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The Magic Mountain
Chapter 7
Highly Questionable
P779 [About Krokowski’s lectures] ... His field of study had always been concerned with those dark, vast regions of the human soul that are called the subconscious, although one would perhaps do better to speak of the superconscious, since there are occasions when the knowledge that rises up from those regions far exceeds an individual’s conscious knowledge, suggesting that there may be connections and associations between the bottommost unlighted tracts of the individual soul and an omniscient universal soul. [Wasn’t I just speculating about this? In my other blog, HERE. (Dually sentient in first section.)] The realm of the subconscious, the “occult’ realm in the etymological sense of the word, very quickly turns out to be occult in the narrower sense as well and forms one of the sources for phenomena that emerge from it and to which we apply the same makeshift term... Any man who recognizes an organic symptom of illness to be the product of forbidden emotions that assume hysterical form in conscious psychic life also recognizes the creative power of the psyche in the material world -- a power he is then forced to declare to be the second source of magical phenomena. As an idealist of the pathological, if not to say a pathological idealist, such a man will see himself at the starting point of a sequence of thought that very quickly flows into the problem of being-in-general -- that is to say, into the problem of the relationship between mind and matter. The materialist, as the son of a philosophy of pure robust health, can never be argued out of his belief that the mind is a phosphorescent product of matter; whereas the idealist, who proceeds from the principle of creative hysteria, will tend to answer, indeed will very soon definitively answer the question of primacy in exactly the opposite terms. All in all, this is nothing less that the old argument over which came first, the chicken or the egg...
I had forgotten about this, though I remembered the story of Ellen Brand. And this, I hardly need to point out at this point, goes back to Goethe again and that tossed off comment of Settembrini’s that he didn’t want to talk about what Goethe had said at the time of the earthquake at Messina.
The Great Petulance
Again, and I think for the last time, I admit I’m not sure if this is about the teens or the twenties. Probably both when it comes to Germany, perhaps more the teens when it comes to Europe as a whole.
I’m tempted to skip over Naphta’s last lecture. It is especially tempting as there is actually some plot in this section. However, as I’m almost certain this will be my last reading of TMM, I want to make sure I’m not missing anything important here. It would be like Mann to toss in something important just where we are most likely to skip over it.
P827 ...the conversation was actually a monologue by Naphta... a monologue of a quite peculiar and antisocial sort... addressed exclusively to Hans Castorp.
P828 ...the topic... was aimed at proving in dismal fashion that all life’s intellectual phenomena are ambiguous, that nature is equivocal and any grand concepts abstracted from her are strategically useless, and at demonstrating how iridescent are the robes that the Absolute dons on earth.
At best one could have seen this lecture as devoted to the problem of freedom, which he treated as the basis for confusion. Among other things, he spoke about Romanticism and the fascinating duality of this early nineteenth-century European movement, before which both reactionary and revolutionary ideas fell, that is all those that were not synthesized to something higher still. [I think of Romanticism as more 18th century.] For it was, of course, quite ridiculous to try to tie the concept of revolution exclusively to progress and a victoriously onrushing Enlightenment. European Romanticism was above all a movement of liberation: both anticlassical and antiacademic, directed against outmoded classicism, the old school of reason, whose defenders it scorned as powdered periwigs.
And Naphta moved on to the German Wars of Liberation, to Fichtean enthusiasms and the delirious, song-singing popular uprising against an intolerable tyranny -- which unfortunately, hee hee, had embodied freedom, that is, the idea of revolution. How very amusing. Bellowing their anthems, they had raised their arms to smash revolutionary tyranny in favor of rule by reactionary princes -- and had done so in the name of freedom.
Sadly (for me, not Europe), I don’t have Pirenne’s notes on this later phase of European history. But this is a period I know a little better, though I hardly recognize it from this “doublespeak” wording. “Wars of Liberation” indeed. This was the period when liberal revolts were repeatedly put down in Germany sending wave after wave of refugees (and rich pastry) to America. Germany was less “liberated” and more “unified” under the worst of the royal houses, the Hohenzollerns. “Reactionary princes” is at least an apt description of the House Hohenzollern. I do suggest you read at least the first paragraph of THIS Wiki entry about Fichte. I had forgotten that he, and not Hegel, is responsible for the thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
His youthful listener was sure to have noticed... the difference, or even contradiction, between external and internal freedom -- and at the same time the ticklish question as to which form of unfreedom was least or most likely... to be compatible with a nation’s honor.
I wish I knew what he means here. Perhaps that “Germans” gained their freedom from France and Austria but at the cost of a loss of personal freedom within the Prussian German Empire?
Freedom was in fact probably more an idea of Romanticism than of the Enlightenment, for as a concept it shared with Romanticism the same complex, never-to-be-disentangled interlocking of the human instinct to expand and the passionate, constricting thrust of the individual ego. The thirst for individual freedom had brought forth the bellicose, cult of nationalism, which humanitarian liberalism called sinister, although it, too, taught the doctrine of individualism, but from a slightly different angle. Individualism was romantically medieval in its belief in the infinite, cosmic importance of each single creature, from which came the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the theory of geocentrism, and astrology. On the other hand, individualism was a matter of liberal humanism, which tended toward anarchy and wanted at all costs to protect the precious individual from being sacrificed to the interests of the whole. That was individualism, one thing and yet another, a word for all seasons.
P829 ...this pathos for freedom had also brought forth shining foes of freedom, brilliant knights of tradition who did battle with irreverent, seditious progress. And Naphta named Arndt, [maybe HERE?] who had cursed industrialism and exalted the nobility, named Gorres, who had written a Christian Mysticism. And did not mysticism likewise have something to do with freedom? Had it not... been antischolastic, antidogmatic, anticlerical? One was compelled... to see the Church’s hierarchy as a force for freedom, since it formed a barrier against absolute monarchy. The mysticism of the late Middle Ages... had demonstrated a liberating tendency by acting as a forerunner of the Reformation... which for its part had been a tangled snarl of freedom and medieval reaction.
Luther’s deed... had the virtue of demonstrating in the crudest, most graphic terms, the questionable nature of any deed, of action in general... A deed... was the assassination of Privy Councillor Kotzebue by Karl Sand, who had belonged to a radical fraternity. And what... had put the weapon in Karl Sand’s hand? A love of freedom... And yet when you looked closer, it wasn’t actually so much that as moral fanaticism and hatred of imported foreign frivolity...
There's a Jane Austen connection to Kotzebue!
I suppose, given what we said recently about the death wish, that Naphta had sought an honorable death in a duel makes some sense. When Settembrini refused to comply, he was forced to take the less honorable route. One almost wonders why Mann didn’t have them both seek this way out of their exile on the Magic Mountain. But then Mann still needs Settembrini for one last thing.
The Thunderbolt
P844 [Hans Castorp] ...no longer carried his pocket watch. It had stopped... and he refrained from having it put into measuring rotation again -- for the same reasons he had long ago dispensed with calendars... for reasons of “freedom,” that is. It was his way of honoring the stroll by the shore, the abiding ever-and-always, the hermetic magic, to which once withdrawn from the world, he had proved so susceptible -- the magic that had been his soul’s fundamental adventure, in which all the alchemistic adventures of that simple stuff had been played out.
...
P845 Then came the rumble of thunder --
...It was... a historic thunderclap that shook the foundations of the earth; but for us it is the thunderclap that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates. There he sits in the grass, sheepishly rubbing his eyes, like a man who, despite many an admonition, has failed to read the daily papers.
...
P848 ...He saw that the enchantment was broken, that he was released, set free -- not by his own actions... but set free by elementary external forces, for whom his liberation was a very irrelevant matter... If life was to receive back her sinful problem child, it could not happen on the cheap, but only like this, in a serious, rigorous fashion, as a kind of ordeal, which in this case did not perhaps mean life so much as it meant three salvos fired in his, the sinner’s honor... [What Joachim had received after his death.]
[Our last glimpse of Hans,] p852 ...What’s this? He’s singing? The way a man sings to himself in moments of dazed, thoughtless excitement, without even knowing -- and he uses what tatters of breath he has left to sing to himself:
Upon its bark I’ve ca-arved there
So many words of love -- [Schubert, of course.]
...
P853 Farewell, Hans Castorp, life’s faithful problem child. Your story is over. We have told it to its end; it was neither short on diversion nor long on boredom -- it was a hermetic story. We told it for its own sake, not yours, for you were a simple fellow. But it was your story at last, and since it happened to you, there surely must have been something to you...
...There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimations of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round -- will love someday rise up out of this, too?
Finis Operis
I’m still surprised that reading Pirenne has made the most difference to this rereading of TMM. I knew it would be handy, but I hadn’t realized quite to what extent TMM is a survey course in European thought. Yes, it’s about the competing ideas just before and just after the Great War, but it really touches on everything in the Western tradition. Judging by the lack of enthusiasm in my book club, I think Mann failed at making this intellectual review interesting enough, but still it is an admirable attempt. How could you do it better?
I think the book is almost too combative when it comes to the dialectic of Settembrini and Naphta. Would something more collegial have been even better? For example, since I’m just mentioned Pirenne, what if two university scholars had been imprisoned together during the Great War instead of just Pirenne toiling on his own? They would together cover the history of Europe only from somewhat different perspectives. (Pirenne’s Belgian perspective vs either a French or German perspective -- I’m sure there were a few German intellectuals who pissed off the 2nd Reich.) They could bounce ideas off each other. And they would work faster so as to cover all of European history. I would read that.
One of my favorite Medium authors just published a piece on why it isn’t essential to write at book length. Some writers are better with short pieces, either fiction or nonfiction, and some subjects simply don’t require hundreds of pages to cover properly. And I agree with her, but for this project I would actually like to see something closer in length to In Search of Lost Time or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It should take years to read this.
This does, unfortunately, remind me a bit of Settembrini’s Encyclopedia of Suffering. The work I have in mind would say everything there is to say about all the major ideas in European thought. And it would increasingly refer back to itself as it contrasted the latest notion with ideas from the past.
And that, I believe, is the end of both The Magic Mountain and this blog.
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The Magic Mountain
Mynheer Peeperkorn (Conclusion)
I’m looking forward to this as it will be my first reading since reading Goethe’s Faust and the famous waterfall scene there. (Nope. Nothing about the sun or sunlight. I’ve got nothing.)
And what to think of Peeperkorn’s exit? I guess a part of his fondness for the simple pleasures of life was a determination not to outlive a vigorous life. He wanted to die with his boots on. We don’t learn Clavdia’s side of it. Was there an ED problem. If there were a contemporary film made of this part of the book would there be a scene in which Peeperkorn was reviewing a pamphlet with “Ask your doctor if Viagra is right for you”?
Here’s a good Modernist analysis of TMM.
P747 ...It seemed to Hans Castorp that not only he had come to this dead standstill, that the world, all of it, the “whole thing,” was in much the same state... it had seemed to the young man as if there were something uncanny about the world and life. As if there were something peculiar, something increasingly askew and disquieting about it, as if a demon had seized power, an evil and crazed demon, who had long exercised considerable influence, but now declared his lordship with such unrestrained candor that he could instill in you secret terrors, even prompt you to think of fleeing. The demon’s name was Stupor.
...
P755 ...Hans Castorp... sat for a long time at the table... brooding, gripped by the horror of the eerie and skewed state in which he saw the world entrapped, by the grinning demon and monkey-god in whose crazed and unrestrained power he now found himself -- and whose name was “The Great Stupor.”
...He was afraid. It was as if “all this” could come to no good end, as if the end was surely a catastrophe, a rebellion of patient nature, a thunderstorm and a great cleansing wind that would break the spell cast over the world, wrench life for its “dead standstill,” and overturn the “doldrums” in a terrible Last Judgment. He longed to flee...
Fullness of Harmony
P773 Again, this could certainly be a reference to the state of Europe before the Great War, but, also again, it could as well be a reference to Europe in the ‘20s. Some people view the two world wars as episodes of the same war. If we follow that train of thought, I suppose this could be both Europe in the teens and also in the twenties.
Valentin is the brother of the girl Faust seduces and leaves with a child. Faust kills Valentin in a dual and Marguerite (Gretchen) is condemned to death after she kills the baby. This sequence somehow leads to Faust’s being “saved” at the very end.
P774 Now we come to the most important of the musical offerings, Schubert’s “Lindenbaum.” This, again, goes back to Goethe, only it’s The Sorrows of Young Werther this time.
P775 ...But it is, we must admit, a very tricky task to explain what this last work... this old “linden tree,” meant to... [Hans], and the greatest care must be given to nuance, if we are not to do more harm than good.
... an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is “significant” in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object... Moreover, love for such an object is itself equally “significant.” It says something about the person who feels it, it defines his relationship to the universe, to the world represented by the created object and... loved along with it.
P776 Does anyone believe that our ordinary hero, after a certain number of years of hermetic and pedagogic enhancement, had penetrated deeply enough into the life of the intellect and the spirit for him to be conscious of the “significance” of this object and his love for it? We assert, we recount, that he had. The song meant a great deal to him, a whole world -- a world that he evidently must have loved... We know what we are saying when we add -- perhaps somewhat darkly -- that his fate might have been different if his disposition had not been so highly susceptible to the charms of the emotional sphere, to the universal state of mind that this song epitomized so intensely, so mysteriously...
...What was this world that stood behind it, which his intuitive scruples told him was a world of forbidden love?
It was death.
...
...behind this sweet, lovely, fair work of art stood death. It had special ties with death, ties one might indeed love, but not without first “playing king,” [taking stock] not without intuitively taking into account a certain illegitimacy in such love... to feel spiritual and intellectual sympathy with it was to feel sympathy with death... in its train came the workings of darkness.
P777 What was all this he had himself believing? He would not let any of you talk him out of it. The workings of darkness. Dark workings. Torturers at work, misanthropy dressed in Spanish black with a starched ruff and with lust in place of love -- the outcome of steadfast, pious devotion.
...Hans Castorp’s sweet, lovely, fair song of nostalgia, the emotional world to which it belonged, his love for that world -- they were supposed to be “sick”? Not at all. There was nothing more healthy, more genial on earth. Except that this was a fruit -- a fresh, plump, healthy fruit, that was liable, extraordinarily liable, to begin to rot and decay at that very moment, or perhaps the next... It was a fruit of life, sired by death and pregnant with death. It was a miracle of the soul -- the ultimate miracle, perhaps, in the eyes of unscrupulous beauty... Both a miracle and, in response to the final compelling voice of conscience, the means by which he triumphed over himself.
P778 ...In the solitude of night, Hans Castorp’s thoughts, or intuitive half-thoughts, soared high as he sat before his truncated musical coffin . . . ah, they soared higher than his understanding, were thoughts enhanced, forced upward by alchemy. Oh, it was mighty, this enchantment of the soul... the song’s best son may yet have been the young man who consumed his life in triumphing over himself and died, a new word on his lips, the word of love, which he did not yet know how to speak. It was truly worth dying for, this song of enchantment. But he who died for it was no longer really dying for this song and was a hero only because ultimately he died for something new -- for the new word of love and for the future in his heart.
Those, then, were Hans Castorp’s favorite recordings.
Up to that last paragraph I thought I knew what Mann was doing. This song is a wonderful expression of the German death-wish and we’ve been cultivating this passion from those early chapters describing the deaths of Hans’s parents and grandfather. (I wonder if TMM is at all popular in Japan? Japanese culture puts Germany to shame when it comes to the death-wish.) But he lost me with the new word of love. No clue what he has in mind.
After "Snow," I think this section may be the most important of the book. At least I think Mann would have felt that way. And with that in mind I'm going to make this a short post.
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The Magic Mountain
Chapter 7
A Stroll By the Shore
Mynheer Peeperkorn
Vingt et Un
P664 So old Pieter Peeperkorn is sixty. A youngun.
P666 They are twelve gathered at the table for cards and refreshments. Was that the number for the last supper? (Not quite.) Curious that this is on page 666. Am I wrong in thinking of Dionysus during the description of Peeperkorn this evening?
This is where Peeperkorn first appeals to me,
P669 ...he did not smoke himself, never had... “Young man,” he said to Hans Castorp... “young man -- whatever is simple! Whatever is holy! Fine, you understand me. A bottle of wine, a steaming dish of eggs, pure grain spirits -- let us first measure up to and enjoy such things before we -- absolutely, my dear sir. Settled...”
P671 [Hans,] “... That is probably true. It may be a sin -- and a token of our inadequacies -- to indulge in refined tastes without having given the simple, natural gifts of life, the great and holy gifts, their due... And although I had never thought of it that way before, now that you mention it, I can only concur with you wholeheartedly...”
...
Hans Castorp was suddenly confronted with the realization that Peeperkorn was very drunk. And yet his drunkenness did not belittle or demean him, caused him no disgrace, but rather, when joined with the majesty of his nature, it only made him grander and more awe-inspiring. Even drunken Bacchus, Hans Castorp thought, had propped himself on his exuberant companions without losing anything of his divinity, and ultimately it depended on who was drunk -- a personality or a tinker...
P681 I suppose it is this section that is responsible for everyone pointing to Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy as being important for understanding TMM. And I do think Mann has done a splendid job of showing what an incarnation of Dionysius might have looked and acted like in the first decade of the 20th century. Of course you can play that the other way, too. Perhaps the origin of Dionysus and Bacchus were merely human personalities like Peeperkorn. Fortunately, a good pantheist doesn’t need to pick one or the other as they both come to the same thing.
I’ve known a few “personalities” similar to, if not quite as exceptional as Peeperkorn, and their charisma does go a long way. And they are sorely missed when they depart the scene. Though it is probably a good thing for your liver.
Mynheer Peeperkorn (continued)
P686 [Talking about quinine and toxins,] ...the world of substances was such that they all concealed both life and death simultaneously, all were both therapeutic and poisonous. Pharmacology and toxicology were one and the same thing -- we were healed by poisons, and a substance considered an agent of life could, under certain circumstances, in a single convulsion kill within seconds.
...
I have to say that this is where I most like Hans. Not only does he take on another mentor -- and then mix them to see what of interest happens -- but he manages to make the most of the situation Clavdia surprised him with. He gets to finally spend some time with her -- might even be said to get to know her -- while also, slyly, getting even with her.
I would rather spend time with the two chatterboxes than with Peeperkorn, but small doses of the three of them together would be very educational.
[Settembrini refuting Hans’s celebration of “personality,”] p694 “...By turning personality into an enigma, you run the risk of idol-worship. You are venerating a mask. You see something mystical where there is only mystification, one of these hollow counterfeits with which the demon of corporeal physiognomy enjoys taunting us on occasion...”
“Fine, a freak of nature... And yet not just a freak, not just something to taunt us. For people to be actors, they must have talent, and talent is something that goes beyond stupidity and cleverness, it is itself a value for life. Mynheer Peeperkorn has talent, too... and he uses it to put us in his pocket...
...
P702 ...Pieter Peeperkorn... did not paralyze the nerve of antithesis with confusion and obstructionism the way Naphta did; he was not ambiguous like him, or if so, then in an entirely contrary, positive fashion -- he was the staggering mystery that went not only beyond mere stupidity and cleverness, but also beyond so many of the other opposites that Settembrini and Naphta conjured up to create high tension for pedagogic purposes. Personality, so it seemed, was not pedagogic -- and yet, what an opportunity it presented for a tourist thirsty for knowledge. What a strange feeling to watch this ambiguity coming from a king when the disputants began to speak of marriage and sin, the sacrament of indulgence, the guilt and innocence of lust... And behold, in a flash the martyrdom blossomed into sensuality. The tilt of the head suddenly implied roguishness; the lips, still open, smiled lewdly; the sybaritic dimple, familiar from earlier occasions, appeared in one cheek -- and there was the dancing heathen priest... And they hear him say: “Ah, yes, yes, yes -- agreed. That is -- those are -- it just goes to show -- the sacrament of lust, you understand --”
P703 ... He had stopped now to lean back and look up, shading his eyes with his hat; they all followed his example. “I call your attention... to the heights above, far above us, to that black speck circling up there against the singular blue, shading into black -- it is a bird of prey, a large bird of prey. It is... an eagle. I most emphatically call your attention -- you see! ... A golden eagle. He circles directly above us in the blue, without beating his wings he hovers there in those magnificent heights... The eagle, gentlemen, Jupiter’s bird, the king of his race, the lion of the air! ... Plummet! Strike that head, those eyes, with your iron beak, rip open the belly of the creature whom God has --Agreed! Settled! Your talons shall be tangled in its entrails and your beak shall drip with blood --”
P704 He was bursting with enthusiasm, and that was the end of the promenaders’ interest in Naphta and Settembrini’s antinomies... there was food and drink, quite outside the normal schedule... a bout of eating and drinking like so many Mynheer initiated outside the Berghof, wherever he happened to be... They enjoyed the classic gifts under his majestic direction: coffee with cream and country breads, or rich cheeses and fragrant Alpine butter, which also tasted marvelous with hot, roasted chestnuts, all washed down by as much Veltliner red as the heart desired...
P706 [Clavdia to Hans as they are talking alone together and he has just described himself as, “not a passionate man,”] “I find it terribly reassuring... to hear that you are not a passionate man. But, then, how could you be? That would be a degeneration of the species. Passion -- means to live life for life’s sake. But I am well aware you Germans live it for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget oneself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves... You haven’t the least notion how repulsively egoistic that is of you and that someday it may well make you the enemy of humankind.” continued
So is this really about certain charismatic figures of the 1920s and 1930s? Hitler is not like Peeperkorn in terms of stature and Mussolini was even smaller. (And Stalin was the shortest of the three.) But this was a time when charisma, both in person and on radio, seemed to really influence people. I tend to think that politicians find an audience that agrees with what they are saying, rather than what they say changing people’s minds. But I suppose people do get swept up in the popularity of certain people. I recall the example of Heidegger in this respect. Bill Clinton is a good, recent, example of a politician using their charisma to advantage. Hillary Clinton would not be a good example. She may well have been more qualified to be President, but that doesn’t mean much if you can’t convince enough people to vote for you. (Yes, I know she got the most votes, but that isn’t quite how our system works. I was surprised she did as well as she did.)
I had forgotten the “vous” “tu” aspect of this section -- that’s incorrect, though also so proper to put in French instead of German. Hans really should have suggested they also use French to speak to each other. I admit it would be worthwhile reading in German the sections where Hans speaks with Clavdia without using pronouns. This is something you really can’t translate into English.
And what’s the significance of Carmen? Don José has more than a little in common with von Aschenbach. Could Carmen be something Mann intended to work in when the relationship between TMM and Death in Venice was stronger? I don’t think of Clavdia as being that central to this story, but that may not be quite fair. She is at least the catalyst here. And “catalyst” is particularly apt as she herself is left unchanged (spoilers). You could view Pieter Peeperkorn as a literary device for cleanly extracting Clavdia from the story.
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The Magic Mountain
And we return, at long last, for the concluding chapter plus of TMM. I have to say TMM feels more timely this reading. The ways the world has changed since 2016 make it seem like Mann is writing about today, rather than about either the years leading up to 1914 or possibly the 1920s. Though really, this is about all three periods since human nature doesn’t seem to change all that much.
Still chapter 6
A Good Soldier
P602 [Naphta about the Masons,] “...At its root the very idea of the lodge is inseparably tied to the notion of the absolute. It is, therefore, terroristic -- that is, anti-liberal. It relieves the individual of the burden of conscience, and in the name of an absolute goal, it sanctifies every means -- even bloody, criminal means. There are indications that at one time the brotherhood of the lodge was symbolically sealed with blood. A brotherhood is never something visible, but always an organization that, by its very nature, is absolutist in spirit. You didn’t know, did you, that the founder of the Illuminati, a society that for a while almost fused with Freemasonry, was a former member of the Society of Jesus?”
P603 “No, that’s new to me, of course.”
“Adam Weishaupt modeled his humanitarian secret society strictly on the Jesuit order. He himself a Mason, and the most distinguished Masons of the period were Illuminati. I am speaking of the second half of the eighteenth century, which Settembrini would not hesitate to describe to you as a period of decline in his guild. [I think this was the era of Freemasonry Tolstoy wrote about in War and Peace. It’s been a very long time since I read that, but I seem to recall something like this.] In reality... it was in fullest bloom, as were secret societies in general. [The late 19th century in America was like this for groups like The Red Men. I have a bunch of artifacts from my great grandfather from this period. I know that he “worked on riverboats between Louisville and Cincinnati, but, now I think about it for the first time, I don’t know if he was working class or middle class. My oak bookshelf and desk comes from him, so maybe not working class? He was a Mason as well.] It was an age when Freemasonry achieved a higher life -- a life of which it was later purged by people of the same sort as our philanthropist, who would most definitely have joined those who at the time accused it of Jesuitical obscurantism.”
...
All this is yet another approach to finding meaning in life.
...It was a time when our own priests wanted to breathe the spirit of Catholic hierarchy into Freemasonry, and there was even a flourishing Jesuit lodge at Clermont, in France. It was, moreover, the period when Rosicrucianism [this about Hermeticism is also worth reading] infiltrated the lodges -- a very strange brotherhood, which you should note, united the purely rational, sociopolitcal goals of improving the world and making people happy with a curious affinity for the occult sciences of the East, for Indian and Arabic wisdom and magical knowledge of nature. At the time, many lodges went through a period of rectification and reform, in the spirit of the ‘strict charges’ -- an explicitly irrational, mysterious, magical, alchemistic spirit, to which the higher degrees of the Scottish Rite owe their existence... It was a matter of reaching back to certain religious orders of knights in the Middle Ages, to the Knights Templar in particular -- you know the ones who swore vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience before the patriarch of Jerusalem...
...
P604 ...The reemergence of the Templars had meant nothing less than the establishment of such connections [to Oriental mysticism]; it had introduced the ferment of irrationality into an intellectual world concerned with rational, practical social improvement. All of which gave Freemasonry a new fascination and luster... It attracted various elements who were weary of their century’s sophistries, of its humane, dispassionate enlightenment, and were thirsty for stronger elixirs. The order’s success was such that the philistines complained that it was alienating men from domestic bliss and a reverence for women.”
...
“... The strict charges meant a deepening and broadening of the order’s traditions, a transference of its historical origins back to the occult world, to the so-called Dark Ages. Those who held the higher degrees of the lodges were initiates in the physica mystica, bearers of the magical knowledge of nature -- which means... great alchemists.”
P605 “...Alchemy -- making gold, the philosopher’s stone, aunum potabile. . .”
“Yes, that’s the popular understanding. Put more academically, it is the purification, mutation, and refinement of matter, its transubstantiation to something higher, its enhancement, as it were. The lapis philosophorum, which is the male-female product of sulfur and mercury -- the res bina, the bisexual prima materia -- was nothing more and nothing less than the principle of that enhancement, the application of external influences to force matter upwards: magical pedagogy if you will.”
...
“The primary symbol of alchemical transmutation... was the crypt.”
“The grave?”
“Yes, the scene of corruption. It is the epitome of all hermetism -- nothing less than the vessel, the carefully safeguarded crystal retort, in which matter is forced toward its final mutation and purification.”
...
P606 “...The apprentice must be fearless and hungry for knowledge... The crypt, the grave, has always been the primary symbol in their initiation ceremony. The apprentice, the novice hungry to be admitted to such knowledge, must remain undaunted by the grave’s horrors... The path of the mysteries and purification is beset with dangers, it leads through the fear of death, through the realm of corruption, and the apprentice, the neophyte, is the young man who is hungry for the wounds of life, demands that his demonic capacity for experience be awakened, and is led by shrouded forms, who are merely shades of the great mystery itself.”
“... [hermetic pedagogy] is a guide to final things, to an absolute confession of those things that transcend the senses, and so to our goal. The alchemistic rites of such lodges have led many a noble , inquisitive mind to that goal in the decades since. But surely... it cannot have escaped you that the degrees in the Scottish Rite are but a surrogate for another hierarchy, that the alchemistic knowledge of the Master Mason is fulfilled in the mystery of transubstantiation, and that the mystic tour with which the lodge favors its novices clearly corresponds to the means of grace, just as the metaphoric games of its ceremonies are reflections of the liturgical and architectural symbols of our Holy Catholic Church.”
...
P607 “...The strict charges... provided lodges with human foundations that went far deeper. Like certain mysteries in our Church, the lodges’ secrets have a clear connection to the solemn cults and holy excesses of primitive man. As regards the Church, I am thinking of the supper that is a feast of love, the sacramental partaking of body and blood...”
...
“--as regards the lodges... I was referring to the cult of the crypt and coffin... In both cases, we are dealing with a symbolism of last and ultimate things [Eschatology], with elements of orgiastic primal religion, with unbridled nocturnal sacrifices in honor of dying and ripening, of death, transformation, and resurrection. You will recall that both the cult of Isis and the Eleusinian mysteries were carried out in dark caves at night... among its secret societies were some that used the name Eleusinian. Those lodges held feasts... of the Eleusinian mysteries and the secrets of Aphrodite, which at last got the female involved...”
...
“...The lodges were modernized, humanitarianized... They were led back from their aberrations to reason, usefulness, and progress, to the battle against prince and priest -- in short, to social happiness... In a word, it is bourgeois misery organized as a club.”
...
P610 [Settembrini on Freemasonry,] “...Masonic thought was never apolitical, not at any time... What are we? Masons and hodmen who build, all with one purpose. The good of all is the fundamental principle of our brotherhood. And what is this good, this building we build? The well-crafted social edifice, the perfection of humanity, the new Jerusalem... The social problem, the problem of human coexistence is politics, is politics through and through, nothing but politics. And the man who consecrates himself to it... belongs to politics, foreign and domestic. He understands that the craft of the Freemason is the art of governance.”
...
P611 [Hans,] “...Do Freemasons believe in god?”
“...An international union of Freemasons does not exist. It shall be established... And then... we shall likewise be united in our religious confession -- and it will be: ‘Ecrasez L’infame.’ “
“Will it be compulsory?...”
“...tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
“So, then, God would be evil?”
“Metaphysics is evil. For it serves no purpose except to lull us to sleep, to sap us of the energy we should bring to building the temple of society. Only a generation ago, the Grand Orient of France provided us a fine model by erasing the name of God from all his works...”
“How Catholic of you!”
“By which you mean?”
“I find it terribly Catholic -- erasing God.”
Okay. I’m not sure what Hans means either but this, again, reminds me of The Brothers Karamazov and in particular of Ivan’s story of the Grand Inquisitor.
In it’s own way, this statement about metaphysics is as sweeping and “terroristic” as any Naphta has made -- though countless students of metaphysics would probably have stood and cheered while reading this. Again, I’m in the position of having to speculate about what both Settembrini and Mann are up to here. This dogma about metaphysics is similar to Settembrini’s wanting Hans to act and not reason. It seems to be pushing humanism to an absurd extreme. (And if you read the link about the Illuminati, it seems they were also rather focused on a single correct path to knowledge and truth.) As difficult as metaphysics can be, it is, to use a construction metaphor, the foundation upon which everything else rests. This ignoring of the foundation, to use a local, SF, example, must have been the thinking behind the construction of Millennial Tower. (Which is famously sinking and leaning.) They are now having to deal with the consequences of ignoring “metaphysics” and building on an unsound foundation.
This bit about metaphysics sent me back to Henry Ryecroft. I’m still having a problem finding the passages I’m looking for, but I recall that Ryecroft (Gissing) at some point associates metaphysics with illness. Maintains that in a life of perfect health there would be no need for metaphysics. I did, finally, find this passage about illness, with a reference back to TMM in my “Alpha” section. Still can’t find the passage about metaphysics I want.
This discussion continues with Settembrini returning to his West vs East dualism,]
P612 “...Decisions must be made -- decisions of incalculable significance for the future happiness of Europe, and your country will have to make them, they must come to fruition within its soul. Positioned between East and West, it will have to choose, will have to consciously decide, once and for all, between the two spheres vying for its heart. You are young, you will take part in this decision...”
...
P613 “You are silent... You and your country allow unconditional silence to reign, a silence so opaque that no one can judge its depths. You do not love the Word, or do not possess it, or sanctify it only in a sullen way -- the articulate world does not and cannot learn where it stands with you. My friend, that is dangerous. Language is civilization itself. The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together. Wordlessness isolates. One presumes that you will seek to break out of your isolation with deeds...”
I don't tend to think of Germans as being "wordless." More that they too often invent or compound new words but still leave everyone in the dark.
P617-618 [Interesting argument here about the future of Classical Education and even literacy, where, again, Naphta has turned out to be correct.]
And now we come to the sad decline and death of Joachim. I presume Mann means something by this, but I’m at a loss to say what it is. But, again, if we assume this is more about Weimar Germany than late 2nd Reich Germany, Joachim can be seen as representing the death of German honor. Aside from some nasty consequences of technological innovations in modern warfare around the Great War (U-boats and gas and zeppelin bombing, for example) the German military remained honorable during the first WW. There were no SS units yet. But I’m speculating here.
If I had remembered that there was so much back and forth between Settembrini and Naphta in this last section, I probably wouldn’t have advocated stopping at "Snow" before our last book club meeting. We could at least have gotten this all out of the way and balanced all the talk with Joachim. But I blame Mann here, as I still think "Snow" was the crucial synthesis that should conclude this dialectic.
Anyway, now we are on to chapter 7 and the, still distant, conclusion of the book.
Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Pieter Peeperkorn
