148. Uncle Tungsten - I. We begin

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Uncle Tungsten

by Oliver Sacks - Vintage edition 2001

My book club enjoyed Oliver Sacks' On the Move so much that we decided to add his Uncle Tungsten to our reading list. I thought it would just be autobiographical information about his childhood, I hadn't realized it was, in addition, a way of telling the story of the development of our current technological world, which is either based on science or, if you choose to view it this way, on the Mephistic Arts -- the un-natural powers Mephisto uses to assist Faust in his various adventures.

And I also hadn't anticipated that the story of Oliver Sacks' extended family would turn out to be the story of the bourgeoisie in miniature.  Despite Fernand Braudel's focus on the role of the Sephardic Jews in the growth of capitalism in the West, I tend to think first of the Calvinist contribution. But Sacks' Ashkinazi Jewish family is perfect in their outsider's isolation from the prior class structure combined with their amazing enthusiasm for science, technology, and participation in so many of the trends that left the old order behind and created a new order with so many unanticipated consequences. They are even entrepreneurial in advancing science.

The conclusion of all this is that I must blog this book as well. The challenge here is that Sacks uses his child self to recreate all the scientific steps that lead to our current understanding of the world. As readers, we learn things as he does which re-creates the steps of the great names of science in the very few scientific centuries leading up to our times. 

This is an inspired way to teach this history, but it is also frustrating because you can't discus the more profound levels of these subjects until the final secrets are revealed in the last chapters of the book. I am adopting yet another convention for this book, my comments will be color coded to distinguish notes made during my initial reading (in red) from notes made during this, second reading. 

I was also going to honor his method and refrain from going into the "electronic" aspects of chemistry (the ones that most interest me) until the end. Alas, that was too difficult. I will be explaining the phenomena he describes so that it makes sense to me -- when I can.


He begins with a description of his childhood home near Hampstead and all the questions about the world that he had as a strikingly inquisitive child. This is a sort of overture of the autobiographical and scientific topics that will be developed over the course of the book. (It would be possible to do a musical version of this book.) I'm going to skip his overture except to fill in the cast of characters: Besides his parents (both doctors) there are his brothers Marcus, David, and, closest to his age, Michael. Then the all important uncles: David (Uncle Tungsten), Abe (physics) and aunts, Birdie, Lina, Len, and more will be introduced later. Then his Landau grandfather -- no longer living.

These first several chapters do a wonderful job of depicting a comfortable, supportive, middle class life supported by family, the Jewish faith, and the science and technology of the age. And all this on the very cusp of the deluge as, with the start of the war in Europe in 1939, both Oliver and his brother Michael are evacuated out of London to attend a "safer" school in the countryside. 


Chapters 1-3.

p24 [Red indicates my original notes] Unrelated to what I'm interested in here, the teacher-turned-headmaster at the school the Sacks brothers attend seems to be unhinged by something relating to the new boarding school or the war. Or perhaps the power of his new position just brings out the worst in him. In any case, he is brutal to Oliver and Michael. Michael, as we know from On the Move, seems to be -- in his turn -- permanently unhinged by this experience and even Oliver is seriously affected.

The Greta the dachshund story seems to show, and I think this is what Sacks intends us to see, how young Oliver seems to have passed on his brutal treatment to the innocent Greta. This personal insight is very interesting. Child abuse, and child sexual abuse, is often passed down generation to generation. I've always been puzzled by the process or mechanism for this. 


p30 The other common consequence of abuse is dissociation -- and even finding refuge in a new personality. Sacks' creation of elaborate fictions that he passed off as reality makes it sound like he was pretty close to dissociation. And, of course, it was Michael who's personality was actually unhinged by this wartime exile experience. I have to say, given the long term consequences of the evacuation just on this one family, you have to wonder if it wouldn't have been better to have kept all the kids in London.

His extended family represents to a remarkable degree the bourgeois world order of science and trade. And being Jewish, they were in no way a part of the old Tory world order. Primo Levy (as we see him int The Periodic Table) is like this too, and I get the same feeling from Marcel's family in Lost Time, though that is supposed to be a middle class Catholic family. 

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99. TBK. Bk XI. 9.

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The Brothers Karamazov

I have to apologize in advance. This post is way too long but it really can't be broken up. It's also my favorite part of the book, for reasons that should become obvious if you were with me for Doctor Faustus.
   

TBK Bk. XI. 9.
p734 [Ivan’s brain fever crisis (In case you didn't follow that link, a quick Wiki search on Brain Fever turns up a variety of illnesses that could have been called this in the 19th century -- including Meningitis and Scarlet Fever -- about which it says, “infectious disease whose symptoms can include paranoia and hallucinations.”] And so he was sitting almost conscious himself of his delirium and... looking intently at something on the sofa against the opposite wall. Someone appeared to [him to] be sitting there, though goodness knows how he had come in, for he had not been in the room when Ivan came into it, on his return from Smerdyakov. [Goethe has Mephisto enter in the form of a dog. Dostoyesvsky here, and Mann in Doctor Faustus, has the character become aware of a presence in the room. In Adrian’s case, it is a sudden feeling of cold while reading Kierkegaard that alerts him to the demonic presence. I now wonder that he didn’t have him reading The Brothers K.] This was a person or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, about fifty, with rather long, thick dark hair... 

p735 In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom... But after a gay youth, becoming gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of poor relative, wandering from one good old friend to another... 

The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good-natured, as accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as the occasion might arise... 

Ivan was angrily silent and would not begin the conversation. The visitor waited and sat exactly like a poor relation who had come down from his room to keep his host company at tea, and was discreetly silent, seeing that his host was frowning and preoccupied. But he was ready for any pleasant conversation as soon as his host should begin it. All at once his face expressed solicitude.

“I say,” he began to Ivan, “excuse me, I only mention it to remind you. You went to Smerdyakov’s to find out about Katerina but you left without finding out anything about her. You probably forgot . . .” [This is something only Ivan could know.]

p736 “Oh, yes,” said Ivan and his face grew gloomy with uneasiness. “Yes, I’d forgotten . . . But it doesn’t matter now. Never mind, till tomorrow,” he muttered to himself. “But you,” he added, addressing his visitor, I would have remembered it myself in a minute, for that was just what was tormenting me! But you, why do you interfere? You act as though you prompted me, and that I didn’t remember it myself.”

“Don’t believe it then,” said the gentleman, smiling pleasantly. “What’s the good of believing against your will? Besides, proof is no help to believing, especially material proof. Thomas believed, not because he saw Christ risen, but because he wanted to believe, before he saw. Look at the spiritualists, for instance. . . . I am very fond of them . . . Only would you believe it, they imagine they are serving the cause of religion, because the devils show them their horns from the other world. That, they say, is material proof of the existence of another world. The other world and material proof, what next! And if you come to that, does proving there’s a devil prove that there’s a God? I want to join an idealist society, I’ll lead the opposition in it. I’ll say I am a realist, but not a materialist, he-he!”

“Listen.” Ivan suddenly got up from the table. “I seem to be delirious . . . I am delirious, in fact. Talk any nonsense you like, I don’t care! You won’t drive me to fury, as you did last time. But I feel somehow ashamed... I sometimes don’t see you and don’t hear your voice as I did last time, but I always guess what you are saying, for it’s I, I myself speaking, not you. Only I don’t know whether I was dreaming last time or whether I really saw you...

“I am so glad you treat me with such familiarity,” the visitor began.

“Fool,” laughed Ivan. “Do you think I should stand on ceremony with you? I am in good spirits now, though I’ve a pain in my forehead . . . and on the top of my head . . . Only please don’t talk philosophy, as you did last time. [Now that's honest.] If you must stay, talk of something amusing. Gossip. You are a poor relative, you ought to gossip. What a nightmare to have! But I am not afraid of you. I’ll get the better of you. I won’t be taken to a madhouse!”

p737 “How charming, ‘poor relative.’ Yes, I am in my natural shape. For what am I on earth but a poor relative? By the way, I am listening to you and am rather surprised to find you are actually beginning to take me for something real, not simply your imagination, as you persisted in declaring last time . . .”

“Never for one minute have I taken you for reality,” Ivan cried with a sort of fury. “You are a lie, you are my illness, [so similar to Adrian’s case with his syphilis] you are a phantom. It’s only that I don’t know how to destroy you and I see I must suffer for a time. You are a hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself, but only of one side of me . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the worst and most stupid of them [This is another way of saying that we create the devil in our own image]. From that point of view you might be of interest to me, if only I had time to waste on you . . .”

“Excuse me, excuse me, I’ll catch you. When you called out to Alyosha under the lamp post this evening: ‘You learned it from him! How do you know that he visits me?’ you were thinking of me. So for one brief moment you did believe that I really exit,” the gentleman laughed blandly.

“Yes, that was a moment of weakness . . . But I couldn’t believe in you. I don’t know whether I was asleep or awake last time. Perhaps I was only dreaming then and didn’t really see you at all . . .”

“And why were you so surly with Alyosha? He is so good; I’ve treated him badly over Father Zossima.”

“Don’t talk of Alyosha! How dare you, you flunky!” Ivan laughed again.

“You scold me, but you laugh -- that’s a good sign. But you are ever so much more polite than you were last time and I know why: that great decision of yours . . .”

“Don’t speak of my decision,” cried Ivan savagely.

“I understand, I understand. It’s all very noble and charming. You are going to defend your brother and sacrifice yourself . . . It’s chivalrous.”

p738 “Keep quiet, I’ll kick you!”

“I won’t be altogether sorry, for then my object will be attained. If you kick me, you must believe in my reality, for people don’t kick ghosts. Joking apart, it doesn’t matter to me, scold if you like, though it’s better to be a trifle more polite even to me. ‘Fool, flunky!’ What words!”

“...I am poor, but . . . I won’t say very honest, but . . . It’s an axiom generally accepted in society that I am a fallen angel. I certainly can’t conceive how I can ever have been an angel. It I ever was, it must have been so long ago that there’s no harm in forgetting it. Now I only prize the reputation of being a gentlemanly person and live as I can, trying to make myself agreeable. I really love mankind, I’ve been slandered! Here when I stay with you from time to time, my life gains a kind of reality and that’s what I like most of all. You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here everything is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate equations! I wander about here dreaming. I like dreaming. Besides, on earth I become superstitious. Please don’t laugh. That’s just what I like, to become superstitious. I adopt all your habits here; I like going to the public baths, would you believe it? I go and steam myself with merchants and priests. What I dream of is becoming incarnate once and for all in the form of some merchant’s wife weighing two hundred and fifty pounds, and of believing all she believes. My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith, this is the absolute truth. Then there would be an end to my sufferings. I like going to the doctor too; in the spring there was an outbreak of smallpox and I went and was vaccinated in a foundling hospital -- if only you knew how I enjoyed myself that day. I donated ten roubles for the Slavs! . . . But you are not listening. Do you know, you are not at all well this evening? I know you went to that doctor yesterday . . . Well, what about your health? What did the doctor say?”

p739 “Fool! Ivan cried.
...
“The devil has rheumatism!”

“Why not...? I put on fleshly form and I take the consequences. Nothing human is beyond the possibility of Satan.”

“What, what? Nothing human is beyond . . . That’s not bad for the devil!”

“I am glad I’ve pleased you at last.”

“But you didn’t get that from me,” Ivan stopped suddenly, seemingly struck. “That never entered my head, that’s strange.” [Ivan hasn’t payed much attention to his dreams.]

“It’s original, isn’t it? This time I’ll be honest and explain it to you. Listen, in dreams and especially in nightmares, from indigestion or something else, a man sometimes sees such visions, such complex and real actuality, such events, even a whole world of events, woven into such a plot, with such unexpected details from the most exalted matters to the last button on a cuff, as I swear Leo Tolstoy has never invented. [Funny. But true.] Yet such visions are sometimes seen not by writers, but by the most ordinary people, officials, journalists, priests. . . . The subject of dreams is a complete mystery. A statesman once confessed to me that all his best ideas came to him when he was asleep. Well, that’s how it is now, though I am your hallucination, yet just as in a nightmare, I say original things which have not entered your head before. So I don’t repeat your ideas, yet I am only your nightmare, nothing more.”

p740 “You are lying. You are trying to convince me you exist independently and are not my nightmare. You are trying to convince me that you are a dream.” [What?]

“My dear fellow, I’ve adopted a special method today, I’ll explain it to you afterwards. Wait, where did I break off? Oh, yes! I caught cold then, only not here but someplace else.”
...
p741 [The visitor tells an odd story about catching a cold and being cured by “Hoff’s malt extract.” But there are problems when he tries to write a letter of thanks to the newspapers] “...I was prompted by a feeling of gratitude. But it led to no end of trouble. Not a single paper would take my letter. ‘It would be very reactionary ,’ they said. ‘No one would believe it. The devil does not exist. You’d better remain anonymous,’ they advised me. What use is a letter of thanks if it’s anonymous?... ‘It’s reactionary to believe in God today,’ I said, ‘but I am the devil, so people can believe in me.’ ‘We quite understand that,’ they said. ‘Who doesn’t believe in the devil? Yet we won’t print your letter, it might injure our reputation. As a joke, if you like.’ But I thought as a joke it wouldn’t be very witty. So it wasn’t printed. And do you know, I am angry about it to this day...”

p742 ‘...Before time was, by some decree that I could never make out, I was predestined ‘to deny’ and yet I am genuinely good-hearted and not at all inclined to negation. ‘No, you must go and deny. Without denial there’s no criticism and what would a newspaper be without a column of criticism?’ Without criticism it would be nothing but one ‘hosannah.’ But hosannah is not enough for life. The hosannah must be tried in the crucible of doubt and so on, in the same style. But I don’t interfere in that, I didn’t create it, I am not answerable for it. [Implicit here is God’s responsibility for both good and evil.] Well, they’ve chosen their scapegoat; they’ve made me write the column of criticism and so life has been made possible. We understand that comedy; I, for instance, simply ask for annihilation. No, live, I am told, for there’d be nothing without you. [Close to my position that evil is necessary to promote story] If everything in the universe were sensible, nothing would happen. There would be no events without you, and there must be events. So against the grain I serve to produce events and do what’s irrational because I’m commanded to. For all their indisputable intelligence, men take this farce as something serious, and that is their tragedy. They suffer, of course . . . But then they live, they live a real life, not a fantastic one, for suffering is life. Without suffering what would be the pleasure of life? [We have to ask ourselves here how Settembrini had never read this? He would have had even less excuse than I have.] Life would be transformed into an endless church service; it would be holy, but tedious. But what about me? I suffer, but still, I don’t live. I am x in an indeterminate equation. I am a sort of phantom in life who has lost all beginning and end, and who has even forgotten his own name. You are laughing -- no, you are not laughing, you are angry again... But I repeat again that I would give away all this superstellar life, all the ranks and honors, simply to be transformed into a merchant’s wife weighing two hundred and fifty pounds and set candles at God’s altar.”

“Then even you don’t believe in God? asked Ivan with a smile of hatred.

“What can I say -- that is, if you are in earnest . . .”

“Is there a God or not?” Ivan cried with savage intensity.

“Ah, then you are in earnest! My dear fellow, upon my word I don’t know. There! I’ve said it now!”

“...No, you are not someone apart, you are myself, you are I and nothing more! You are rubbish, you are my fancy!”

“Well, if you like, I have the same philosophy as you. That is true. ‘I think, therefore I am,’ I know that for a fact. All the rest, all these worlds, God and even Satan -- all that is not proved, to my mind. Does all that exist of itself, or is it only an emanation of myself, a logical development of my ego which alone has existed forever? But I must stop talking, otherwise, I think, you will jump up and start beating me.”

I must say that this is some of the best philosophy I’ve read anywhere. It makes me want to locate the final resting places of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer... even Hume and Nietzsche (not to mention the 20th century windbags) and piss on their graves. Was Nietzsche influenced by this to make his later books more novel like and readable? Admittedly, I haven’t read those books in over 40 years, but I believe they were still too vague and filled with impenetrable terminology. Perhaps that’s just a German thing. Or a German in translation thing. 

p744 “You’d better tell me an anecdote!” said Ivan miserably.

“There is an anecdote on our subject, or rather a legend, not an anecdote. You reproach me with unbelief, yet you yourself don’t believe. But, my dear fellow, I am not the only one like that. We are all confused over there now and all the result of your science. Once there used to be atoms, five senses, four elements; and everything hung together somehow. There were atoms in the ancient world even, but since we’ve learned that you’ve discovered the chemical molecule and protoplasm and everything else, we had to lower our crest. There’s complete confusion, and, above all, superstition, scandal; there’s as much scandal among us as among you, you know; a little more in fact. And spying, also, for we have our secret police department where private information is received. Well, this legend belongs to our middle ages -- not yours, but ours -- and no one believes it even among us, except old ladies of two hundred and fifty pounds, not your old ladies I mean, but ours. We have everything you have. I am revealing one of our secrets out of friendship for you, though it’s forbidden. This legend is about Paradise. There was, they say, here on earth a thinker and philosopher. He rejected everything, Laws, Conscience, Faith, but above all, the Future Life. He died; he expected to go straight to darkness and death and he found a future life before him. He was astonished and indignant. ‘This is against my principles!’ he said. And he was punished for that. That is . . . You must excuse me, I am just repeating what I heard, it’s only a legend . . . He was sentenced to walk a quadrillion miles in the dark. And when he had finished that quadrillion, the gates of heaven will be opened to him and he’ll be forgiven . . .”

I loved the way that paragraph started out but the ending is kind of lame. I would think by “in the dark” he meant out of God’s light, but this isn’t obvious here.

“And what tortures have you in the other world besides walking a quadrillion miles?” asked Ivan with a strange eagerness.

p745 “What tortures? ah, don’t ask. In the old days we had all sorts, but now they are chiefly moral punishments -- ‘the stings of conscience’ and all that nonsense. We got that, too, from you, from the softening of your manners. And who’s the better for it? Only those who have no conscience, for how can they be tortured by conscience when they have none? But decent people who have conscience and a sense of honor suffer. Reforms, when the ground has not been prepared for them, especially if they are institutions copied from abroad, cause nothing but trouble. [Dostoyesvsky really can’t leave the end of serfdom alone.] The ancient fire was better. Well, this man, who was condemned to the quadrillion miles, stood still, looked round and lay down across the road. ‘I won’t go, I refuse on principle!’ Take the soul of an enlightened Russian atheist and mix it with the soul of the prophet Jonah, who sulked for three days and nights in the belly of the whale, and you get the character of that thinker who lay across the road.”

“What did he lie on there?”

“Well, I suppose there was something to lie on. You are not laughing?”

“Good!” cried Ivan, still with the same strange eagerness. Now he was listening with an unexpected curiosity. “Well, is he lying there now?”

“That’s the point, he isn’t. He lay there almost a thousand years and then he got up and started walking.” 

What a fool!” cried Ivan, laughing nervously. “Does it make any difference whether he lies there forever or walks a quadrillion miles? It would take a billion years to walk it?” 

“Much more than that, I haven’t got a pencil and paper or I could work it out. But he finished walking long ago and that’s where the story begins.”

“What, he accomplished it? But where did he get the billion years to do it?”

“Why, you keep thinking of your present earth! But your present earth may have been repeated a billion times. [Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence?] Why, it’s become extinct, been frozen, cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ‘the water above the firmament,’ then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth -- and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and in exactly the same way in every detail, most unseemly and insufferably tedious . . .” 

p746 “Well, well, what happened when he finished walking?”

“Why, at  that moment the gates of Paradise were opened and he walked in. And before he had been there two seconds by his watch (though to my thinking his watch must have dissolved into its elements on the way), he cried that those two seconds were worth walking not a quadrillion miles but a quadrillion of quadrillions, raised to the quadrillionth power! In fact, he sang ‘hosannah’ and overdid it so, that some people there wouldn’t shake hands with him at first -- he’d become too rapidly reactionary, they said. The Russian temperament. I repeat, it’s a legend. I give it for what it’s worth. So that’s the sort of ideas we have on such subjects even now.”

Interesting how “Russian” this devil is and how “German” Adrian’s is in Doctor Faustus. Not only do we create God and the devil in man’s image, but also in our cultural image. We barely try for a universal or even a global deity. 

[Ivan recalls that he made up the quadrillion miles anecdote himself when he was 17.] “...You are a dream! You are a dream not a living creature!”

“From the passion with which you deny my existence,” laughed the gentleman, “I am convinced that you believe in me.”


“Not in the slightest! I haven’t a hundredth part of a grain of faith in you!”

“But you have the thousandth of a grain. Homeopathic doses perhaps are the strongest. [funny] Confess that you have faith even to the ten-thousandth part of a grain.”

“Not for one minute,” cried Ivan. “But I would like to believe in you, “ he added strangely.

p747 “Ah! There’s an admission! But I am good-natured. I’ll come to your assistance again. Listen, it was I who caught you, not you who caught me. I told you your anecdote you’d forgotten on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me completely.”

“You are lying. The object of your visit is to convince me of your existence!”

“Yes. But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief -- is sometimes such torture to a conscientious man, such as you are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once. Knowing that you are inclined to believe in me, I injected some disbelief by telling you that anecdote. I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my motive in it. It’s the new method. As soon as you disbelieve in me completely, you’ll begin assuring me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality. I know you. Then I will have attained my object, which is an honorable one. I will sow in you only a tiny grain of faith and it will grow into an oak tree -- and such an oak tree that, sitting under it, you will long to enter the ranks of ‘the hermits in the wilderness and the saintly women,’ for that is what you are secretly longing for. You’ll dine on locusts, you’ll wonder into the wilderness to save your soul!”

“Then it’s for the salvation of my soul you are working, is it, you scoundrel?”

“One must do some good work sometimes. How ill-humored you are!”

“Fool! Did you ever tempt those holy men who ate locusts and prayed seventeen years in the wilderness till they were overgrown with moss?”


“My dear fellow, I’ve done nothing else. One forgets the whole world and all the worlds, and sticks to one such saint, because he is a very precious diamond. One such soul, you know, is worth a whole constellation. We have our system of reckoning, you know. The conquest is priceless! And some of them, I swear, are not inferior to you in culture, though you won’t believe it. They can contemplate such depths of belief and disbelief at the same moment that sometimes it really seems that they are within a hairsbreadth of being turned upside down.”

Again I’m struck by the sexual -- temptation as seduction -- aspect of all this. How many people have “gone into the wilderness” mostly for the thrill of being tempted?  

p748 “Well, did you succeed or fail? If you failed then you had ‘your nose pulled off your face.’ ”

“My dear fellow,” observed the visitor, “it’s better to fail than not to try at all...” [this sets up a strange story about having your nose pulled and then one about a girl sinner that I’m going to skip.]
...
p749 “...You are really angry with me for not having appeared to you in a red glow, with thunder and lightening, with scorched wings, but to have shown myself in such a modest form. You are wounded, in the first place, in your aesthetic feelings, and, secondly, in your pride. How could such a vulgar devil visit such a great man as you! Yes, there is that romantic strain in you... I make no claim to being equal to you in intelligence. Mephistopheles declared to Faust that he desired evil, but did only good. Well, he can say what he likes, it’s the opposite with me. I am perhaps the one man in all creation who loves the truth and really desires good. I was there when the Word, Who died on the Cross, rose up into Heaven bearing on His bosom the soul of the penitent thief. I heard the glad shrieks of the Cherubim singing and shouting hosannah and the thunderous rapture of the seraphim which shook Heaven and all creation. And I swear to you by all that’s sacred, I longed to join the choir and shout hosannah with them all. The word had almost escaped me, had almost broken my lips . . . You know how susceptible and impressionable I am. But common sense -- oh, a most unhappy trait in my character -- kept me in bounds and I let the moment pass! For what would have happened, I wondered, what would have happened after my hosannah? Everything on earth would have been extinguished at once and no events could have occurred. [Charmed. I'm not going to explain that but I hope someone gets the reference.] And so, solely from my sense of duty and my social position, I was forced to suppress the good moment and to stick to my unpleasant task. Somebody takes all the credit of what’s good for himself, and nothing but evil is left for me. But I don’t envy the honor of a life of idle imposture. I am not ambitious. Why am I, of all creatures in the world, doomed to be cursed and kicked by all decent people? For if I put on mortal form I am bound to be cursed and kicked. I know, of course, there’s a secret in it, but they won’t tell me the secret because then, perhaps, seeing the meaning of it, I might bawl out hosannah, and the indispensable minus would disappear at once, and good sense would reign supreme throughout the whole world. And that, of course, would mean the end of everything, even of magazines and newspapers, for who would buy them. [Why doesn’t this have the reputation of being the finest chapter in literature? (It does have the reputation of being one of the three best chapters in this book, I believe.)] I know that at the end of all things I will be reconciled. I, too, shall walk my quadrillion miles and learn the secret. But until that happens I am sulking and fulfill my destiny even though it is against the grain -- that is, to ruin thousands for the sake of saving one. How many souls have had to be ruined and how many honorable reputations destroyed for the sake of that one righteous man, Job, over whom they made such a fool of me in old days? Yes, until the secret is revealed, there are two sorts of truth for me -- one, their truth, which I know nothing about so far and the other my own. And there’s no knowing which will turn out to be better. . . . Are you asleep?”

p750 “I might as well be,” Ivan groaned angrily. “All my stupid ideas -- outgrown, thrashed out long ago, and flung aside like a dead carcass -- you present to me now as something new!”

“There’s no pleasing you! And I thought I would fascinate you by my literary style. That hosannah in the skies really wasn’t bad, was it? And then that ironical tone like Heine, eh?”

p751 “No, I was never a flunky! How then can my soul beget a flunky like you?”

“My dear fellow, I know a most charming and attractive young Russian gentleman, a young thinker and a great lover of literature and art, the author of a promising poem entitled The Grand Inquisitor. I was only thinking of him!”

“I forbid you to speak of The Grand Inquisitor!” cried Ivan, crimson with shame.

“And the Geological Cataclysm. Do you remember? That was a poem!”

“Keep quiet, or I’ll kill you!”

“You’ll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young friends, quivering with eagerness for life! ‘There are new men,’ you decided last spring, when you were planning to come here, ‘they propose to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Fools! They didn’t ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that’s how we have to set to work. It’s that, that we must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all denied God -- and I believe that period, corresponding with geological periods, will come to pass -- the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism and what’s more the old morality, and everything will begin anew. [Of course there are always people, like the Surrealists, who long for a bit of cannibalism.] Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. [So much Nietzsche here. But how well known was The Birth of Tragedy at this time? Most of his “popular” books were yet to be written. I still can’t figure who was influencing whom or if this was simply synchronicity. In the 1880s Dostoyesvsky was certainly more widely read than Nietzsche.] Extending his conquest of nature by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour that he will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it’s useless for him to grieve at life’s being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but this very consciousness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave’ . . . And so on and so on in the same style. Charming!”

p752 Ivan sat with his eyes cast downward and his hands pressed to his ears. He began trembling all over. The voice continued.

“The question now is, my young thinker reflected, is it possible that such a period will ever come? If it does, everything is determined and humanity is settled forever. But since, owing to man’s stupidity, this cannot come about for at least a thousand years, everyone who recognizes the truth now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense, ‘all things are lawful’ for him. What’s more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is always no God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if he is the only one in the whole world. Promoted to his new position, he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the old slave-man, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands, the place is holy. Where I stand will become the foremost place . . . ‘All things are lawful’ and that’s the end of it! That’s all very charming; but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for doing it? But that’s our modern Russian all over. He can’t bring himself to swindle without moral sanction. He is so in love with truth . . .”

...Ivan suddenly snatched a glass from the table and threw it at him.

“Oh, how stupid of you,” cried the gentleman, jumping up from the sofa and shaking off the drops of tea. “He remembers Luther’s inkstand! He takes me for a dream and throws glasses at a dream! It’s like a woman! I suspected you were only pretending to stop up your ears.”

A loud, persistent knocking was suddenly heard at the window. Ivan jumped up from his seat.

“Do you hear? You’d better open,” cried the gentleman. “It’s your brother Alyosha with the most interesting and surprising news!”

p753 “Keep quiet. I know it is Alyosha. I felt he was coming. And of course he has not come for nothing; of course he brings ‘news,’ ” Ivan exclaimed frantically.

“Open, open to him. There’s a snowstorm and he is your brother. Do you realize what it is like outdoors? It isn’t fit for a dog.”

The knocking continued. Ivan wanted to rush to the window, but something seemed to hold back his arms and legs. He strained every effort to break his chains but in vain. The knocking at the window grew louder and louder. At last the chains were broken and Ivan looked round him wildly. Both the candles had almost burned out. The glass he had thrown at his visitor stood before him on the table, and there was no one on the sofa opposite. The knocking went on persistently, but it was by no means so loud as it had seemed in his dream, on the contrary it was quite subdued.

“It was not a dream! No, I swear it was not a dream, it all happened just now!” cried Ivan. He rushed to the window and opened the movable pane. 

It would have been brilliant if he had the sort of dream where you think you wake up but are still actually dreaming. The line above would be when he only thought he was awake and his visitor would tweak him about it.

“Alyosha, I told you not to come.” he cried to his brother. “What do you want? Why have you come?”

“Smerdyakov hung himself an hour ago,” Alyosha answered from the yard.

“Come around to the steps, I’ll open the door at once, said Ivan.

Really, even if this wasn’t such an obvious model for the similar scene in Doctor Faustus, this would still be the best chapter of the book and much more interesting than "The Grand Inquisitor." And as with Faustus, you can understand this as being simply Ivan’s dream or an insight he has into something more profound only because of his illness. Except that the visitor doesn’t seem to tell him anything he doesn’t already think (or does he only think this in the dream) -- he simply rubs Ivan's nose in ideas he no longer believes or has serious doubts about. And that his dream takes a Faust like (but not exactly Faustian) direction tell us that, like Faust, he is desperate to make contact with something that will resolve his doubts. The visitor turns out to be less Mephisto and more study buddy. Really he is Dostoyevsky’s spokesman, calling into question Ivan’s modern, European ideas that Dostoyevsky thinks are leading to nihilism and the downfall of Russia.

For the most part, Dostoyevsky seems to be saying that we need Russian Orthodox Christianity because our life in this world will be thrown into confusion without it. The only point where the book argues for belief itself, that I can think of, is where Alyosha mysteriously knows to assure Ivan that he didn’t murder his father. I suppose we are to think that it was Ivan’s guilt over his role in his father’s death that brought on his “brain fever” in the first place. This doesn’t make Ivan a very good spokesman for ‘all things are lawful’, but as I said before, while Ivan says this, it is Pavel (and Fyodor) who believes it.

I still can’t believe that I read this, so soon after Doctor Faustus, completely by accident. So much for this being a “palate cleanser”. It might be difficult reading this chapter in isolation, but, perhaps with some marginal notes, I would make this required reading for any review of late 19th century philosophy and especially for a study of the works of both Thomas Mann and Nietzsche. Perhaps that bit about cannibalism is a reference to previous nihilistic enthusiasm (most probably influenced by de Sade) but, if not, Bataille and the Surrealists certainly picked up on it later.  

(Moved from an earlier section -- A quick Wiki search on Brain Fever turns up a variety of illnesses that could have been called this in the 19th century including Meningitis and Scarlet Fever about which it says, “infectious disease whose symptoms can include paranoia and hallucinations.”) 


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39. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXVII

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[This is the oddest chapter. Its subject is the visit to Pfeiffering of Herr Saul Fitelberg, an impresario, “‘...Arrangements musicaux. Représentant de nombreux artistes prominents’” keen to present Adrian to Paris society. He arrives by way of Munich in a hired automobile (with driver) and makes his pitch to Adrian while Zeitblom looks on. The scene is vivid and fun, he is thwarted, of course, in all that he wishes to do for Adrian, but what is the point of all this? I’m going to include a few passages but he is really a mystery to me. I should explain that only his side of the conversation is recorded. He seems to have, for the most part, read in their faces their responses and voiced those as well.] p400 “...I have come to tempt you away, to betray you to a temporary unfaithfulness, [to Pfeiffering] to bear you on my mantle through the air and show you the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them -- or even more, to lay them at your feet. . . . [now this sounds quite like the traditional Mephisto. And wasn’t he always a kind of impresario?] Forgive my pompous way of talking. It is really ridiculously exaggere, especially as far as the ‘glories’ go. It is not so grand as that, nothing so very thrilling about these glories; I am saying that who after all am the son of little people, living in humble circumstances, really miese, you know, from Lublin in the middle of Poland; of really quite little Jewish parents -- I am a Jew, you must know, and Fitelberg is a very ordinary, low-class, Polish-German-Jewish name; only I have made it the name of a respected protagonist of avant-garde culture, whom great artists call their friend...”

“Thank God, that lousy Lublin [but also here] lies far behind me. More than twenty years I have been living in Paris -- will you believe it, for a whole year I attended philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne! But à la longue [over time] they bored me. Not that philosophy couldn’t be a best-seller too. It could. But for me it is too abstract. And I have a vague feeling that it is in Germany one should study metaphysics...”

[He opened a theatre called Theatre des fourberies gracieuses. Which I think could be translated as Theatre of Graceful Deceit. The Dartmouth Guide prefers "Theater of the Graceful Deceptions".]

p401 “...The way to fame, in Paris, leads through notoriety -- at a proper premiere people jump up several times during the evening and yell ‘Insulte! Impudence! Bouffonerie ignorminieuse!’ [Ignomious buffoonery] while six or seven initiates, Erik Satie, [Gymnopédies] a few surrealists, Virgil Thomson, [Four Saints in three acts] shout from the loges: ‘Quelle précision! Quel esprit! C’est divin! C’est suprême! Bravo! Bravo!’

“I fear I shock you, messieurs -- if not Monsieur Le Vercune, [the way he pronounces Leverkuhn] then perhaps the Herr Professor. But in the first place I hasten to add that a concert evening never yet broke down in the middle; that is not what even the most outraged want at bottom; on the contrary they want to go on being outraged, that is what makes them enjoy the evening, and besides, remarkable as it is, the informed minority always commands the heavier guns...”

Clearly, this is in large part Mann commenting on French culture.

p402 “...Naturellement, you think I have in mind [why he thinks Adrian will be a sensation in Paris] your ferocious discipline, and que vous enchainez votre art dans un systeme de règles inexorables et néoclassiques, [And how you subject your art to a system of inexorable and neoclassical rules] forcing it to move in these iron bands -- if not with grace, yet with boldness and esprit. But if it is that that I mean, I mean at the same time more than that when I speak of your qualité d’Allemand; I mean -- how shall I put it? -- a certain four-squareness, rhythmical heaviness, immobility, grossièreté, [roughness] which are old-German -- en effect, entre nous, [indeed, between you and me] one finds in Bach too... Your theses -- they consist almost throughout of even note values, minims, crotchets, quavers; true enough, they are syncopated and tied but for all that they remain clumsy and unwieldy, often with a hammering, machinelike effect. C’est ‘boch’ dans un degré fascinant. Don’t think I am finding fault, it is simply énormément caractéristique, and in the series of concerts of international music which I am arranging, this note is quite indispensable. . . .”

“You see, I am spreading out my magic cloak. I will take you to Paris, to Brussels, Antwerp, Venice, Copenhagen. You will be received with the intensest interest...”

p403 “But that is the condition -- ah non! You cannot inflict upon me the performance of your works in absentia. Your personal appearance is indispensable, particulierement a Paris, where musical renown is made in three or four salons...”

[He tries to interest Adrian in “stimulating contacts among your brothers in Apollo”] p404 “Is it possible that I read in your manner a certain resistance even to that? But here, chere Maître, every shyness, every embarras is really quite out of place... there must be some peculiar and interesting psychological association: I do not ask... Is that any reason for embarras, in a sphere where there reigns unlimited freedom from prejudice? A freedom from prejudice which for its part has its own good reasons too? Oh, la, la! Such a circle of arbiters elegantiarum and society cheer-leaders is usually an assortment of demi-fous excentriques, [half-crazy eccentrics] expended souls and elderly crapsules [?] -- un impresario, c’est us espece d’infirmier, voila! [a kind of nurse, there you have it!]

Why do I have the feeling Mann was having a blast writing this chapter?

“...You abhor all generalizing, classifying, subsuming, as a derogation of your dignity. You insist on the incomparableness of the personal case. You pay tribute to an arrogant personal uniqueness -- maybe you have to do that. ‘Does one live when others live?’ I have read that question somewhere, I am not sure precisely where, but in some very prominent place. Privately or publicly you all ask it; only out of good manners and for appearance’ sake do you take notice of each other -- if you do take notice of each other...

p405 “Tragique, messieurs. I call it that, because in my opinion the unhappiness of the world rests on the disunity of the intellect, the stupidity, the lack of comprehension, which separates its spheres from each other. Wagner poured scorn on the picturesque impressionism of his time, calling it all ‘daubs’ -- he was sternly conservative in that field. But his own harmonic productions have a lot to do with impressionism, they lead up to it and as dissonances often go beyond the impressionistic. Against the Paris daubers he set up Titian as the true and the good...

p406 “Gentlemen, I have been rambling frightfully. I mean I have wandered from my subject and my purpose. Take my garrulity as an expression of the fact that I have given up the idea that brought me here. I have convinced myself that it is not possible. You will not step foot on my magic cloak...

“You probably do not realize, cher Maître, how German is your repugnance, which, if you will permit me to speak en psychologue, I find characteristically made up of arrogance and a sense of inferiority, of scorn and fear. I might call it the ressentiment of the serious-minded against the salon world... In Germany the superstition prevails that there is nothing but valse brillante [“brilliant waltz” (title of Chopin’s opus 18)] outside its borders and nothing but serious-minded inside them. And still, as a Jew one feels skeptical towards the world, and leans to German serious-mindedness -- at the risk, of course, of getting kicked in the pants for one’s pains. To be German, that means above all to be national -- and who expects a Jew to be nationalistic? Not only that nobody would believe him, but everybody would bash his head in for having the impudence to try it on. We Jews have everything to fear from the German character, qui est essentiellement antisemitique; [which is essentially anti-Semitic] and that is reason enough, of course, for us to plump for the worldly side and arrange sensational entertainments. It does not follow that we are windbags, or that we have fallen on our heads. We perfectly well know the difference between Gounod’s Faust and Goethe’s, even when we speak French, then too. . . .

p407 “...Gounod’s Faust, gentlemen -- who turns up his nose at it? Not I, and not you, I am glad to know. A pearl -- a marguerite, full of the most ravishing musical inventions...

[M. Fitelberg describes the painstaking process Bruckner put his students through before they were allowed to compose anything on their own.]

“Comme c’est respectable! Pas précisément humain, mais extrêmement respectable. [How respectable that is. Not exactly human, but extremely respectable] Why should we Jews, who are a priestly people, even when we are minaudering [maundering? meandering?] about in Parisian salons, not feel drawn to the Germans and let ourselves lean to the German side and an ironic view, as against the world, against art for the little friend? [“little friend” relates to a music student’s love interest from a story I skipped about Massenet] In us nationalism would be impertinent enough to provoke a pogrom. We are international -- but we are pro-German, like nobody else in the world, simply because we can’t help perceiving the role of Germany and Judaism on earth. Une analogie frappante! [a striking analogy] In just the same way they are both hated, despised, feared, envied, in the same measure they alienate and are alienated. People talk about the age of nationalism. But actually there are only two nationalisms, the German and the Jewish, and all the rest is child’s play. -- Is not the downright Frenchness of an Anatole France the purest cosmopolitanism alongside German isolation in the subjective and the Jewish conceit of the chosen race. . . . France -- a nationalistic pseudonym. A German writer could not well call himself Germany, such a name one gives to a battleship. He has to content himself with German -- and that is a Jewish name, oh la, la. [I hadn't previously noticed that "German" or "Germann" was a Jewish name.]

p408 “...The Germans should leave it to the Jews to be pro-German. With their nationalism, their pride, their foible of ‘differentness,’ their hatred of being put in order and equalized, their refusal to let themselves be introduced into the world and adopted socially, they will get into trouble, real Jewish trouble, je vous le jure. [I assure you] The Germans should let the Jew be the mediateur between them and society, be the manager, the impresario. He is altogether the right man for it, one should not turn him out, he is international, and he is pro-German. Mais c’est en vain. Et c’est tres dommage! [But it is in vain. And that is a great pity.]...

Have you noticed that when Mann gets to the point he tends to make it in French? This was truly an amazing analogy to make in the mid-'40s. I started by saying this was an odd chapter but now I'm thinking it is exceptional. He finds just the right voice to skewer both the the French and the Germans. And the person who is most similar to the traditional Mephisto, in what he offers to do for Adrian, is not only not demonic but is in fact a German-Polish-Jew. And Adrian has no interest in what he offers.

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