Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: TMM - Operationes Spirituales cont.
The Magic Mountain
Snow
There are so many reasons this is my favorite part of the book. The description of this particularly snowy winter at the beginning is wonderful. I still love snow, or at least my memory of snow from my youth. And the same goes for skiing. I only went skiing a handful of times, but it was always such an unusually natural experience. For me, skiing was more about being out in the Colorado mountains in the snow than it was about mastering the “sport.” You just had to know enough to stay upright and get where you wanted to go. If my family hadn’t moved to SoCal, I probably would have transitioned to cross country skiing. Instead I gave it up.
I’m sure my, rented, equipment in the early 1960s was more advanced than what Hans was using in the first decade of the century, but my skis were also wood. In fact I refused to use metal skis. But enough of that. While snow and skiing does strike a cord with me, that’s not why this section is the heart of the book.
P563 ...When he would stop -- not moving a muscle, so that he could not hear even himself -- the silence was absolute, perfect, a padded soundlessness, like none ever known or perceived anywhere else in the world. There was not a breath of wind to brush softly against the trees, not a rustle, not the call of a bird. It was primal silence to which Hans Castorp listened as he stood there, leaning on one pole, his head tilted to the side, his mouth open; and silently, unrelentingly the snow went on falling, drifting down in a gentle hush.
My fondest memory from my years living in Boulder is of precisely this silence. And speaking of silence, HERE is something on that topic from George Gissing, Sara Maitland, and me. But now to the point,
P564 ...A colloquy with Naphta and Settembrini was not exactly a canny experience, or at the least led into uncharted and dangerous regions; and if we can speak of Hans Castorp’s sympathy with the vast winter wilderness, it is because he found it to be, notwithstanding the devout awe it awakened, a suitable arena where he could resolve his tangle of ideas, a convenient spot for someone who, without knowing quite how it had happened, found himself burdened with the duties of “playing king” in regard to the state and conditions of the homo Dei.
...
P565 “Ah, my pedagogic Satana, [Settembrini] with your ragione and ribellione,” he thought, “I like you. True, you’re a windbag and organ-grinder, but you mean well, mean better than that caustic little Jesuit and terrorist, that Spanish torturer and flogger with his flashing glasses. And I like you better, too, although he’s almost always right when you two argue and scuffle pedagogically for my poor soul, like God and the Devil struggling over a man in the Middle Ages.” [So now that’s been spelled out.
Hans is lost in the storm now and, leaning against the hut, has started to dream,]
P580 ...it was the same with this landscape now, transforming itself, opening onto an ever-growing radiance. Blue floated. The glistening curtain of rain fell away -- and there lay the sea, a sea, the Mediterranean, deep deep blue, sparkling with silver, a marvelously beautiful bay... what a bliss of light, of deep pure sky, of sun-drenched water. Hans Castorp had never seen it before, not anything even like it... he had never reached the Mediterranean -- Naples, Sicily, Greece. And yet he remembered it... a cry went up within, as if he had always carried this blue sunshine now spreading before him secretly in his heart, hiding it even from himself. And this “always” was wide , infinitely wide, as wide as the sea there on his left, where the sky settled down upon it in soft violet hues.
This reminds me of a wonderful dream I had just in the past few days. I can recall almost nothing except that it was a dream in which I could fly, or at any rate, gravity did not limit my movement. It was a fun dream.
P583 [About the people populating this idyllic landscape,] “It’s all so very charming,” Hans Castorp thought, touched to the quick. “They’re all so pleasant, so winning. How pretty, healthy, clever, and happy they are. It’s not just their well-formed bodies -- a cleverness and warmth comes from within them, too. That is what moves me, makes me love them so -- the spirit and purpose... that lies at the basis of their being and allows them to live together like this.”...he meant the dignity, bordering on gravity, though totally fused with good cheer, which alone defined their every deed, an ineffable spiritual influence, earnest yet never gloomy, devout yet always reasonable -- though not lacking a certain ceremonial quality...
P584 ...Just below where... [Hans] was sitting, a pretty lad... stood with his arms crossed on his chest... And the boy looked directly at him, turned his eyes up toward him, and, watching the watcher, his gaze passed back and forth between Hans Castorp and the scenes on the shore. Suddenly... he looked beyond and behind him, into the distance, and in a flash that smile of courteous, brotherly deference... vanished from his... almost childlike face, and, without so much as a frown, it took on a grave expression, an inscrutable blank look of deathlike reserve, as if it were made of stone...
He looked in the same direction. Towering behind him were... the columns of a temple gate, and he was sitting on the open stairway that led to it. With a heavy heart he stood up and descended... [he] found himself at an opening in the rows of columns, before him a group of statuary: two stony female figures on a pedestal, a mother and daughter, it appeared. The one was seated -- an older, dignified matron clad in a heavily pleated tunic and drape... her vacant, starless eyes truly mild and godlike, yet with a plaintive set to the brows; held in her maternal embrace, the other figure, a young woman with a round face, stood with arms and hands buried in the folds of her cloak.
Hans Castorp... felt himself compelled to circle behind the figures and move on through the next double row of columns. The metal doors to the sanctuary stood open, and the poor man’s knees almost buckled under him at what he now saw. Two half-naked old women were busy at a ghastly chore among flickering braziers -- their hair was gray and matted, their drooping witches’ breasts had tits long as fingers. They were dismembering a child held above a basin, tearing it apart with their bare hands in savage silence... They devoured it piece by piece, the brittle little bones cracking in their mouths... Hans Castorp was caught frozen in the gruesome, icy spell. He wanted to cover his eyes with his hands and could not. He wanted to flee and could not. They... had seen him now and... damned him soundlessly with the filthiest, lewdest curses of his hometown dialect... Trying desperately to pull himself away, he slipped and fell... he found himself lying in the snow, his head resting on one arm, his legs stretched out before him, his skis still on.
P586 It was not a genuine awakening; he simply lay there blinking, relieved to be rid of those repulsive women... he went on dreaming... no longer in visions, but in thoughts hardly less perilous and tangled.
“I thought so -- it was only a dream... A very enchanting, very dreadful dream. At some level, I knew all along that I was making it up myself... knew it ahead of time almost. But how can a person know something like that, make it up, to exhilarate and terrify himself? Where did I get that beautiful bay with those islands, and the temple precincts... We don’t form our dreams out of just our own souls. We dream anonymously and communally, though each in his own way. [Here’s another thing I like about Mann, who else considers dream creation the same way I do? Was he influenced by Carl Jung? If dreams draw upon a collective unconscious then that would explain the “communally” here. Or you could go all the way and assert a pantheistic origin to such dreams.This sent me to Wiki to look up “logos” and I found this, “Ancient Greek philosophers used the term in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean discourse; Aristotle applied the term to refer to "reasoned discourse"[5] or "the argument" in the field of rhetoric, and considered it one of the three modes of persuasion alongside ethos and pathos.[6] Stoic philosophers identified the term with the divine animating principle pervading the Universe. Within Hellenistic Judaism, Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC – c. 50 AD) adopted the term into Jewish philosophy.[7] The Gospel of John identifies the Logos, through which all things are made, as divine (theos),[8] and further identifies Jesus Christ as the incarnate Logos. The term is also used in Sufism, and the analytical psychology of Carl Jung.” As usual, I follow the Stoics here, but the other associations are equally interesting.] The great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us... dreams in our many different ways its own eternal, secret dream -- about its youth, its hope, its joy, its peace, and its bloody feast. [So pantheism it is. I would have said that it dreams “story.” And now I’m going to have to link back to that other, other blog again for the Devi myth. You can go HERE and find my account of this creation story just before Section 6.] Here I lie against my column, with real remnants of my dream still inside my body [that’s a mind-body dualism problem, but he is still semi-dreaming here] -- both the icy horror of the bloody feast and the previous boundless joy, my joy in the happiness and gentle manners of that fair humanity... I have experienced so much among the people up here, about kicking over the traces, about reason. I have passed on with Naphta and Settembrini into these dangerous mountains. I know everything about mankind. I have known flesh and blood, I gave Pribislav Hippe’s pencil back to ailing Clavdia. But he who knows the body, who knows life, also knows death... You have to hold it up to the other half, to its opposite. Because our interest in death and illness is nothing but a way of expressing an interest in life -- just look at how the humanistic faculty of medicine always addresses life and its illness so courteously in Latin. But that is only an adumbration of one great, urgent concern, which in fullest sympathy I shall now call by its name: life’s problem child, man himself, his true state and condition. I know quite a bit about him... I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectful community of men -- while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror? What a fine and gallant conclusion for them to draw! I shall hold to their side, here in my soul, and not with Naphta, or for that matter with Settembrini -- they’re both windbags. The one is voluptuous and malicious, and the other is forever tooting his little horn of reason and even imagines he can stare madmen back to sanity -- how preposterous, how philistine! It’s mere ethics, irreligious, that much is certain. And yet I’m not going to take little Naphta’s side, either, with his religion that’s nothing more than a guazzabuglio [jumble] of God and the Devil, good and evil, just made for someone to tumble headlong into its void and perish mystically there... Their arguments and contradictions are nothing but a guazzabuglio, the hubbub and alarum of battle, and no one whose head is a little clear and heart a little devout will let himself be dazed by that. With their questions of ‘true aristocracy’! With their nobility! Death or life -- illness or health -- spirit or nature. Are those really contradictions? I ask you: Are those problems? No, they are not problems, and the question of their nobility is not a problem, either. Death kicks over its traces in the midst of life, and this would not be life if it did not, and in the middle is where the homo Dei’s state is found -- in the middle between kicking over the traces and reason -- just as his condition is somewhere between mystical community and windy individualism. I can see all that from my column here. And in that state let him commune with himself, fine, gallant, genial, and respectful -- for he alone is noble, and not that set of contradictions. Man is the master of contradictions, they occur through him, and so he is more noble than they. More noble than death, too noble for it -- that is the devotion of his heart. There, I have rhymed it all together, dreamed a poem of humankind. I will remember it, I will be good, I will grant death no dominion over my thoughts. For in that is found goodness and brotherly love, and in that alone. Death is a great power. You take off your hat and tiptoe past his presence... He wears the ceremonial ruff of what has been, and you put on austere black in his honor. Reason stands foolish before him, for reason is only virtue, but death is freedom and kicking over the traces, chaos and lust. Lust, my dream says, not love. Death and love -- there is no rhyming them, that is a preposterous rhyme, a false rhyme. Love stands opposed to death -- it alone, and not reason, is stronger than death. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. And form, too, comes only from love and goodness: form and cultivated manners of man’s fair state, of a reasonable, genial community -- out of silent regard for the bloody banquet. Oh, what a clear dream I’ve dreamed, how well I’ve ‘played king’! I will remember it. I will keep faith with death in my heart, but I will clearly remember that if faithfulness to death and to what is past rules our thoughts and deeds, that leads only to wickedness, dark lust, and hatred of humankind. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts. And with that I shall awaken. For with that I have dreamed my dream to its end, to its goal. [Freud and Jung proved the danger (of offending) in interpreting someone else’s dreams, but I do think Mann is slightly off here. Settembrini contrasts Western thought with Lao-tzu, but I would rather contrast it with Buddhism and Hinduism. I'm going to send you to my other, other blog again HERE, but just in case, there are a couple passages I have to quote. Here is a quick description of Kali,
...Hindu texts referring to the goddess are nearly unanimous in describing her as terrible in appearance and as offensive and destructive in her habits. Her hair is disheveled, her eyes red and fierce, she has fangs and a long lolling tongue, her lips are often smeared with blood, her breasts are long and pendulous, her stomach is sunken, and her figure is generally gaunt. She is naked but for several characteristic ornaments: a necklace of skulls or freshly cut heads, a girdle of severed arms, and infant corpses as earrings. She is usually said to have four arms. The upper left hand holds a bloodied cleaver, the lower left hand, a freshly cut human head; the upper right hand makes the sign “fear not,” and the lower right hand, the sign of conferring boons.
But that's not all. Here is a passage that describes Kali (as she is worshipped in Bengal) in the context of dharma and moksa. This provokes the kind of debate that Naphta and Settembrini have been having but in a non-Christian context. This quote will end with my reaction to how appropriate this was in the previous context of dealing with the thought of Michel Foucault and his annoying cohort. But I feel my reaction is just as appropriate here,
Kali is a very dangerous being. She vividly and dramatically thrust upon the observer things that he or she would rather not think about. Within the civilized order of Hinduism, the order of dharma, of course, blood and death are acknowledged. It is impossible not to acknowledge their existence in human life. They are acknowledge, however, within the context of a highly ritualized, patterned, and complex social structure that takes great pains to handle them in “safe” ways, usually through rituals of purification...
p152
Kali puts the order of dharma in perspective, perhaps puts it in its place, by reminding the Hindu that certain aspects of reality are untameable, unpurifiable, unpredictable, and always threatening to society’s feeble attempts to order what is essentially disorderly: life itself.
To her devotees Kali is known as the divine mother. In the light of what I have said, I would suggest that she is mother to her devotees because she gives birth to a wider vision of reality than the one embodied in the order of dharma. The dharmic order is insufficient and restrictive without a context, without a frame, as it were. Kali frames that order of dharma, as maya, prakrti, and sakti out of control, as death and blood out of place, Kali makes that order attractive indeed.
Yet the wider vision that she presents may be understood in a more positive way as well. The Hindu religious tradition consistently affirms a reality that transcends the social order. From the perspective of moksa, final release from the endless round of births and deaths, the order of dharma is seen as a contingent good, a realm that must finally be left behind in the quest for ultimate good. Standing outside the dharmic order, indeed threatening it, Kali may be understood in a positive way as she who beckons humans to seek a wider, more redemptive vision of their destiny.
Depending upon where one is in one’s spiritual pilgrimage, then, Kali has the power either to send one scuttling back to the womb of dharma or to provoke one over the threshold to moksa. In either role she might be understood as the mother who gives her children shelter.
Wow! I can’t believe how apropos this turned out to be.
This can be read as taking the dialectic in TMM to a whole other level, or I may be underestimating the Christian based dialectic (I don’t think so). Or it can be viewed as taking our search for the Meaning of Life to another level. This, I think, is the true meaning of Hans’s dream. Everyone (most everyone) adores Parvati and the other auspicious goddesses, but you need to give Kali her due, because she is also part of the dream/life. This is the dualism Settembrini should be unhappy with, but should treat with the respect Hans just assigned to Death.] I’ve long been searching for that truth: in the meadow where Hippe appeared to me, on my balcony, everywhere. The search for it drove me into these snowy mountains. And now I have it. My dream has granted it to me so clearly that I will always remember... My heart is beating strong and knows why... It beats for human reasons and because my spirit is truly happy. The truth of my dream has refreshed me -- better than port or ale, it courses through my veins like love and life, so that I may tear myself out of my dreaming sleep... Awake, awake!...”
P588 ...It wasn’t five yet... Amazing! Could it be that he had lain there in the snow for only ten minutes or a little longer, had fantasized all those daredevil thoughts, those images of happiness and horror...? It seemed that life meant well by its highly confused problem child.
P589 ...He... was in Dorf by half past five; he stored his equipment at the grocer’s, rested a bit in Herr Settembrini’s garret, and gave him a full report of how he had been overtaken by the snowstorm. The humanist was duly horrified. He... lit the sputtering fire of his little alcohol stove and brewed some strong coffee for the exhausted engineer -- which did not prevent Hans Castorp from falling asleep in his chair.
P590 An hour later he was cradled in the highly civilized atmosphere of the Berghof, He did justice to his supper. His dream was already beginning to fade. And by bedtime he was no longer exactly sure what his thoughts had been.
Exactly. It’s a rare dream you can retain in any detail. And he gets the sense of time -- or rather the timelessness -- in a dream right as well. And then there’s dream logic.
Many people maintain that there’s no need to read past section 15 of The Birth of Tragedy. Even Nietzsche came to believe this, but I disagree. And yet I wouldn’t have a real problem with Mann ending TMM here. Though that would mean losing one of my favorite characters in the book.
I mention The Birth of Tragedy because of the following passage,
That this effect should be necessary, everybody should be able to feel most assuredly by means of intuition, provided he has ever felt, if only in a dream, that he was carried back into an ancient Greek existence. Walking under lofty Ionic colonnades, looking up towards a horizon that was cut off by pure and noble lines, finding reflections of his transfigured shape in the shining marble at his side, and all around him solemnly striding or delicately moving human beings, speaking with harmonious voices and in a rhythmic language of gestures -- in view of this continual influx of beauty, would he not have to exclaim, raising his hand to Apollo: ‘Blessed people of Hellas! How great must Dionysus be among you if the god of Delos considers such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!’
To a man in such a mood, however, an old Athenian, looking up at him with the sublime eyes of Aeschylus, might reply: ‘But say this, too, curious stranger: how much did this people have to suffer to be able to become so beautiful! But now follow me to witness a tragedy, and sacrifice with me in the temple of both deities!’
This is from my blog, HERE.
Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - A Good Soldier
No comments:
Post a Comment