179. While we're taking a break from TMM

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Health regime
Because I’m reading TMM now, the regular taking and recording of one's temperature reminds me of something personal. Last November my doctor thought my blood pressure was too high (high blood pressure: “the silent killer” -- are there any loud diseases?) so I started taking my blood pressure on a regular basis. Now I’m down to taking it every other day, it’s really quite low since I’ve altered my diet, but at first I was taking it multiple times a day -- once you buy the damn machine you may as well get some use out of it. 

It actually took me a couple months to determine the best way and best time to take my pressure. The pages of early results are pretty pointless because I was unaware, at the time, of all the factors that can affect your pressure. As with body temperature, there is a circadian pattern, a high point is in the morning and a low at midday, so now I always take my pressure in the morning. The pressure is also influenced by eating and the state of your bowels, and how long you’ve been upright from bed, and sitting down. Now my readings take all this into account so that we are always comparing apples. 

But what I still don’t know, and I’ve done a fair amount of online research, is if there’s a blood pressure equivalent to a stress EKG. In other words, is there a situation that particularly indicates and reveals a problem? Everything I’ve read has been silent on this subject.


American Health care

(Sung to the tune "American Woman" by The Guess Who)

Everyone knows American Health care is a mess, but I've always thought Kaiser Permanente was different. The concept behind Kaiser makes sense: instead of paying insurance premiums to a company that simply pays (what it thinks is fair) to the health providers you deal with, Kaiser is itself your health care provider, so it has an incentive to keep you health. (There are always standard "copays" but Kaiser is on the hook for the bulk of whatever health related costs you incur.) Kaiser even has its own pharmacies, so they can purchase in volume and get the best prices while eliminating contributing to the profits of third party pharmacies. All this works reasonably well. But the situation is different with the Medicare side of their operation.


I was never able to afford regular Kaiser coverage, but because Medicare requires that I cough up money for what is known as Part A (hospitalization) and Part B (other doctors and labs) and Part D (drugs), I thought it was maybe worthwhile paying a bit more and getting Part C, which is what Kaiser provides. They become my one-stop health shop. 


But Medicare continues to pay a percentage of all costs, so the more office visits and more pharmaceuticals I'm on, the more money Kaiser receives from the government. Everything they do -- or prescribe -- is now a potential source of profit, which isn't the case with a non-Medicare client/patient. And they're not subtle about this. You get a free "Welcome to Medicare" exam when you join and at that exam I asked about two skin issues. My new doctor dragged in their "roving dermatologist" (which is a brilliant idea) who confirmed they just needed to be zapped off with liquid nitrogen. Only neither of them did that. Instead my doctor scheduled another appointment for me. So I had to return, pay a $35 copay on top of the much larger amount Medicare paid, so that my doctor, not the specialist, could zap me. And to add injury to insult, she didn't know what she was doing so the problem wasn't resolved. To be fair, one problem was resolved while the other wasn't.


So now I'm involved in what is basically Medicare fraud on a massive scale. But only for this year. I now plan to find a new doctor and go back to just Parts A, B, and D next year. Assuming President Fredo doesn't screw this up too. 


The reason for this, strange, health issue of Regieren, is that I'm way ahead of schedule on blogging TMM. I really don't want to start reading Chapter 5 until near the end of July. There may be some filler posts, like this, but we won't revisit Hans for almost a month. Just wanted to give you a warning.

Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Encyclopedia

178. TMM - Chapter 4 - Progress and humanism

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
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The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 4 continued

Hippe
And another overture. Another “little phrase” that will be repeated. 

Analysis
Mann is having a lot of fun with Dr Krokowski.  

This is an interesting subject -- love/sex and illness -- when we’ve so recently been talking about the value, intellectual or otherwise, of illness. If one must be ill to be truly intellectual or holy, then apparently one must repress one’s sexuality.There are some jokes at the expense of the Catholic priesthood here that I will let slide.

Also, isn’t it a little odd that “bourgeois forces” are an integral part of this mechanism that leads to holiness and artistic creativity? 


Table Talk
Really wonderful how Mann demonstrates, in Hans, manifestations not unlike what Dr K was just lecturing about. How his interest in Madame Chauchat is revealed in his tremor. 


Growing Anxiety
P170 - Hans’s crush here is so much like a school crush. School could almost have been designed with romance in mind. College and high school are bad enough, but grade school, where you spend the entire day with the same small group of students is in some ways the worst.

P183 - 1830 in Paris, July Revolution again. I forget what an effect it had. On Goethe as he was ending Faust; for Dostoevsky at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov; and now here for Mann. 

P185 - [Settembrini] ...There was no doubt which of these two forces [Asiatic (tyranny, superstition, the law of obduracy) and European (freedom, knowledge, the law of ferment, change and progress)] would gain the victory -- that of enlightenment, or reasoned advancement toward perfection. Because human progress was always gathering up new nations in the course of its brilliant advance, conquering new continents -- indeed all of Europe itself -- and had even started to press on into Asia. Yet there was much to be done before total victory... But that day would come, [when monarchies and religions would at last collapse in the more backward European nations] Settembrini said, smiling delicately beneath his mustache -- it would come, if not on the feet of doves, then on the pinions of eagles, and would burst as the dawn of universal brotherhood under the emblem of reason, science, and justice; it would bring about a new Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracies, the shining antithesis of that thrice-infamous alliance of princes and ministers whom Grandfather Giuseppe had declared his personal enemies -- in a word, the Republic of the World. But to achieve this goal, it was necessary above all to strike at the Asiatic principle of bondage and obduracy at its vital center, at the very nerve of resistance -- in Vienna. One must deal a fatal blow to Austria and crush her, first to avenge past wrongs and second to open the way for the rule of justice and happiness on earth. 

This is interesting. (Hans doesn’t care for it, by the way.) Since I just left off a history of Europe just at the point where the Habsburg cancer had metastasized all over Europe, I feel a deep sympathy for Settembrini’s position here. While for him Vienna primarily represents the oppressor of Lombardy-Venetia, and to a less emotional degree the oppressor of the Slavs and other nations of the Balkans and eastern Europe, for me they represent the absolute worst of the dynastic system that even now continues to rule in parts of Europe, like Britain. Pirenne’s little rant against Charles V, as ruler of Spain, is an excellent expression of the problems inherent in this system of rule.

That said, it’s hard to see what even Crown Prince Rudolf could have done had he inherited the empire instead of shooting himself at Mayerling. With the Ottomans to the south and the Romanovs to the east and the troublesome House of Hohenzollern to the north, I’m not sure what even a philosopher king could have done with that situation. How many good years were there between the fall of the House of Habsburg and WW2 and then the Cold War? Were people really better off? Was nationalism a panacea? 

If you give Gavrilo Princip credit for ending the Habsburg reign, has that actually improved people’s lives? Granted, this means imagining an alternative timeline in which The Great War never happens, which quickly gets too difficult to even attempt. Someone has put together a very convincing argument in favor of Canada’s relationship with Britain as opposed to our, American, revolutionary relationship. I found it very difficult to argue against -- which is unusual for me. Nationalism is a great reason to kill people, but beyond that it’s hard to see any real benefits.

Now I’m remembering a similarly convincing argument for Persian governance over Hellenic “freedom” in BCE Greece. Would Europe have been better off in a Continental Habsburg Empire? Would the world have been better off? That's even harder to imagine than a Habsburg Empire in Central and Southeast Europe surviving far into the 20th century... or beyond. 

Nationalism is such an odd concept anyway, take the German Empire in the Great War, which lies in the near future for our characters here. “Germany” was hammered together through a series of wars in which the Prussians compelled the cooperation of a variety of states that, while speaking some version of the German language, had no particular interest in the “Nation” being created. And the same was true in the past for France and England -- though in England the smaller nations didn’t even speak the same language. Actually that’s true for parts of France as well.

But to get back to Settembrini -- and Mann -- we are intended to see here the bourgeois/socialist ideal of a border-less world-state based on science and reason. But, and this is a huge but, we are reading this after 1924 (the year it was published), which is just after 1922 when Mussolini and the Fascist party came to power in Italy. There is more than a little in common between Settembrini and pre-war Mussolini. I don't know that Mussolini was a model for the character, but he could have been. Both were socialists with nationalistic tendencies. It is not hard to imagine Settembrini making the same choices Mussolini made during the war. The road to national socialism was paved with good intentions. 

[Settembrini continues about his father:] ...what was humanism? Love of humankind, nothing more, and so it, too, was political, it, too, was a rebellion against everything that had soiled and degraded the ideal of humanity. Humanism had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form; but it cultivated beautiful form purely for the sake of the dignity of man -- in brilliant antithesis to the Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into misanthropy and superstition, but also into ignominious formlessness. From the very first, his father had fought for the cause of humanity, for earthly interests, for freedom of thought and the pursuit of happiness, and had firmly believed that we can leave heaven to the birds. Prometheus! He had been the first humanist and was identical with Satana, whom Carducci had apostrophized in his hymn...  

I’ve never bothered to look into this Satana, strangely, but now I have and found THIS. Here’s my understanding: I think by “Satana” Carducci means, not the Devil or even Mephisto, but the opposite of Christ -- the anti-christ, as it were. (But not the “Antichrist.”) This is why Settembrini can toast to him while at the same time worrying about giving the Devil an inch. And while I’m at it, his invocation of Prometheus is one of the reasons I love this author.  
...

P188 ...And he spoke now about the “Word,” about the cult of the Word, about eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. Because the Word was the glory of humankind, and it alone gave dignity to life...  

I originally skipped this passage, but I kept thinking about it because it is language, or the choice of words, that often most attracts me to either prose or poetry. (Again, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," by James Agee comes to mind.) But what’s interesting here is that you can also say what Settembrini said against music against beautiful language. Ugly ideas can be expressed in moving words. Beauty is not truth, truth is not always beauty. 

P189 Young Hans Castorp found all this well worth listening to... he listened to him politely and attentively and tried to be fair, compensating for or suppressing feelings that he felt rising in opposition to his mentor’s opinions and characterizations. For it cannot be denied that opposition was stirring in his soul -- both the sort that had always been there naturally from the start and the sort that arose specifically from the present situation, partly from indirect observation, partly from personal experience among the people up here.

What a piece of work is a man, and how easily conscience betrays him. He listens to the voice of duty -- and what he hears is the license of passion... With the best of intentions he tested the man’s views on reason, the world republic, and beautiful style -- and was prepared to be influenced by them. And each time, he found it all the more permissible afterwards to let his thoughts and dreams run free in another direction, in the opposite direction... And what or who stood on the opposing side of patriotism, the dignity of man, and beautiful literature -- the side toward which Hans Castorp believed he should direct his thoughts and deeds? There stood . . . Clavdia Chauchat... 


The Thermometer

P190 This scene with Hans calculating his cousins bill for a year but including cigars and suits is so clever. Hans almost reminds me of Adrian Mole here in his obvious obliviousness.

P215 - I wish there were some way of knowing how much of this about the air being “good for illness”, about creating “a revolution in the body,” about the “intoxicating effects” of “soluble toxins” is true, or at least what was believed at the time; and how much is invention of the novelist? It sounds plausible enough, but then again Mann’s wife spent a fair amount of time at a place like this and they never noticed she wasn’t tubercular at all. And if this scene is a close approximation of what Mann himself was told on his visit, which wouldn’t surprise me at all, then his Hofrat Behrens was dead on. Though fleeing to the Flatlands doesn’t seem to have caused Mann any permanent damage. 

I’m trying to think of another case were the treatment has the potential of making the condition worse, or of bringing it on. I’m sure there must be something similar.  

And this brings to a close our hero's visit to the Magic Mountain. From here on he will be a resident, not a visitor.



Jump to Next: TMM - 179. Taking a break, health 

177. TMM - Chapter 3 to 4 - Time and music

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Jump back to Previous: Chap. 1-3  

The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 3 continued

Satana Makes Shameful Suggestions
P107 ...there was one dream that Hans Castorp dreamed twice that night, and it was exactly the same both times. It came the second time toward morning. He was sitting in the dining hall with its seven tables when the glass door banged shut louder than ever, and in came Madame Chauchat, wearing her white sweater, one hand in her pocket, the other at the back of her head. Instead of proceeding to the Good Russian table, the ill-mannered woman walked soundlessly up to Hans Castorp and silently extended her hand for him to kiss -- not the back, but the palm. And Hans Castorp kissed her hand -- her unrefined, slightly broad hand with its stubby fingers and jagged cuticles. And once again he felt sweeping through him, from head to foot, that sense of dissolute sweetness that had risen up inside him when he had tried out what it must be like to be free of the pressures of honor and to enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace -- and he experienced that sweetness again in his dream, except that it was overwhelmingly sweeter.

I thought this would come much later, but perhaps this is the time to mention Thomas Mann’s actual visit to his wife, while she was at a sanatorium because it was believed she had tuberculosis. The story is that Mann, as Settembrini suggests here and as Hans’s Uncle James does much later, bolts the place in fear. Perhaps what we’ve just read explains what it was that frightened them off.

The great kicker to this story is that after their deaths it was revealed that while Mann’s wife’s lungs showed no sign of tuberculosis, Mann’s lungs revealed a brush with the disease in the past. 

Chapter 4 

A Necessary Purchase

P113  [Hans:] “...One assumes stupid people must be healthy and vulgar, and that illness must ennoble people and make them wise and special. At least that’s what one normally thinks, is it not? I’ve probably said more than I can defend...”

I wonder if this is aimed at Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov? George Gissing’s Henry Ryecroft also has argued something similar, that intellectual achievement goes with ill health and is not to be found united with good health.

P115 [Settembrini corrects Hans:] “...Illness is definitely not elegant, and certainly not venerable -- such a view is itself a sickness, or leads to it. Perhaps I can best arouse your abhorrence of that idea by telling you that it is outdated and ugly. It comes from an era of superstitious contrition, when the idea of humanity was demeaned and distorted into a caricature, a fearful era, when harmony and health were considered suspicious and devilish, whereas infirmity in those days was as good as a passport to heaven. Reason and enlightenment, however, have banished those shadows, which once lay encamped in the human soul -- not entirely, however, for even today the battle is still being waged. That battle, however, is called work, sir, earthly labor, work for the earth, for the honor and interests of humankind. [For this life instead of for the next. Though there is also an unfortunate hint here of "Arbeit macht frei"] And steeled by each new day in battle, the powers of reason and enlightenment will liberate the human race entirely and lead it forth on paths of progress and civilization toward an ever brighter, milder, and purer light.”
...

P116 “Backsliding,” Settembrini began again... “intellectual backsliding, a return to the views of that dark, tormented age -- and believe me, my good engineer, that is itself a sickness, a sickness that has been abundantly researched and for which science has provided various names -- one from the language of aesthetics and psychology, another from that of politics, both of them academic terms of no consequence, which you may happily eschew. But since in the life of the mind all things cohere and one idea emanates from another, since one cannot give the Devil an inch but that he takes a mile, and you along with it -- and since, on the other hand, a sound principle can give rise to sound results, no matter which sound principle one may begin -- for all such reasons, then imprint this on your minds: illness is very far from being something so elegant, so venerable that it may not be associated with stupidity, even in passing. Illness is, rather, a debasement -- indeed, a painful debasement of humanity, injurious to the very concept itself. And although one may tend and nurse illness in the individual case, to honor it intellectually is an aberration -- imprint that on your minds!...

P118 [Settembrini:] “...If for his part our good engineer has already voiced analogous opinions, that only confirms my surmise that, like so many talented young men, he is playing the intellectual dilettante, temporarily experimenting with possible points of view. The talented young man is no blank page, but is rather a page where everything has already been written, so to speak, in appealing inks, the good with the bad. And it is the educator’s task explicitly to foster the true -- and by appropriate practical persuasion forever to eradicate the false when it tries to emerge...”

Now with both The Brothers Karamazov and Doctor Faustus behind me, I can’t help noticing how our Erasmus is still actively engaged with the Devil. And this is true to the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. And, of course, this is a subject of interest to Mann. Like Settembrini, I’m not fond of this association as an absolute rule, but I do see some truth in it.

We will return to this subject later. 

Excursus On the Sense of Time

P121 - [Hans:] ...For he was a patient man by nature, who could spend long hours doing nothing in particular and loved, as we recall, his leisure time, with no numbing activity to demolish, banish, or overwhelm it. At four there would be afternoon tea with cake and preserves, followed by a little exercise outdoors, and then he would come back up here to rest in the lounge chair again, with supper at seven -- which, like all the meals, brought with it certain sights and tensions that he looked forward to...

...

P122 - ...We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time -- and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air, for the trip to the shore: the experience of a variety of refreshing episodes. The first few days in a new place have a youthful swing to them, a kind of sturdy, long stride -- that lasts for about six to eight days. Then, to the extent that we “settle in,” the gradual shortening becomes noticeable. Whoever clings to life, or better, wants to cling to life, may realize to his horror that the days have begun to grow light again and are scurrying past; and the last week -- or, let us say, four -- is uncanny in its fleeting transience... The first few days at home after a change of scene are likewise experienced in a new, broad, more youthful fashion -- but only a very few, for we are quicker to grow accustomed to the old rules than to their abrogation. And if our sense of time has grown weary with age or was never all that strongly developed -- a sign of an inborn lack of vitality -- it very soon falls asleep again, and within twenty-four hours it is as if we were never gone and our journey were merely last night’s dream.

From this perspective, Marcel, in In Search of Lost Time, was the perfect traveler, as he felt the change of place so acutely. 

P132 - [Settembrini on music] “...Music . . . there is something only semi-articulate about it, something dubious, irresponsible, indifferent. You will object, I presume, that it can also be quite clear... It is not true clarity, but a dreamy, empty clarity that demands nothing of us, a clarity without consequences, and therefore dangerous, because it seduces us to take our ease beside it. But, if you like, let music assume its most high-minded pose. Fine! And then our emotions are inflamed. And yet the real point should be to inflame our reason. Music, it would appear, is movement for its own sake -- although I suspect it of quietism. Let me overstate my case: my distaste for music is political.”

This is basically a Platonic position. And the best example I can think of for what Settembrini is saying are those show stopping numbers in the play Titus!, delivered after the singer loses her tongue. We are stirred and all but compelled to rise and give her a standing ovation even though we can understand not a single syllable of her song. Music is about emotion, not meaning.
...

“...Music is invaluable as the ultimate means for awakening our zeal, a power that draws the mind trained for its effects forward and upward. But literature must precede it. By itself, music cannot draw the world forward. By itself, music is dangerous. And for you in particular, my good engineer, it is absolutely dangerous. I read that at once from your face as I arrived just now.”...

That’s a comment that doesn’t really pay off until the final chapter, if memory serves -- and again, this brings us to the musical reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther. Though I have to say that that really works better with the next war, the Götterdämmerung War. Shit! If Mann had handled the aftermath of Peeperkorn just a little bit differently, you would have to consider the love triangle here in terms of the triangle in Young Werther. Unless we are to think of the personalities as subsumed by their national identities. This is getting as ridiculous as Goethe’s Faust. I’ll be discovering a Marxist reading next. 

P134 [Joachim on music and time in general and the fortnightly concert in particular] “...it is an enjoyable change. It fills a few hours for us so nice and properly, I think. It divides them up and gives some content to each, so that there’s something to them after all -- whereas normally the hours and days and weeks hang so awfully heavy on one’s hands. Such an unpretentious concert piece lasts perhaps seven minutes, am I correct? And each piece is something all to itself, has a beginning and an end, stands out in contrast to the rest, and that is what keeps them, in some sense, from being swallowed up in the general routine. And, besides, each is then divided up into several parts itself -- into melodic phrases, and those by the rhythm itself -- so that something’s always going on and every moment takes on a certain meaning that a person can hold on to, whereas otherwise -- I don’t know if I’m putting it right, but . . .”

“Bravo!” Settembrini cried. “Bravo, lieutenant. You have described very nicely an indubitably moral element in the nature of music: to wit, that by its peculiar and lively means of measurement, it lends an awareness, both intellectual and precious, to the flow of time. Music awakens -- and in that sense it is moral. Art is moral, in that it awakens. But what if it were to do the opposite? If it were to numb us asleep, counteract all activity and progress? And music can do that as well. It knows all too well the effect that opiates have. A devilish effect, gentlemen. Opiates are the Devil’s tool, for they create dullness, rigidity, stagnation, slavish inertia. There is something dubious about music, gentlemen. I maintain that music is ambiguous by its very nature...”

P135 He went on speaking in these terms for a while, and Hans Castorp listened, too, but was unable to follow the argument very well -- not only because of his weariness, but also because he was distracted by the conviviality among the flighty young people down on the steps... They were ill, both of them -- all the same, it certainly showed what peculiar social customs young people had up here. The band was playing a polka.

Mann is so interested in music that we can’t be surprised at how he counters Settembrini here without a word of argument. But this reminds me of something else, TMM was originally a companion piece to Death In Venice. The movie version of which was altered to make Aschenbach a composer rather than an author. What surprises me is that Mann didn’t make him a composer to start with. Reading the Wiki entry on Death In Venice, it seems that the character Aschenbach was even based in part on Mahler. The main similarity that comes to my mind between TMM and Death In Venice is the Hippe/Tadzio crush.

This comment more properly belongs with chapter 2, but it’s a little surprising that Hans seems to have no religious context at all.

I will continue with Chapter 4 next time. 

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176. Finally, The Magic Mountain

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The Magic Mountain 

by Thomas Mann
Everyman's Library 2005 (originally published 1924)

My book club decided to tackle The Magic Mountain. It had become a joke the way I kept bringing the book up in every imaginable context. I'm still not sure how it will go over, but I'm glad to finally be blogging TMM. 

The book I'm just now wrapping up on my other blog, Bloggity-Blog, is A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne. To my surprise, this has turned out to be the most helpful book for understanding TMM. I really should have blogged it here, but it wasn't until I was near the end and started the section on the Renaissance (Settembrini) and the Reformation (Naphta) that I realized the connection. You can follow the book title link above to get to the beginning of my coverage of the book, though, as I said, the relevant part is at the end (HERE).

The books, besides the Pirenne, that I would now recommend to people interested in TMM are already here -- Doctor Faustus and The Brothers Karamazov. I think all three of these titles are better than Goethe's Faust (The Norton Critical Edition) and The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, though, of course those books are also worth reading.

And so, at last, we get to the point...

Chapter 1

I don’t think I’d ever really noticed how the length of the chapters expands to reflect the changing sense of time. Chapter 1 is 17 pages; chapter 2 is 21 pages; chapter 3 is 64 pages; chapter 4 is 107 pages. And that’s just his original 3 week visit. Chapter 5 is 191; chapter 6 is 231; and chapter 7 (also the number of years) is 213 -- but truncated by the "thunderbolt."

Since "I had Never Really Noticed" is bound to become a theme, let's go with "IHNRN" as an abbreviation.

Even in this first chapter we see that Hans is quick to set aside his copy of Ocean Steamships. In fact he’s already set it aside by the time we first see him. And in the restaurant we note the first of the other residents, not counting his cousin,  the unnamed lady who sets a precedent by spending her entire life in the world of the sanatoriums.

Chapter 2

The Baptismal Bowl

Such an overture of death, I had forgotten that all aspects of his fascination with death are revealed here at the funeral of his grandfather. I wonder if he wrote this later. Maybe even after the rest of the book.

At the Tienappels'
And the overture continues in the second section with Hans’s dreaminess and indecisiveness when it came to his choosing a trade. I would almost bet money Mann wrote this last. Though it could also have been his starting outline. 

And the description of his approach to deciding on a career does sound almost like quantum (Copenhagen Interpretation) superposition. Nothing is determined in advance, it’s all a matter of probability and fate until the wave function collapses.

I do like the light, almost humorous, tone taken by the narrator. We are not going to take our young hero too seriously. I guess there's no getting around TMM being a Bildungsroman. And skimming that Wiki entry, I couldn't help jumping over to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goethe. Why has no one mentioned that as a book to read? Now I wonder how much Wilhelm and Hans are alike, though I suspect Thomas Mann may also be the model for student Hans -- though, intellectually, Adrian Leverkühn (in Doctor Faustus) is closer to young Mann. Perhaps Hans is the laid-back student the adult Mann now imagines he could have been. 

And don't I recall a reference to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, perhaps a musical reference? toward the end of TMM. Maybe I need to read some Goethe novels.

And I do like this picture of the world of what Henri Pirenne has taught me to call the patricians of the bourgeoisie. The centuries of bourgeois stability and rectitude; yet with a foot still in the Low German world of the common man. Plattdeutsch or Low German.

Chapter 3

Satana

IHNRN we get our Erasmus even before our first spell on our new chair.

P66 - Minos and Rhadamanthus

P67 - Carducci

P68 - Settembrini: about shipbuilding “... I am a humanist, a homo humanus, and understand nothing of such ingenious matters, however sincere my deep respect for them. But I can well imagine that the theoretical side of your profession demands a clear and keen mind and its practice no less than the whole man -- is that not so?”

P69 “It certainly is, yes, I can agree with you unconditionally there,” ... “Its demands are colossal nowadays -- one dare not be all too aware of just how exacting or one might truly lose all heart. No, it is no fun. And when one’s constitution is not all that strong -- I am here only as a guest, true, but my constitution’s not exactly the strongest, and I would be lying were I to claim that work suits me splendidly. Indeed it rather wears me down, I must say. Actually, I only feel really healthy when I am doing nothing at all.”
...

P70 - [After Hans has complained about his cigar and been informed that Behrens is also a cigar smoker] Settembrini: ...“A devil of a fellow, our Rhadamanthus. And truly ‘always merry’ -- though at times it’s a little forced. He tends to melancholy. His vice is not good for him -- but otherwise, it would be no vice -- tobacco only makes him melancholy. Which is why our venerable head nurse has taken charge of his supply and allows him only a small daily ration...” 

What is the significance of tobacco here? Something I should try to pay attention to this time through. Surely it’s not Freudian?


P71 - “What a windbag,” Hans Castorp thought, and did not change his mind when Settembrini... returned to casting aspersions. His primary object was Director Behrens -- he sneered at the size of the man’s feet and lingered over his title of Hofrat, which had been bestowed on him by a prince suffering from tuberculosis of the brain...

[After talking about the head nurse, Adriatica von Myendonks] Hans: “Ha ha ha. What a sarcastic man you are, Herr Settembrini.”

“Sarcastic? You mean malicious. Yes, I am a little malicious,” ... “My great worry is that I have been condemned to waste my malice on such miserable objects... In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.” And all of a sudden he began to speak about Petrarch, whom he called the “Father of Modernity.” 

...

Clarity of Mind

 P75 - [Joachim is taking his temperature] Hans: “And how long does that take?” ... Joachim raised seven fingers.

“Seven minutes must be up by now.”

Joachim shook his head. After a while he took the thermometer out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “Yes, when you pay close attention to it -- time, I mean -- it goes very slowly. I truly like measuring my temperature four times a day, because it makes you notice what one minute, or even seven, actually means -- especially since the seven days of a week hang so dreadfully heavy on your hands here.”

P76 Hans: ...”There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.” He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.

Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it has passed -- for you for me and everyone.”

“But wait,” ... “You said that a minute is as long as it seems to you while you’re measuring your temperature, correct?”

“A minute is as long as . . . it lasts, as long as it takes a second hand to complete a circle.”

“But how long that takes can vary greatly -- according to how we feel it! And in point of fact . . . I repeat, in point of fact,” ... “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time -- the way uneducated people do. It’s twenty hours from Hamburg to Davos -- true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds -- not even a second!”

“Listen here,” Joachim said, “what’s wrong with you? I think being up here with us is getting to you.”

“Just be quiet... So then, what is time?” ... “Will you please tell me that? We perceive space with our senses, with vision and touch. But what is the organ for our sense of time? ... You see, you’re stuck. But how are we ever going to measure something about which, precisely speaking, we know nothing at all -- cannot list a single one of its properties. We say time passes. Fine, let it pass... But in order to measure it . . . no, wait! In order for it to be measurable, it would have to flow evenly, but where is it written that it does that? It doesn’t do that for our conscious minds, we simply assume it does, just for the sake of convenience. And so all our measurements are merely conventions, if you please.”
...
P77 - Hans: “And I’ll go now,” ... “My head is full of all kinds of ideas about time -- a whole complex of thoughts, let me tell you. But I don’t want to get you worked up over them, not when your temperature is already too high. I’ll keep it all in mind, and we can talk about it later then, after second breakfast perhaps...”

[Hans’s first time in his chair] ...it was terribly pleasant just to lie there, Hans Castorp discovered at once to his delight -- he could not remember ever having used a more comfortable lounge chair... attached to a string and slipped into an embroidered linen case was a roll for your neck, neither too firm nor too soft, and it simply worked wonders. Hans Castorp propped one elbow on the broad, smooth surface of the chair arm, and lay there blinking, not even bothering to entertain himself with Ocean Steamships...

P78 - ...he went on dreaming. It was already ten o’clock when he lay down. An hour passed. It was an ordinary hour, neither long nor short...

“Well, that felt marvelous just lying there. What sort of chairs are those? If they’re for sale up here, I’ll take one with me back to Hamburg, they’re simply heavenly...

And this is why this book so appeals to me. The whole idea of laying about in comfy chairs, with lovely scenery to look at, and good food, while doing philosophy. What could be better?

Now, to “time.” While Mann is writing this in the teens and twenties, the cousins are still back in 1907. Einstein published his Special theory of Relativity in 1905 and his General theory in 1916. Would a slacker student of engineering have picked up any hint of what was still just Relativity? Seems unlikely. And of course Einstein was not talking about the perception of time. Both cousins would have been surprised by the objective relativity of time that Einstein was discovering.

To Hans’s point, I keep running into articles about how professional athletes and other people in high stress moments experience time quite differently. It would be only a slight exaggeration to describe this as the Matrix effect (meaning the cinematic slow-motion technique, not the phantasm machine idea). For that matter, I just the other day watched a video speculating about why time seems to pass quicker as you age.

Meanwhile, time can also be seen as the greatest offering of the Berghof. At least for Hans, it is giving him time to think... or to do “nothing at all,” as he himself claimed makes him feel the healthiest.

Herr Albin
 P94 ...That comparison taken from life at school had made an impression on him, [Hans] because he had been held back in his sophomore year, and he could recall the somewhat ignominious, but humorous and pleasantly untidy state of affairs that he had enjoyed in the last quarter, once he had given up even trying and was able to laugh “at the whole thing.”... On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagined how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace -- and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.

I'm going to stop here and finish Chapter 3 next time.

Jump to Next: Chap. 3-4