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The Magic Mountain
Walpurgis Night
At last! I would skip this section, but for those few, those readers really engaged in the Hans & Clavdia “romance,” this is the exciting climax. Oh, those poor people.
P382 A few days passed, and young Hans Castorp had now spent seven months up here, whereas Joachim, who already had five months to his credit when his cousin first arrived, could now look back on twelve months, one round year -- round in the cosmic sense, as well, for in the time since the small, sturdy locomotive had dropped him off up here, the earth had returned to its starting point, having completed one orbit around the sun...
Well... yes and no. And this may be another area where the science of the time, astrophysics in this instance, was lacking. I don’t really know. But since Mann has brought up the “cosmic sense” I feel it’s only right for me to run it into the ground.
It’s true that the earth has returned to the same point in its orbit that it had occupied a year before. But it would be very wrong to imagine that this was the same point in space, for our star -- the Sun -- is, at every moment, dragging the whole complex of the solar system along with it as it orbits around the galactic center. (See HERE.) And, of course, our galaxy itself is not immobile but involved in a gravity inspired dance with Andromeda and the Magellanic Clouds. (Not to even get into the inherent expansion of the universe.) None of that was known when this book was published. Still, the earth has spiraled forward one year of the Sun’s orbit of the supermassive black hole (or black holes) that hold our galaxy together. And over that time the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies have moved a small distance toward their eventual collision. Alas, that spectacular event will not fall within the seven years covered by this book.
...It was carnival time. Mardi Gras was upon them, and Hans Castorp inquired of the one-year-old what that was like up here.
P383 “Magnifique!” responded Settembrini, who had happened to meet the cousins on their morning constitutional. “Splendid!” he said. “As rollicking as in the Prater. You’ll see, my good engineer. And now the dance is taken up, we play gallants most dashing,” he quoted, and went on shooting a volley of taut, satirical words accompanying his satire with deft gestures of arm, head, and shoulder... “The program includes various danses macabres. Unfortunately a certain number of last year’s participants won’t be able to appear this time, because the party is over at half past nine.”
“You mean . . . oh, I see now -- how, marvelous!” Hans Castorp laughed...
P384 ...Already at breakfast on Mardi Gras morning... the dining hall was filled with the rattling and tootling of all sorts of toy instruments... And by evening both in the dining hall and the social rooms the festivities continued to grow until at one point . . . [I would remind the reader that that ellipsis was Mann's while mine are "..."] At this juncture we alone know to what these carnival festivities eventually led, thanks to Hans Castorp’s enterprising spirit. But we are not about to let our knowledge of what happened disrupt the deliberate pace of our narrative; instead, we shall give time the honor it is due and not rush into things -- perhaps we shall even draw these events out a bit, for we share with young Hans Castorp the same moral scruples that for so long had kept him from precipitating such events.
...
A note to Hans from Settembrini,
But bear in mind, the mountain’s mad with spells tonight,
And should a will-o’-wisp decide your way to light,
Beware -- its lead may prove deceptive.
I believe this is Mephisto talking to Faust while they are on Der Zauberberg on Walpurgisnacht... Not quite, but close. The following is from Goethe’s Faust Part One (right after Faust has seduced and abandoned Gretchen, I should note)
------------------------
XXI
Walpurgis-Night
Mephisto and Faust are mid conversation,
Mephistopheles
I notice no such thing, I vow!
’Tis winter still within my body:
Upon my path I wish for frost and snow.
How sadly rises, incomplete and ruddy,
The moon’s lone disk, with its belated glow,
And lights so dimly, that, as one advances,
At every step one strikes a rock or tree!
Let us, then, use a Jack-o’-lantern’s glances:
I see one yonder, burning merrily.
Ho, there! my friend! I’ll levy thine attendance:
Why waste so vainly thy resplendence?
Be kind enough to light us up the steep!
Will-O’-The–Wisp
My reverence, I hope, will me enable
To curb my temperament unstable;
For zigzag courses we are wont to keep.
Mephistopheles
Indeed? he’d like mankind to imitate!
Now, in the Devil’s name, go straight,
Or I’ll blow out his being’s flickering spark!
Will-O’-The–Wisp
You are the master of the house, I mark,
And I shall try to serve you nicely.
But then, reflect: the mountain’s magic-mad to-day,
And if a will-o’-the-wisp must guide you on the way,
You mustn’t take things too precisely.
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P386 ...For his part, Hans Castorp felt that he ought to reciprocate tit for tat, that he had to respond by writing a jocular note of his own... He searched his pockets for a pencil, but could not find one, and neither Joachim nor the teacher had one to lend him. His bloodshot eyes wandered eastward for help... And it was at once apparent that what had been a fleeting notion had dissipated into a wider circle of associations -- he turned pale and completely forgot his original intention.
...
P389 [Settembrini, of course, while Hans is captivated by Clavdia in her Mardi Gras finery,] “Look closer now, my lad!” Hans Castorp heard Herr Settembrini say, as if from some great distance -- his eyes were following her as she now left the dining hall by way of the glass door. “‘Tis Lilith.”
“Who?” Hans Castorp asked.
The question delighted the man of literature. He replied, “The first wife Adam had. You’d best beware . . .”
...
Goethe’s Faust, again,
FAUST
Who's that, pray?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Mark her well! That's Lilith.
FAUST
Who?
MEPHISTOPHELES
Adam's first wife. Of her rich locks beware!
That charm in which she's parallel'd by few;
When in its toils a youth she doth ensnare,
He will not soon escape, I promise you.
-------------
...
“According to Hebrew traditions... [Adam was married twice.] Lilith then became a wraith who haunts young men by night -- her beautiful hair makes her particularly dangerous.”
P390 “Why, how disgusting! A wraith with beautiful hair. You simply can’t stomach things like that, can you? And so here you come and turn the lights back on, so to speak, so you can set young men back on the right path -- isn’t that what you’re up to, Lodovico?” Hans Castorp said giddily. He had drunk quite a bit of burgundy and champagne.
...”You will please use forms of address appropriate to the educated West. No first names. Formal pronouns, if you please. What you are trying to do there doesn’t suit you at all.”
“But why not? It’s Mari Gras! It’s common practice on an evening like this.”
“Yes, just to add a little uncivil excitement to things. For people to use informal pronouns or first names when they have no real reason to do so is a repulsively barbaric practice, a slovenly game, a way of playing with the givens of civilization and human progress, against both it is directed -- shamelessly, insolently directed. Please, do not presume that in calling you ‘my lad,’ I was addressing you in that fashion. I was merely quoting a passage from the masterpiece of your national literature. I was speaking poetically, as it were.”
Mann makes a great deal of the use of formal and informal pronouns, even more so in Doctor Faustus. Not an easy thing to translate into English. I suspect Settembrini, or should I say at this point, Lodovico, would not care much for English on that basis alone.
Hans, wine emboldened, has quite a long speech here summing up the relationship of the two men and winding up with this,
...”Forgive me, then, and don’t think badly of me. To your health, Lodovico -- I wish you long life. I empty my glass in honor of your literary efforts to eradicate human suffering!” he concluded, and throwing his head back, he downed his burgundy and champagne in two great gulps. “And now let’s go join the others.”
P392 “My good engineer, whatever has got into you?” the Italian asked, his eyes full of amazement, rising to leave the table as well. “Those sound like words of farewell.”
“No -- why should it be a farewell?” Hans Castorp said, ducking the issue, not just in a metaphorical sense with his words, but also physically, swinging his upper body around in a wide curve and taking the arm of Fraulein Engelhart, who had come to fetch them...
Eventually, inevitably, Hans seeks a pencil from Clavdia,
p396 ...She rummaged in her leather handbag, peered down into it, first pulled out a handkerchief, from which she then extracted a silver pencil-holder, a slight, fragile trinket, never intended for serious use. That pencil long ago, the first one, had been more straightforward, handier.
I apologize for this filthy language, but I’m only quoting the text.
Oh dear...
“Voila,” she said and picked the little pencil up by the tip, holding it between thumb and forefinger and waggling it back and forth...
P397 “A poor thing, but thine own,” he said, brow to brow with her, gazing down at the pencil...
“Oh, and you are witty, too,” she replied with a brief smile, raising her head now and letting him take the pencil... (Though God only knew how he had managed to be witty -- with apparently not a drop of blood left in his head.)
...
I’m not going to attempt to capture all of this exchange, but there are a few tidbits that have interest beyond Walpurgis night.
P398 Clavdia speaking of Joachim: “He is a very rigid, very respectable, very ‘German’ young man.” [The italics here indicate that the text is translated from the French in the original.]
“Rigid? Respectable?” he repeated. “I understand French better than I speak it. What you mean to say is that he’s pedantic. Do you consider us Germans pedantic -- us other Germans?”
“We are talking about your cousin. But it’s true, you are all a little bourgeois. You love order more than liberty, all Europe knows that.”
If I only had a nickle for every child of the bourgeoisie who used "bourgeois" in a pejorative sense...
“Love . . . love. What is it exactly? The word lacks definition. What one man has, the other loves, as the German proverb puts it, Hans Castorp contended. “I have been giving freedom some thought of late,” he continued. “That is, I heard the word mentioned so often, that I started thinking about it. I’ll tell you in French what it is I’ve been thinking. What all Europe refers to as liberty is, perhaps, something rather pedantic, rather bourgeois in comparison to our need for order -- that’s the point!”
P399 “You don’t say! How amusing. Was it really your cousin who got you thinking such strange things?”
“No, he is truly a good soul, his is a simple temperament, not prone to dangers, you understand. But he is not a bourgeois, he is a military man.”
...
P400 ...”Let’s sit here and watch, as if in a dream. It is like a dream for me, you know for me to be sitting here like this -- like an especially deep dream, for a man must sleep very heavily to dream like this. What I’m trying to say is: it is a dream I know well, have dreamed for a long time, yes, eternally, sitting here with you as I am now. Behold -- eternity.”
“A poet!” she said. “A bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet -- behold, Germany all rolled into one, just as it should be!”
“I’m afraid we are not at all, not in the least, as we should be,” he replied. “Not in any way. We are perhaps life’s problem children, that’s all.” [At first I thought by “we” he meant he and Clavdia, but I think he means Germans.]
...
After Clavdia let’s loose the first thunderbolt, that she is leaving the next day,
p402 “So you will be coming back?”
“That’s an open question. Or rather, the real question is when. As for me, you know, I love freedom above all else -- especially the freedom to choose my place of residence. I can hardly expect you to understand what it means to be obsessed with independence. It’s in the blood, perhaps.“
“And your husband in Daghestan consents to -- your liberty?”
“It is my illness that allows me liberty. [It would be tempting to think that Mann could here be addressing the status of women at a time when suffrage was a topic in some nations and the status of women in general was even worse than it is today. Alas, I can’t think of anything I’ve read by Mann that suggests any interest at all in women. They are mostly used symbolically, and here I believe Clavdia represents Finn/Slavic Russia. There’s a great deal more about what it means to be German in Doctor Faustus, but what interests me with all that and with the history of the 20th century also in the can, is that, psychologically, both the Germans and Russians are fixated on their exposed status -- their being surrounded on all sides by enemies. The history of the Soviet Union in the 20th century could be explained in terms of the International aspect of socialism, but it can also be explained in terms of nationalistic paranoia and the long history of Russia having been assaulted by Mongols and Turks and Germans for centuries. And the case of Germany in both the 19th and 20th century is even clearer. The Nazi’s added a particularly racial aspect to this, but Bismarck was no less paranoid. And, living in the shadow of Napoleon and the French Revolution, it’s not like there was no basis for this paranoia. And what people mean by “bourgeois” is always interesting. I would guess that Clavdia -- after Dostoevsky -- means that the Germans are more concerned with money and the display of wealth, of demonstrating that you are a sound member of the middle class. Hans, with reference to Joachim, refutes this by asserting the superior German sense of honor and duty. And “liberty” or “freedom” would certainly seem to be individualistic bourgeois values. So there’s a good deal of the pot calling the kettle black here.] You see, this is now my third time here. I’ve been here a year now. I may well return. But you will be far from here long before that.”
“Do you think so, Clavdia?”
“And my first name, too! You certainly do take the customs of carnival very seriously!”
...
P403 [Clavdia about Joachim,] “Poor devil. He is, in fact, more ill than he knows. Your friend the Italian, by the way, is not doing very much better.”
P404 “He says so himself. But my cousin -- is that true? You frighten me.”
“It is quite possible that he will die if he tries to be a soldier on the plains.”
...
[Hans,] ... “Let me ask you something else. From time to time a Russian gentleman who lives in town comes to visit you. Who is he? What is his purpose in coming?” [Stalker red flag waves in the air.]
“You’re enormously skilled in espionage, I must say. All right -- I’ll give you an answer. Yes, he is an ailing compatriot, a friend. I made his acquaintance at another resort, some years ago. Our relationship? We have tea together, we smoke two or three papyrosy, we gossip, we philosophize, we talk about man, God, life, morality, a thousand things. And with that my tale is ended. Are you satisfied?”
It’s at this point in the book that I always have the sense we may have been following the wrong protagonist this whole time.
“About morality as well! And what discoveries have you in fact made about morality, for example?”
“Morality? It interests you, does it? All right -- it seems to us that one ought not to search for morality in virtue, which is to say in reason, in discipline, in good behavior, in respectability -- but in just the opposite, I would say: in sin, in abandoning oneself to danger, to whatever can harm us, destroy us. It seems to us that it is more moral to lose oneself and let oneself be ruined than to save oneself. The great moralists have never been especially virtuous, but rather adventurers in evil, in vice, great sinners who teach us as Christians how to stoop to misery. You must find that all very repugnant.”
The overlap between The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus grows as I read this for the first time since reading the latter work for the first time.
P405 He fell silent... her pencil between his fingers -- and from lowered eyes, Hans Lorenz Castorp’s blue eyes, he looked out into the room, which was empty now. The guests had scattered. The piano in the far corner across from them tinkled softly, disjointedly; the patient form Mannheim was playing with just one hand... [I had to confirm that he's the other man with a crush on Clavdia] Only these four [Fraulein Engelhart has been turning the pages of the music] were left now from the Mardi Gras party -- they sat there motionless...
[Clavdia, ] “...our carnival festivities are over.”... “You know the consequences, monsieur.”
But hans Castorp rejected this... “Never, Clavdia. Never will I address you formally, never in life or in death, if I may put it that way, and surely I may. That form of address, as cultivated in the West and in civilized society, seems terribly bourgeois and pedantic to me. Why, indeed, use such forms? Formality is the same thing as pedantry! All those things you have established in regard to morality, you and your ailing compatriot -- do you seriously suppose they surprise me? What sort of dolt do you take me for? So then tell me, what do you think of me?”
“That is a subject requiring little thought. You are a decent, simple fellow from a good family, with handsome manners, a docile pupil to his teachers, who will soon return to the flatlands in order to forget completely that he ever spoke in a dream here and to help repay his great and powerful fatherland with honest labor on the wharves. And there you have your own intimate photograph, taken with no apparatus at all. You do find it a good likeness, I hope?”
...
At this point he proclaims his love for her... and manages to slide Pribislav in there, too, though Clavdia, oddly, seems to overlook that.
p407 ... “I don’t care, I don’t care about Carducci and the republic of eloquence and human progress over time, because I love you!”
She softly stroked the short-cropped hair at the back of his head with one hand. “My little bourgeois!” she said. “My handsome bourgeois with the little moist spot. Is it true that you love me so much?”
We are almost at the end now and I would so like to fade out here. Alas, the next paragraph, while perhaps a new low in love making (unless you’ve already read Doctor Faustus where love/sin smitten Adrian goes so far as to address the poor girl with a different name so that, as I recall, the reader never does learn her proper name), is important for the “novel of ideas” aspect of TMM. And so we must delve in,
... “Ah, love, you know. The body, love, death, are simply one and the same. Because the body is sickness and depravity, it is what produces death, yes, both of them, love and death, are carnal, and that is the source of their terror and great magic! But death, you see, is on the one hand something so disreputable, so impudent that it makes us blush with shame; and on the other it is a most solemn and majestic force -- something much more lofty than a life spent laughing, earning money, and stuffing one’s belly -- much more venerable than progress chattering away the ages -- because it is history and nobility and piety, the eternal and the sacred, something that makes you remove your hat and walk on tiptoe. In the same way, the body, and love of the body, too, are indecent and disagreeable; the body’s surface blushes and turns pale because it is afraid and ashamed of itself. But at the same time it is a great and divine glory, a miraculous image of organic life, a holy miracle of form and beauty, and love of it, of the human body, is likewise an extremely humanistic affair and an educating force greater than all the pedagogy in the world! Ah, ravishing organic beauty, not done in oils or stone, but made of living and corruptible matter, full of the feverish secret of life and decay! Consider the marvelous symmetry of the human frame, the shoulders and the hips and the breasts as they blossom at each side of the chest, and the ribs arranged in pairs, and the naval set amid the supple belly, and the dark sexual organs between the thighs!... What an immense festival of caresses lies in those delicious zones of the human body! A festival of death with no weeping afterward!... oh, my human image made of water and protein, destined for the contours of the grave, let me perish, my lips against yours!”
...
She said, “You are indeed a gallant suitor, one who knows how to woo in a very profound, German fashion.”
...
“Adieu, my Carnival Prince! I can predict that you’ll see a nasty rise in your fever chart this evening.”
... Over her shoulder she said softly, “Don’t forget to return my pencil.”
And she left.
To paraphrase Shakespeare,
Was ever woman in this manor wooed?
Was ever woman in this manor won?
And to think, that piker Faust required Mephisto-supplied jewelry to woo Gretchen.
Here’s something about Friedrick Nietsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra I just ran into on Medium HERE,
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The conditions that activate Zarathustra’s convalescence — his capacity for pursuing “the great health” — might include, for example, the metaphysical inheritances of millennia as they are operative in contemporary moral discourses and political institutions. In any event “[t]he energy of health betrays itself in the case of illness in the abrupt resistance against the contagious element.” “What is inherited” over the millennia first given direction by Socrates “is not sickness but sickliness: the lack of strength to resist the danger of infections, etc. the broken resistance; morally speaking, resignation and meekness in the face of the enemy.” A degree of good health is necessary for warding off the most extreme symptoms of this sickliness in order to identify the proper social remedy against decadence and to acquire the will to implement it. Taking these measures may be controversial, because good health is complicated when “all signs of the Übermenschlichen appear as illness or madness in human beings.”
A couple days after finding the above, I ran into another piece on Medium where the author set up Nietzsche’s Ubermensch as an evil, Ayn Randean totem that he then proceeded to attack mercilessly. On the one hand, I’m pleased to see old Crazy Fritz still getting so much attention. On the other hand, it’s depressing to still see “opinion makers” misunderstanding his concepts so badly. Though it’s also true that German thinkers like Nietzsche and Heidegger are largely to blame for being so hard to understand/easy to misinterpret. I would blame their translators, except that Germans seem as bad as anyone else when it comes to this misinterpreting.
There’s a process in stars where, as they collapse into denser and denser cores, their constituent parts smash together until you end up with nothing but a mass of neutrons, A neutron star. I’m imagining a similar process that would lead to the ultimate German philosophy where all the words would be compressed into one long, book length word. Perfect. Yet perfectly indecipherable.
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The Magic Mountain
Chapter 5 continued
Danse Macabre
I’ve been looking forward to this section. Let’s see what Mann tells us about death and dying here.
The Austrian horseman demonstrates a desperate fear of death through his financially ruinous call for oxygen. This is neither honorable nor spiritual.
Young Leila is quite childish, which is not unreasonable but also fails to hint at any Dostoevskean moral improvement by the confrontation with death.
Fritz Rotbein, the businessman who speaks of the European flower business and considers his own rib resection (as I would) as a doubtful business proposition.
And now for what I think may be the coup de gras for poor Hans,
P362 Behrens:
“...You did a proper bit of courting there at the end -- got in just under the wire, didn’t you? [they are fumigating Leila’s room after her death] I like that about you -- taking on my little lung-whistlers in their cages, seeing as you’re in relatively robust health yourself. A nice trait. No, no -- you cannot deny it, it’s a very pretty trait in your character. Would you like me to introduce you to some patients now and then? I’ve plenty other caged finches here -- that’s if you’re still interested. For instance I’m just about to look in on ‘Lady Overblown.’ Do you want to come along?...”
...
P365 ... He [a doctor in Zurich] had overblown her! [Pneumothorax]... The upshot was that she had come back up here in an overblown state, with constriction of the heart and shortness of breath -- ha! Hee hee hee -- and Behrens had sworn like a trooper and sent her straight to bed. Because she was now seriously ill... Ha ha ha -- look at his face, what a funny face! And pointing a finger at Hans Castorp, she laughed so hard at the face he was making that her forehead began to turn purple... “You are literally hovering between life and death,” he [Behrens] had shouted... What a bear he was -- ha ha ha...
It was not clear why the director’s comments had sent her into gales of laughter. Was it because he had “turned the air blue” and she did not really believe him -- or that she did believe him, as she surely must, but found her state of “hovering between life and death” too funny for words?... [Hans Castorp] sent her flowers all the same -- but never saw the gleeful Frau Zimmermann again... For after being kept under oxygen for several days, she had died in the arms of her husband, who had been called to her bedside by telegram. “A jumbo-size goose,” the director had volunteered in summary when he told Hans Castorp the news.
...
P367 ...Lauro [Tous-les-deux’s surviving son] turned out to be an astonishingly pretty young man with glowing eyes... but he carried on in such a dramatic, boastful way that the visitors -- Hans Castorp no less than Joachim Ziemssen -- were both happy to close the patient’s door behind them again... pretty Lauro had gushed on and on in surging, clanking, and unbearably high-flown French phrases about how he intended to die a hero’s death, comme heros, a l’espagnol, just like his brother, de meme que son fier jeune frere, Fernando, who likewise had died a Spanish hero. And he went on like that -- speaking with broad gestures, ripping back his shirt to expose his yellow chest to the fatal blow -- until a coughing fit stifled his rodomontade, bringing delicate, rusty-colored froth to his lips and giving the cousins an excuse to withdraw on tiptoe.
P368 They said nothing further about their visit with Lauro, and even in the quiet of their own rooms, they refrained from judging his behavior. They both enjoyed, however, their visits with Anton Karlovitch Ferge from Saint Petersburg, a fellow with a huge good-natured moustache and a protruding Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured; he lay there in his bed, recovering very slowly and with great difficulty from an attempted pneumothorax, which, Herr Ferge said, had come within an inch of costing him his life. It had been a severe shock to his system, a pleural shock...
I’ve included this introduction because we will see more of Herr Ferge, but he is really not part of this examination of people’s reaction to death, so I won’t include any more. I do like Ferge. He tells interesting stories about his prior life in Russia as a traveling fire-insurance salesman and is insistent that he never speaks about “higher things” but only sticks to the facts.
...
P370 ...From time to time they also visited Teddy, the boy from the Fridericianum, an elegant, refined, blond fourteen year-old, who had a private nurse and wore white silk tie-string pajamas. He was an orphan, but rich, as he himself admitted... on days when he was feeling better he would sometimes leave his bed for an hour, put on a handsome, sporty outfit, and join the social whirl downstairs. The ladies liked to tease him, and he enjoyed listening to their conversations... Then he would go lie down again. And So Teddy idled his time away, elegantly, making it clear that he expected nothing more of life than this.
Frau von Mallinckrodt sounds like Anna K, but worse, and without Anna's good qualities. Also, Mann has a fondness for extreme German names like Mallinckrodt. Doctor Faustus is filled with them.
P371 In room number 50 lay Frau Mallinckrodt -- Natalie was her first name. She had black eyes and wore golden earrings; a flirt who loved her finery, she was nevertheless a perfect Job, a Lazarus in a female body, whom God had visited with every sort of affliction. Her organism seemed to be so inundated by toxins that she was ravaged by numerous illnesses, sometimes alternately, sometimes all at once... In short, the woman’s life was a horror. She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children -- as she freely admitted to the cousins -- for another man (still half a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover. She now had no home, although she was not penniless -- her former husband saw to that... Well aware that she was a faithless and sinful woman, she bore all the plagues of job with amazing patience and poise, with a fiery female’s elemental powers of resistance, she triumphed over the misery of her dark-skinned body, even turning a white gauze bandage, which she was forced to wear wrapped around her head for some awful reason, into a becoming piece of attire. She was constantly changing her jewelry... With golden rings dangling at her ears, she quickly told the cousins what had happened to her: about the respectable, but boring husband, her equally respectable and boring children, who had turned out just like their father and whom she had never especially warmed to, and about the half-grown boy with whom she had run off and whose poetic displays of affection she praised at length...
P372 ...The poetic adolescent’s delicacy only served to spur... [Hans] to take the opposite course, to find occasion for paying frequent visits to unhappy Frau von Mallinckrodt and for performing little nursing services that required no special training... He performed these little services when he would drop by on his way to the dinning hall or after a walk, telling Joachim to go on ahead... and each time he felt his whole being expand with a joy rooted in a sense of helpfulness and quiet importance, but intermingled with a certain jaunty delight in the spotless Christian impression his good deeds made -- an impression so devout, caring, and praiseworthy, in fact, that no serious objections whatever could be raised against it, either from the military or a humanistic-pedagogic standpoint.
Again, we have a not very spiritual response to serious disease by a not at all spiritual woman. One could certainly understand this Natalie throwing herself under a train, while Anna -- besides being a more interesting person -- still had so much more going for her. Though I guess it’s actually more accurate to say that it was Leo Tolstoy who threw Anna under the train.
And I can’t help thinking that Mann, in this section, is really throwing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky under a sort of train.
P373 We have not yet mentioned Karen Karstedt, although Hans Castorp and Joachim took special interest in her. She was one of Behren’s private outpatients, and the director had commended her to the cousin’s charity. She had been up here four years now, was penniless herself and dependent on skinflint relatives... She lived in an inexpensive boardinghouse in Dorf -- nineteen years old, a slip of a thing, with smooth oily hair, eyes that shyly tried to hide a glint that matched the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a distinctively husky but sympathetic voice. She coughed almost incessantly and had bandages on all her fingers, the result of open sores from the toxins in her body.
...
Lengthy description of an outing the three take to see a skating event in Dorf and bobsled races. And there’s a description of attending the “Bioscope Theater”, an early cinema. There they run into Frau Stohr who ends up attempting “to get to the bottom of the relationship of these three young people”,
p378 ...It was true, after all, that for Hans Castorp the relationship with poor Karen was a kind of substitute, a vaguely useful device -- but that was true of all his other charitable enterprises as well. Yet these pious works were, at the same time, an end in themselves, and the satisfaction he found in... seeing poor Karen clap her hands with joy and gratitude... was not only of a vicarious and relative kind, but also genuine and immediate. It arose from an intellectual tradition diametrically opposed to the one represented by Herr Settembrini’s pedagogy, but all the same one quite worthy of the designation “placet experiri” -- or so it seemed to Hans Castorp.
P379 [The three are walking again after breakfast,] ...A cemetery was visible about a quarter of the way up its [Dorfberg’s?] slope: the town cemetery, surrounded by a wall, presumably commanding a lovely view... which made it an obvious goal for a walk. And the three of them did hike up there one beautiful morning... The cousins, one with a brick-red face, the other tanned bronze, walked along without overcoats, which would only have been burdensome in the glaring sun -- young Ziemssen wearing sport clothes and rubber galoshes, Hans Castorp dressed much the same, though in long trousers, since he was not the sort who gave much thought to his physique. It was between the beginning and the middle of February of a new year. Yes, the last number in the date had indeed changed since Hans Castorp’s arrival up here...
P380 And so the trio also walked to the cemetery on Dorfberg one day -- this excursion, too, is recorded here for the sake of rendering a full account... Karen Karstedt did not indulge in self-deception about even the final stages of her illness; she knew only too well how things stood and what the necrosis in her fingertips meant. She knew, moreover, that her skinflint relatives would hardly want to hear anything about the expense of transporting her home after her demise and that she would be allotted a modest plot up above for a final resting place. And so one might very well conclude that, as a goal for an excursion, [Hans had suggested it] it was more morally fitting than many others -- the movie theater or the start of the bobsled run, for instance...
P381 ...Standing there in the snow beside the little stone gate to the cemetery, they took in the view and then entered, swinging aside the unlocked wrought-iron grill hinged to the stone.
...The silence, the solitude, the serenity of the place seemed both deep and secret, in many senses of those words...
...As for the inscriptions, the names came from every corner of the earth, were written in English, Russian or other Slavic languages, in German, Portuguese, and many more tongues. The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality -- on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty. The field was populated almost exclusively by youth rather than virtue, by unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form of existence.
This is also suggestive of all the Great War cemeteries soon to dot Europe. Both the short lifespans and the widespread origins. And weren’t they gathered there at least in part because of the toxins in their bodies politic? If not in their own bodies.
Where have I heard it said about suicide that at some point the question is not, “Why should you kill yourself?” but rather “Why not?” (Perhaps this was that book about Michel Foucault.) Perhaps we should look at the Great War the same way, the question finally was “Why not go off to war?” America, strangely, was really the only nation that failed to see the logic behind that question in 1914.
Since this book is, too a large extent, also about the Great War, it’s worth asking now, a century later, if the Pax Americana is indeed coming to an end after almost seventy years, if this isn’t at least in part because the public -- and this time it’s the American public as well -- is starting to ask itself, “Why not go off to war and death?”
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Research
P324 Quite a bit of reading went on at the International Sanatorium Berghof... this was particularly true of newcomers and short-termers, since residents of many months or even years had long since learned how to ravage time without diverting or employing their minds, had become virtuosi at putting time behind them, and declared openly that only clumsy bunglers needed a book to hang on to...
So this suggests to me another aspect of time and the passage of time that I don’t recall coming up before, the more monastic/spiritual/meditative approach to the passage of time. The way of the Desert Fathers, let’s say.
It’s hard to equate these gossipy people with Sara Maitland and her search for “silence,” and if I’m right about her -- that her search had more to do with “voice hearing” than experiencing “silence” -- then the Berghof probably wouldn’t have done her much good. But I still think there may be something the monastics and the sanatorium crowd may have had in common when it came to mastering the passage of time. And all the more so as this crowd was having to contemplate death.
And this brings us to another area where the Berghof excels compared with our contemporary near-the-end-of-life retreat into “independent” and “assisted living” quarters. I believe we will see later that not everyone lives in quarters as spartan as Hans’s, but in general there is a minimizing of the accouterments of life, a leaving behind (in the flatlands) of one’s previous life. Today people seem to drag their lives in with them, at the point where you might expect them to be leaving that behind and focusing on the next life (or at least on death and the leaving behind of their past). No doubt this is because death is the last thing we do want to confront. Even the word eschatology sounds unpleasant.
I like to imagine the Berghof, or a possible alternative berghof, as a sort of monastic hospice. You could check yourself in when you’re ready to leave “this life” behind and focus on prayer and meditation and living a simple life for a time -- with access to (primarily palliative) medical care and a splendid kitchen.
Our Hans is a young man and doesn’t feel like he’s dying. As we are about to see, he’s using this opportunity to research, study, “take stock.” But for others, the Berghof would have offered an opportunity to make peace with the world or with their God. A Tibetan Berghof would have included study of the literature on dying and preparation for making that transition. Meditation and chanting would seem to be a good use of a person’s time here.
...
P328 What was life, really? It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction. It was the existence of what, in actuality, has no inherent ability to exist, but only balances with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair. It was not matter, it was not spirit. It was something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like a rainbow above a waterfall, [dear God, is that a reference to the passage about rainbows and waterfalls in Goethe's Faust? I hope not] like a flame. But although it was not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and revulsion, it was matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without -- existence in its lewd form. It was a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space. It was furtive, lascivious, sordid -- nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature. Out of overcompensation for its own instability, yet governed by its inherent laws of formation, a bloated concoction of water, protein, salt, and fats -- what we call flesh -- ran riot, unfolded, and took shape, achieving form, ideality, beauty, and yet all the while was the quintessence of sensuality and desire. This form and this beauty were not derived from the spirit, as in the works of poetry and music, nor derived from some neutral material both consumed by spirit and innocently embodying it, as is the case with the form and beauty of the visual arts. Rather, they were derived from and perfected by substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh.
P329 This was the image of life revealed to young Hans Castorp as he lay there preserving his body warmth in furs and woolens, looking down on the valley glistening in the frosty night, bright beneath the luster of a dead star. The image hovered there in space, remote and yet as near as his senses -- it was a body: dull, whitish flesh, steaming, redolent, sticky; its skin blemished with natural defects, blotches, pimples, discolorations, cracks, and hard, scaly spots, and covered with the delicate currents and whorls of rudimentary, downy lanugo. The body was leaning back, wrapped in the aura of its own vapors, detached from the coldness of the inanimate world, its head crowned with a cool keratinous, pigmented substance that was a product of its own skin, its hands clasped behind the neck. Gazing out from under lowered lids, the eyes had a slanted look because of a racial variation in the formation of the lid; its mouth was half-open, its lips pouted slightly...
...
P335 As interesting as all this is, it’s important to keep in mind that this was the science of either the first or possibly the third decade of the 20th century. Pre-DNA, for example. The paragraph dealing with “acquired characteristics” would not be clarified until genes were understood.
P336 ... when one looked at chemical molecules, one found oneself at the edge of a yawning abyss far more mysterious than that between organic and inorganic nature -- at the edge of the abyss between the material and non-material. Because the molecule was made up of atoms, and the atom was not even close to being large enough to be called extraordinarily small. It was so small, in fact, such a tiny, initial, ephemeral concentration of something immaterial -- of something not yet matter, but related to matter -- of energy, that one could not yet, or perhaps no longer, think of it as matter, but rather as both the medium and boundary between the material and immaterial. But that posed the question of another kind of spontaneous generation, far more baffling and fantastic than that of organic life: the generation of matter from nonmatter. And indeed, the gap between matter and nonmatter demanded -- at least as urgently as the one between organic and inorganic nature -- that there be something to fill it. [quantum field theory] There must of necessity be a chemistry of nonmatter, of unsubstantial compounds, from which matter then arose, just as organisms had come from inorganic compounds, and atoms would then be the microbes and protozoa of matter -- substantial by nature, and yet not really. [What he says here about energy is interesting, as it is consistent with QCD, which wouldn’t actually exist until the 1960s. And QFT in particular.] But confronted with the statement that atoms were “so small they were no longer small,” one lost all sense of proportion, because “no longer small” was tantamount to “immense”; and that last step to the atom ultimately proved, without exaggeration, to be a fateful one. For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.
P337 The atom was an energy-laden cosmic system, in which planets rotated frantically around a sunlike center, while comets raced through its ether at the speed of light, held in their eccentric orbits by the gravity of the core.That was not merely a metaphor -- any more than it would be a metaphor to call the body of a multicelled creature a “city of cells.” [This seems to be anachronistic. Somehow beyond the Plum Pudding Model of the atom that was current at the time and that wouldn't be displaced until after the Rutherford Gold Foil experiment. But, if we allow it, the metaphorical “gravity” would be the strong force, while the study of these “comets” would be QED. And the true, much stranger, paths of electrons wouldn’t be known until the 1930s] A city, a state, a social community organized around the division of labor was not merely comparable to organic life, it repeated it. And in the same way, the innermost recesses of nature were repeated, mirrored on a vast scale, in the macrocosmic world of stars, whose swarms, clusters, groupings, and constellations, pale against the moon, hovering above the valley glistening with frost and above the head of this master of muffled masquerade. [The existence of galaxies beyond ours wasn’t demonstrated until 1929, by Edwin Hubble] Was it illicit to think that certain planets [would these be hadrons? I’m getting confused] of the atomic solar system -- among all those hosts of solar systems in all those milky ways that constituted matter -- that the state of some planet or other in that inner world might not correspond to the conditions that made the earth an abode of life? For a slightly tipsy young master of the muffling art with an “abnormal” skin condition, who was no longer totally lacking in experience when it came to illicit matters, this was a speculation that bore the stamp of logic and truth and, far from being absurd, seemed as perfectly obvious as it was illuminating. Once the cosmic character of the “smallest” bits of matter became apparent, any objection about the “smallness” of these stars in the inner world would have been quite irrelevant -- and concepts like inner and outer had now lost their foundation as well. The world of the atom was an outer world, just as it was highly probably that the earthly star on which we lived was a profoundly inner world when regarded organically. Had not one researcher in his visionary boldness spoken of the “beasts of the milky way” -- cosmic monsters whose flesh, bones, and brains were formed from solar systems? But if that was so, as Hans Castorp believed it to be, then at the very moment when one thought one had reached the outermost edge, everything began all over again. [Isn’t this just the equivalent of the macrocosm and microcosm from the beginning of Faust?] But that meant, did it not, that perhaps in inner world after inner world within his own nature he was present over and over again -- a hundred young Hans Castorps, all wrapped up warmly, but with numbed fingers and flushed face, gazing out from a balcony onto a frosty, moonlit night high in the Alps and studying, out of humanistic and medical interest, the life of the human body?
What’s amusing about this, if he really went to so much trouble to introduce those concepts from Goethe’s Faust, is that the intellectual mystification he’s going for here is really similar to the Multiverse which Schrödinger would popularize in 1952. And he didn’t require a cat for that.
...
P339 ...disease was life’s lascivious form. And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter -- just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward lust and death, was doubtless taken when, as the result of a tickle by some unknown incursion, spirit increased in density for the first time, creating a pathologically rank growth of tissue that formed, half in pleasure, half in defense, as the prelude to matter, the transition from the immaterial to the material. This was creation’s true Fall, its Original Sin. [One of the curiosities of Quantum Field Theory is that the value of a field can not fall to zero. Even in a vacuum -- in the void -- each field generates “particles” of its particular frequency and these particles come into and go out of existence again. “Spontaneous generation” would be one way you could describe this state of things.] The second spontaneous generation, the birth of the organic form from the inorganic, was only the sad progression of corporeality into consciousness, just as disease in an organism was the intoxicating enhancement and crude accentuation of its own corporeality. Life was only the next step along the reckless path of spirit turned disreputable, matter blushing in reflex, both sensitive and receptive to whatever had awakened it.
Like Tristram Shandy’s Uncle Toby, I can’t pass up this wonderful opportunity to ride one of my favorite hobby horses. Now we are dealing with atomic, and quantum science before much was known about either. In 1907 nuclear science didn’t exist because the nucleus had not yet been discovered -- one of the most shocking and paradigm shifting experiments of all time was the Geiger-Marsden or Rutherford Gold Foil experiment between 1908 and 1913.
If his “planets” really are the components of an atomic nucleus, which I’m less sure of, these are the nucleons or hadrons, and not much would be known about them until the 1930s. And it wasn’t realized that they weren’t elementary particles until the 1960s and the development of QCD, associated with Murray Gell-mann. As with the “location” or orbit of electrons, the location of nucleons is rather more complicated than the common models would suggest. With all of these subatomic “particles,” the use of the word particle is somewhat misleading. As with everything else in quantum mechanics, it’s probably more accurate to speak of waveforms. Which is why I was interested in the use of the word “energy” above, but I suspect this was just a happy accident of descriptive language. The distinction between “matter” and “nonmatter” is much trickier than young Hans, or anyone in 1907, could have imagined.
The crucial work on the actual electron structure of the atom (the comets in the metaphor above) wasn’t realized until the 1930s by Linus Pauling -- see HERE. It wasn’t until this point that anyone really understood how chemistry really worked.
Postscript: Here's a video giving a quick history of our understanding of the atom and its composition.
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The Magic Mountain
Chapter 5
Humaniora
P299 The Berghof is described as being 150 feet above the valley floor. Never noticed this before. The intersection closest to my building is 150 feet above Market Street, which is close to sea level. Now I have a good idea of how he is situated in the valley.
More about cigars and tobacco.
Poor shameless Hans. Poor Joachim. It is funny when Joachim finally realizes what’s happening. Marcel, in In Search of Lost Time, is no less smitten with Gilbert -- and he’s a child at the time -- but I don’t recall him being quite so shameless. Then again, he does get distracted by Swann and especially by Odette. (It may be time for another search for lost time. But Goethe is first in the queue.)
P312 Our Hans: “...Sometimes I’ve asked myself if I shouldn’t have become a doctor... I could have become any number of things. I could have become a clergyman, too.”
“Really?”
“Yes, sometimes I’ve had the fleeting impression that I would actually have been in my element there.”
“But then why did you become an engineer?” [It’s worth noting here that, it’s really only Settembrini that declares the cousins an officer and an engineer. Really they are young students who have yet to become anything. This would actually be a great way to explain the quantum mechanics concept of superposition -- Hans had, perhaps still has, the potential to be many things until his personal waveform collapses (Copenhagen interpretation) and he becomes (SPOILER)... cannon fodder.]
“Purely by chance. External circumstances tipped the scale more or less.”
“Well, then -- skin, you say? What should I tell you about your sensory envelope? It is your external brain, you see. Ontogenetically speaking, it has the same origin as the apparatus for the so-called higher sensory organs up there in your skull. You should know that the central nervous system is simply a slight modification of the external skin. Among lower animals there is no differentiation whatever between central and peripheral -- they smell and taste with their skin...”
This sounds like what we’ve run into before (Walt Whitman?) about how the body is central to feeling? Everything?
P315 So this is where I picked up the idea that breast milk is formed by the lymph. I tried to find this confirmed elsewhere and failed -- though I can’t imagine where else milk could originate.
Yesterday I was thinking about why Mann was putting Hans Castorp through this shameless exercise, but I think it’s obvious here: So that he could stage manage this rather too detailed scientific conversation with the Hofrat. Though the question of why he chose to do it in this exact way is still open to inquiry.
P316 Behrens: “...There’s a protein in muscle plasma called myosin that coagulates in the muscle fiber and causes rigor mortis.”
“Oh, right, when the body goes stiff after death.” Hans Castorp said cheerfully. “Very good, very good. And then comes the autopsy, the anatomy of the grave.”
“But of course. And you’ve put it very nicely. Then everything gets a lot more diffuse. We evaporate, so to speak. Just think of all that water. All those other ingredients are not very stable without life. Decomposition takes over, and they resolve into simpler chemical compounds, into inorganic matter.”
“Decomposition, corruption,” Hans Castorp said, “but that’s really just a burning off, isn’t it? It all binds with oxygen, if I recall.”
“Absolutely correct, oxidation.”
“And life?”
P317 “That, too. That, too, my lad. That’s oxidation, too. Life is primarily the oxidation of cell protein, that’s where our pretty animal warmth comes from, of which some people have a bit too much. Ah yes, life is dying -- there’s no sense in trying to sugarcoat it -- une destruction organique, as some Frenchman once called it in that flippant way the Frenchies have. And it smells of dying, too, our life does. And if we sometimes think otherwise, it’s because we have a natural bias in the matter.”
Something I’ve mentioned many times in my blogs is how frustrating it is when you don’t know what the author means by a word, or how the author understands a concept, or how the author means for a character to understand a concept. And here we are again.
While Mann could very well have been aware of the theory of Relativity in the 1920s, it’s much less certain that he was informed about Valence bond theory and other breakthroughs in the understanding of atoms, molecules, and the basis of chemistry at this time when understanding of these subjects was finally being won. Behrens, in 1907, certainly wouldn’t have understood the quantum nature of the processes being discussed here and it isn’t likely Mann, when he wrote this, was either.
Yes, this is oxidation, but at a deeper level life is a cascade of drops in quantum states -- something Hans could think of as a musical lowering of tones. Plants create a rise in tone and we, as we breath, drop the tone back down again. The music of organic life.
“And so if someone is interested in life,” Hans Castorp said, “it’s death he’s particularly interested in. Isn’t that so?”
“Well, there’s a certain difference all the same. Life means that the form is retained even though matter is being transformed.”
“But why retain the form?” Hans Castorp asked.
“Why? Now listen here -- there’s nothing the least bit humanist about a comment like that.”
“Form is namby-pamby nonsense.”
“You’re in very bold and daring form today, yourself. Literally kicking over the traces. But I’m fading quickly here,” the director said. “I’m beginning to feel melancholy,” he added, rubbing his eyes with his gigantic hands. “It comes over me, you see. I’ve joined you in a cup of coffee, and certainly it tasted good -- but suddenly it just comes over me and I get melancholy. You gentlemen will have to excuse me. It was quite a special occasion. I found it great sport.”
...
As they walked along the corridor and stared up the stairs, Hans Castorp said, “Now admit it -- that was a good idea of mine.”
P318 “It was a change of pace at any rate,” Joachim replied. “And you two certainly did use the occasion to discuss a lot of things, I must say it was all a little haphazard for me...”
It is hard, here, to put Behrens in the “Evil” camp, as a certain description of the characters of the novel has done. If anything, Hans was the one leading the way toward darkness. But this, perhaps, takes us back to the question of the meaning of tobacco. Was it the cigarette or the coffee -- both stimulants, I believe -- or just the conversation that lead to “melancholy?” Is this at all similar to Peeperkorn’s gin?
This concludes the TMM portion of this blog post.
Field of Dreams,
FIELD OF BLOOD
This is my idea of a theater marquee for a double bill of the Baseball classic film Field of Dreams and my family's re-make of that film. Alternatively, it could be a short shown between Field of Dreams and There Will Be Blood.
Spoilers! The emotional climax of the film Field of Dreams is the scene where Kevin Costner’s character plays catch with his dead father. In my family’s version of the film, this is where the music would turn dire and threatening. I can’t recall the order of events, and all the other witnesses are dead, but when I would play catch with my dad in our backyard in Boulder (when I was in grammar school and involved, for a short time, with Little League baseball) he hit me just above the left eye resulting in the need for extensive stitches and a scar that I was just noticing again the other day. But I came out ahead, as I hit him in the mouth with what passed for my fastball. He was losing teeth and having dental work for years after that. Something I have a better appreciation for now that I’ve finally had to have work done on one of my teeth.
In our version of the film, the “voice” would be saying something like, “If you build it, he will run so far away you won’t even see him in your dreams.” But if there was that climactic scene in our version, the result would be... blood. As I imagine it, the “Doc” character would be a dentist instead and he would have to leave the field to examine my dad’s mouth only to report, “It’s a mess. I might be able to do something but I’m not going to be able to squeeze you in until the week after next. Remind me, what insurance do you have?”
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