, actually, but I can't hide my glee when they finally say "in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit... buon appetito!". We eat.

The communal dining hall

8:30 - we start working, each in his or her field (see what I did there?). The work varies: with the animals, in one of the many gardens, in the flower nursery... today one of the girls explained to me that she was late for helping me cut the grass because she had to clean (?, It was all in Italian) the pony's genitals. She proceeded to explain something about when a male animal is alone with no females.. and that she did something with olive oil.. at which point I made it seem as if I understood absolutely nothing in order to avoid further details.

12:30 - the bell rings, we stop working and go eat lunch, at which point I'm usually famished. Italians don't snack between meals, even when spading the earth for four whole hours between breakfast and lunch. Somebody's always late and I want to kill them in even more ruthless ways than in breakfast. They pray. We eat.

14:30 - we resume work, usually finishing what we'd started in the morning. If it rains, I cut strawberries or peel nuts indoors. It usually doesn't rain, though, until the very moment I've finished working outside, or the moment my afternoon/day off begins.

17:00 - I stop working while everybody else continues. Haha (said in a Nelson-from-The-Simpson's manner of speech, while pointing at the others). I take a shower and read my book. If I have a few drops of energy left in my body and it isn't raining, a take a stroll outside.

19:30 - we eat. Somebody's always late and depending on my level of hunger, I want or don't necessarily want to kill them (lunch is quite a big meal). They pray, we eat. Three courses at least, if not four, are always served, one after the other. I usually can't handle more than two, in response to which they either mock my inferior eating abilities or feel sorry for me. "Look at the girl, she's not eating anything!", after I've had salad and a huge bowl of pasta with sauce and cheese. "She seems so pale!", when I'm visibly more brown than most of the big-eaters combined. I appreciate their concern but learned the hard way how to say "no, thank you" to an Italian cook. There's no reasonable reason to eat this much, I personally feel, and since not finishing off your plate is NOT an option here, I simply have to refuse. The mystery as to how Italians remain quite fit while eating so much (and no, they don't just "eat all the good stuff but in small quantities", but I suspect it could have something to do with their rather small breakfasts) remains unresolved to me for the moment and all I can do is envy that magical metabolism system of theirs.

20:30 - sometimes we play cards, sometimes we watch a movie. I read, write, surf the net for a short while when conditions allow it (there's only wifi on two square meters in the farmhouse, inside the communal kitchen).

22:00 - I try not to go to sleep before this hour, or else I simply sleep too much. Good night, sweet, weird, dreams, in "the pink room" with pink everything where the rocking chair seems to move on its own accord. Just sayin'.

One angle of The Pink Room

Then it struck me: I'm living in the Magic Mountain. Except for a few minor differences, like "work cure" instead of "rest cure" and no second breakfast (Germans and their breakfasts), it's exactly that. I even physically am on a (small) mountain (Ok, maybe it's more like a hill) and am constantly surrounded by clouds.

In between writing the draft for this post and publishing it, as I continued reading and without me even asking, Hans Castorp has once again answered my question:
"I've always found it odd, still do, how time seems to go slowly in a strange place at first. What I mean is, of course there's no question of me being bored here, quite the contrary... but when I look back... it seems as if I've been up here for who knows how long already, and that it's been an eternity since I first arrived... it has absolutely nothing to do with reason or with measurements of time - it's purely a matter of feeling".

I wish everybody a long life, or at least as long as they want it to feel at the very moment.