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The Magic Mountain
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.
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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...
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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.
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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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