Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: TMM - The City of God cont.
The Magic Mountain
Chapter 6
An Outburst of Temper/Something Very Embarrassing
P491 [Hans, after Joachim makes it clear he’s on the point of bolting,] “...Can it be that he’ll leave me alone up here...” And then he thought, “How horrible... so horrible and absurd that I can feel my face turning cold and my heart pounding irregularly, Because if I stay behind up here alone... then it will be -- my heart’s standing absolutely still now -- it will be for good and all, because I’ll never, ever find my way back to the flatlands alone.”
...
P495 [Joachim to Behrens,] “...It’s all arranged. I will be joining the seventy-sixth [regiment] as an ensign on the first of October.”
“No matter what the risk?” Behrens asked...
“Yes, sir, Director Behrens, sir,”...
Hans is not leaving with Joachim.
An Attack Repulsed
James Tienappel arrives to fetch Hans home. After a confusing stay of eight days Tienappel flees at first light without even saying goodbye to Hans.
P521 And that was the end of the attempt by the flatlands to reclaim Hans Castorp. The young man admitted quite openly to himself that such total failure, which he had seen coming, was of decisive importance for his relationship to the people down there. For the flatlands it meant a final shrug, the abandonment of any claim; for him, however, it meant freedom finally won, and by now his heart no longer fluttered at the thought.
Operationes Spirituales
Once again, I find I am reading this with new eyes, since I have now read Temple Grandin’s account of Kosher slaughter practices HERE p41. We are finally getting some background on Leo Naphta,
P521 ... His father, about whom he spoke with respect... had been the village shohet -- a profession very different from that of a Christian butcher... He held an office, a spiritual office. Having been examined in his godly skills by the rabbi, who then authorized him to slaughter acceptable animals according to the Law of Moses and the regulations of the Talmud, Elia Naphta was himself filled with a quiet religiosity... Leib [Leo] was a mere boy, but he saw that the methods of those clumsy goyim, though excusably charitable, were also profane, that they did not honor sacred things in the same way his father’s solemn pitilessness did; and so the idea of piety became bound up with cruelty... For he saw quite clearly that his father had... [chosen his profession] for star-eyed, spiritual reasons. [Elia is killed in a pogrom and the family flees.]
P523 ...From his mother he had acquired incipient lung disease; from his father... in addition to a frail physique, he had inherited an exceptional mind -- intellectual gifts that very early on were joined with haughtiness, vaunting ambition, and an aching desire for more elegant surroundings, a passionate need to move beyond the world of his origins. As a lad of fourteen or fifteen, he had obtained books and impatiently and unsystematically gone about educating himself outside of school and providing his mind with nourishment... [Autodidactism is a recurring theme in Mann’s life and books. A district rabbi takes Leo on as a private pupil,] Over time it became clear that he had nursed a viper at his bosom... The honest old scholar suffered every abuse imaginable as a result of young Leo’s intellectual obstinacy, captiousness, skepticism, contrariness, and cutting dialectical logic... In short, there came a day -- at just the same time that Leo’s mother, Rachel, lay dying -- when the master threw Naphta out, and forbade the boy ever to enter his study again.
P524 [Leo, at sixteen, ends up sitting next to a Jesuit on a park bench,] ...The Jesuit, a well-traveled man with cultured manners, a pedagogue by passion, a judge of men, a fisher of men, sat up and took notice at the first sardonic, clearly articulated answers the wretched young Jewish lad gave to his questions. A caustic, tormented spirituality drifted toward him in those words; probing deeper he discovered both knowledge and a maliciously elegant mode of thought... They spoke about Marx, whose Kapital Leo Naphta had studied in a popular edition, and then moved on to Hegel...
P526 ... Like many gifted Jews, Naphta was by instinct both a revolutionary and an aristocrat -- a socialist, yet obsessed with the dream of participating in a proud, elegant, exclusive, closely circumscribed world. The first statement that the presence of a Catholic theologian had elicited from him... had been a declaration of love for the Roman church, which he saw as an elegant and yet spiritual power -- that is, anti-worldly, anti-material, and thus revolutionary. And his homage was genuine, rooted deep within his nature; for, as he himself explained, Judaism -- thanks to its earthy, practical character, its socialism, its political spirituality -- was far nearer to the Catholic sphere, was incomparably more closely related to it, than to the self-absorption and mystical subjectivity of Protestantism; this meant that it was decidedly less intellectually disruptive for a Jew to convert to the Roman church than for a Protestant to do so.
...The priest saw to it that, even before his baptism, the lad was given temporary shelter and spiritual nourishment at the Stella. Leo moved in -- but only after first abandoning, with the cool callousness of an intellectual aristocrat, his younger brothers and sisters to charity and a fate suited to their lesser talents.
P528 [After graduation he becomes a novice,] ... His days and part of his nights were filled with operationes spirituales, with examinations of conscience, with introspection, deliberation, and meditation, and he went about it with such malicious, peevish passion that he found himself ensnared in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and disputes. He was the despair -- and the great hope -- of his father confessor, whose life he daily made a hell with raging dialectics and a total lack of simplicity. “Ad haec quid tu?” Leo would ask, ["What can you do to these"??] his eyes flashing behind his glasses. And driven into a corner, there was nothing the priest could do except admonish him to pray for his soul to find peace -- “ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat.” Except that, once achieved, such “peace” resulted in a total dulling and deadening of the personality, until a man was a mere tool and his peace that of the graveyard, the eerie external tokens of which Brother Naphta could study in the hollow eyes of faces all around him -- and which he would never succeed in achieving, except by way of physical ruin.
I suppose we have to assume this is the way Naphta told his story to Hans. So that he is to some extent proud of the trouble he makes for his mentors. Not judging, by the way. This reminds me of some of my stories from university.
...
...But when both hemorrhages and fever persisted, he had come up here for a long-term cure... and was now into its sixth year...
...
We'll get to the next debate next time.
Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Operationes Spirituales cont.
No comments:
Post a Comment