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The Magic Mountain
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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