194. TMM - Schubert’s “Lindenbaum.”

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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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183. TMM - Danse Macabre

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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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182. TMM - Research

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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.

Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Danse Macabre

176. Finally, The Magic Mountain

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The Magic Mountain 

by Thomas Mann
Everyman's Library 2005 (originally published 1924)

My book club decided to tackle The Magic Mountain. It had become a joke the way I kept bringing the book up in every imaginable context. I'm still not sure how it will go over, but I'm glad to finally be blogging TMM. 

The book I'm just now wrapping up on my other blog, Bloggity-Blog, is A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne. To my surprise, this has turned out to be the most helpful book for understanding TMM. I really should have blogged it here, but it wasn't until I was near the end and started the section on the Renaissance (Settembrini) and the Reformation (Naphta) that I realized the connection. You can follow the book title link above to get to the beginning of my coverage of the book, though, as I said, the relevant part is at the end (HERE).

The books, besides the Pirenne, that I would now recommend to people interested in TMM are already here -- Doctor Faustus and The Brothers Karamazov. I think all three of these titles are better than Goethe's Faust (The Norton Critical Edition) and The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche, though, of course those books are also worth reading.

And so, at last, we get to the point...

Chapter 1

I don’t think I’d ever really noticed how the length of the chapters expands to reflect the changing sense of time. Chapter 1 is 17 pages; chapter 2 is 21 pages; chapter 3 is 64 pages; chapter 4 is 107 pages. And that’s just his original 3 week visit. Chapter 5 is 191; chapter 6 is 231; and chapter 7 (also the number of years) is 213 -- but truncated by the "thunderbolt."

Since "I had Never Really Noticed" is bound to become a theme, let's go with "IHNRN" as an abbreviation.

Even in this first chapter we see that Hans is quick to set aside his copy of Ocean Steamships. In fact he’s already set it aside by the time we first see him. And in the restaurant we note the first of the other residents, not counting his cousin,  the unnamed lady who sets a precedent by spending her entire life in the world of the sanatoriums.

Chapter 2

The Baptismal Bowl

Such an overture of death, I had forgotten that all aspects of his fascination with death are revealed here at the funeral of his grandfather. I wonder if he wrote this later. Maybe even after the rest of the book.

At the Tienappels'
And the overture continues in the second section with Hans’s dreaminess and indecisiveness when it came to his choosing a trade. I would almost bet money Mann wrote this last. Though it could also have been his starting outline. 

And the description of his approach to deciding on a career does sound almost like quantum (Copenhagen Interpretation) superposition. Nothing is determined in advance, it’s all a matter of probability and fate until the wave function collapses.

I do like the light, almost humorous, tone taken by the narrator. We are not going to take our young hero too seriously. I guess there's no getting around TMM being a Bildungsroman. And skimming that Wiki entry, I couldn't help jumping over to Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Goethe. Why has no one mentioned that as a book to read? Now I wonder how much Wilhelm and Hans are alike, though I suspect Thomas Mann may also be the model for student Hans -- though, intellectually, Adrian Leverkühn (in Doctor Faustus) is closer to young Mann. Perhaps Hans is the laid-back student the adult Mann now imagines he could have been. 

And don't I recall a reference to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, perhaps a musical reference? toward the end of TMM. Maybe I need to read some Goethe novels.

And I do like this picture of the world of what Henri Pirenne has taught me to call the patricians of the bourgeoisie. The centuries of bourgeois stability and rectitude; yet with a foot still in the Low German world of the common man. Plattdeutsch or Low German.

Chapter 3

Satana

IHNRN we get our Erasmus even before our first spell on our new chair.

P66 - Minos and Rhadamanthus

P67 - Carducci

P68 - Settembrini: about shipbuilding “... I am a humanist, a homo humanus, and understand nothing of such ingenious matters, however sincere my deep respect for them. But I can well imagine that the theoretical side of your profession demands a clear and keen mind and its practice no less than the whole man -- is that not so?”

P69 “It certainly is, yes, I can agree with you unconditionally there,” ... “Its demands are colossal nowadays -- one dare not be all too aware of just how exacting or one might truly lose all heart. No, it is no fun. And when one’s constitution is not all that strong -- I am here only as a guest, true, but my constitution’s not exactly the strongest, and I would be lying were I to claim that work suits me splendidly. Indeed it rather wears me down, I must say. Actually, I only feel really healthy when I am doing nothing at all.”
...

P70 - [After Hans has complained about his cigar and been informed that Behrens is also a cigar smoker] Settembrini: ...“A devil of a fellow, our Rhadamanthus. And truly ‘always merry’ -- though at times it’s a little forced. He tends to melancholy. His vice is not good for him -- but otherwise, it would be no vice -- tobacco only makes him melancholy. Which is why our venerable head nurse has taken charge of his supply and allows him only a small daily ration...” 

What is the significance of tobacco here? Something I should try to pay attention to this time through. Surely it’s not Freudian?


P71 - “What a windbag,” Hans Castorp thought, and did not change his mind when Settembrini... returned to casting aspersions. His primary object was Director Behrens -- he sneered at the size of the man’s feet and lingered over his title of Hofrat, which had been bestowed on him by a prince suffering from tuberculosis of the brain...

[After talking about the head nurse, Adriatica von Myendonks] Hans: “Ha ha ha. What a sarcastic man you are, Herr Settembrini.”

“Sarcastic? You mean malicious. Yes, I am a little malicious,” ... “My great worry is that I have been condemned to waste my malice on such miserable objects... In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment.” And all of a sudden he began to speak about Petrarch, whom he called the “Father of Modernity.” 

...

Clarity of Mind

 P75 - [Joachim is taking his temperature] Hans: “And how long does that take?” ... Joachim raised seven fingers.

“Seven minutes must be up by now.”

Joachim shook his head. After a while he took the thermometer out of his mouth, looked at it, and said, “Yes, when you pay close attention to it -- time, I mean -- it goes very slowly. I truly like measuring my temperature four times a day, because it makes you notice what one minute, or even seven, actually means -- especially since the seven days of a week hang so dreadfully heavy on your hands here.”

P76 Hans: ...”There is nothing ‘actual’ about time. If it seems long to you, then it is long, and if it seems to pass quickly then it’s short. But how long or how short it is in actuality, no one knows.” He was not at all used to philosophizing, and yet felt some urge to do so.

Joachim contested this. “Why is that? No. We do measure it. We have clocks and calendars, and when a month has passed, then it has passed -- for you for me and everyone.”

“But wait,” ... “You said that a minute is as long as it seems to you while you’re measuring your temperature, correct?”

“A minute is as long as . . . it lasts, as long as it takes a second hand to complete a circle.”

“But how long that takes can vary greatly -- according to how we feel it! And in point of fact . . . I repeat, in point of fact,” ... “that’s a matter of motion, of motion in space, correct? Wait, hear me out! And so we measure time with space. But that is the same thing as trying to measure space with time -- the way uneducated people do. It’s twenty hours from Hamburg to Davos -- true, by train. But on foot, how far is it then? And in our minds -- not even a second!”

“Listen here,” Joachim said, “what’s wrong with you? I think being up here with us is getting to you.”

“Just be quiet... So then, what is time?” ... “Will you please tell me that? We perceive space with our senses, with vision and touch. But what is the organ for our sense of time? ... You see, you’re stuck. But how are we ever going to measure something about which, precisely speaking, we know nothing at all -- cannot list a single one of its properties. We say time passes. Fine, let it pass... But in order to measure it . . . no, wait! In order for it to be measurable, it would have to flow evenly, but where is it written that it does that? It doesn’t do that for our conscious minds, we simply assume it does, just for the sake of convenience. And so all our measurements are merely conventions, if you please.”
...
P77 - Hans: “And I’ll go now,” ... “My head is full of all kinds of ideas about time -- a whole complex of thoughts, let me tell you. But I don’t want to get you worked up over them, not when your temperature is already too high. I’ll keep it all in mind, and we can talk about it later then, after second breakfast perhaps...”

[Hans’s first time in his chair] ...it was terribly pleasant just to lie there, Hans Castorp discovered at once to his delight -- he could not remember ever having used a more comfortable lounge chair... attached to a string and slipped into an embroidered linen case was a roll for your neck, neither too firm nor too soft, and it simply worked wonders. Hans Castorp propped one elbow on the broad, smooth surface of the chair arm, and lay there blinking, not even bothering to entertain himself with Ocean Steamships...

P78 - ...he went on dreaming. It was already ten o’clock when he lay down. An hour passed. It was an ordinary hour, neither long nor short...

“Well, that felt marvelous just lying there. What sort of chairs are those? If they’re for sale up here, I’ll take one with me back to Hamburg, they’re simply heavenly...

And this is why this book so appeals to me. The whole idea of laying about in comfy chairs, with lovely scenery to look at, and good food, while doing philosophy. What could be better?

Now, to “time.” While Mann is writing this in the teens and twenties, the cousins are still back in 1907. Einstein published his Special theory of Relativity in 1905 and his General theory in 1916. Would a slacker student of engineering have picked up any hint of what was still just Relativity? Seems unlikely. And of course Einstein was not talking about the perception of time. Both cousins would have been surprised by the objective relativity of time that Einstein was discovering.

To Hans’s point, I keep running into articles about how professional athletes and other people in high stress moments experience time quite differently. It would be only a slight exaggeration to describe this as the Matrix effect (meaning the cinematic slow-motion technique, not the phantasm machine idea). For that matter, I just the other day watched a video speculating about why time seems to pass quicker as you age.

Meanwhile, time can also be seen as the greatest offering of the Berghof. At least for Hans, it is giving him time to think... or to do “nothing at all,” as he himself claimed makes him feel the healthiest.

Herr Albin
 P94 ...That comparison taken from life at school had made an impression on him, [Hans] because he had been held back in his sophomore year, and he could recall the somewhat ignominious, but humorous and pleasantly untidy state of affairs that he had enjoyed in the last quarter, once he had given up even trying and was able to laugh “at the whole thing.”... On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless. He tried putting himself in Herr Albin’s shoes and imagined how it must be when one is finally free of all the pressures honor brings and one can endlessly enjoy the unbounded advantages of disgrace -- and the young man was terrified by a sense of dissolute sweetness that set his heart pounding even faster for a while.

I'm going to stop here and finish Chapter 3 next time.

Jump to Next: Chap. 3-4 

169. Thinking In Pictures - V. Empathy

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Thinking In Pictures 

Chapter 4 - Learning Empathy


P82 To have feelings of gentleness, one must experience gentle bodily comfort. As my nervous system learned to tolerate the soothing pressure from my squeeze machine, I discovered that the comfortable feeling made me a kinder and gentler person... It wasn’t until after I had used the modified squeeze machine that I learned how to pet our cat gently... As I became gentler, the cat began to stay with me, and this helped me understand the ideas of reciprocity and gentleness.

...The relaxing feeling of being held washes negative thoughts away... Gentle touching teaches kindness.

P83 I always thought about cattle intellectually until I started touching them. I was able to remain the neutral scientist until I placed my hands on them at the Swift plant and feedlots in 1974. When I pressed my hand against the side of a steer, I could feel whether he was nervous, angry, or relaxed. The cattle flinched unless I firmly put my hand on them, but then touching had a calming effect. Sometimes touching the cattle relaxed them, but it always brought me closer to the reality of their being.
...
The application of physical pressure has similar effects on people and animals. Pressure reduces touch sensitivity. For instance, gentle pressure on the sides of a piglet will cause it to fall asleep, and trainers have found that massaging horses relaxes them. The reactions of an autistic child and a scared, flighty horse are similar. Both will lash out and kick anything that touches them. 
...
P91 At a conference a man with autism told me that he feels only three emotions, fear, sadness, and anger. He has no joy. He also has problems with the intensity of his emotions, which both fluctuate and get mixed up, similar to sensory jumbling. My emotions don’t get mixed up, but they are reduced and simplified in some areas...

During the last couple of years, I have become more aware of a kind of electricity that goes on between people which is much subtler than overt anger, happiness, or fear. I have observed that when several people are together and having a good time, their speech and laughter follow a rhythm. They will all laugh together and then talk quietly until the next laughing cycle. I have always had a hard time fitting in with this rhythm, and I usually interrupt conversations without realizing my mistake. The problem is that I can’t follow the rhythm. Twenty years ago, Dr. Condon, a Boston physician, observed that babies with autism and other developmental disorders failed to move in synchronicity with adult speech. Normal infants will tune into adult speech and get in sync with it.

While Temple Grandin’s autism makes her a sympathetic student of cattle, it also makes her unusually observant of human behavior as she stands outside it, the same way that European sociologists or anthropologists stand outside the native cultures they study. 


P92 The work I do is emotionally difficult for many people, and I am often asked how I can care about animals and be involved in slaughtering them. Perhaps because I am less emotional than other people, it is easier for me to face the fact of death. I live each day as if I will die tomorrow. This motivates me to accomplish many worthwhile things, because I have learned not to fear death and have accepted my own mortality. This has enabled me to look at slaughtering objectively and perceive it the way the cattle do. However, I am not just an objective, unfeeling observer; I have sensory empathy for the cattle. When they remain calm I feel calm, and when something goes wrong that causes pain, I also feel their pain. I tune into what the actual sensations are like to the cattle rather than having the idea of death rile up my emotions. My goal is to reduce suffering and improve the way farm animals are treated.
...  


Jump to Next: Thinking In Pictures - VI. 

137. Zen Physics - XIII. The end... maybe

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Zen Physics

Chapter 14 - I, Universe
p171 One simple change in our worldview would have the most profound and dramatic effect on our lives. And it is this: to see, as Eastern philosophies have long seen, that the brain does not give rise to consciousness.
...
[Thoughts on the brain and consciousness.]

p172 Consciousness, in survival terms, is an irrelevancy. It is perfectly possible to conceive of a world inhabited by all sorts of life-forms... in which there never stirred a single conscious feeling or experience... It might appear to be full of diversity, sophisticated behavior, intelligence, and even wit and charm, and yet involve no subjective experience, no inner feeling of being, whatsoever. 

I can't see this, but I’ll have to take his word for it at the moment. 


Many attempts have been made by evolutionary biologists to explain why consciousness should have come about and what possible advantage it might have bestowed on its owners... Consciousness, it is sometimes said, helps us to see the world from each other’s point of view. But the circularity of this argument is readily apparent... [Only makes sense if] conscious feelings and experiences are already a fact of the world, but this offers no explanation of why consciousness should have come about in the first place. Exasperated by their failure to discern an obvious purpose for consciousness, some researchers have dismissed it as peripheral and almost accidental -- an inconsequential spin-off of the brain’s other activities.

The same problem that evolutionary biologists invent for themselves in trying to find a credible survival function of consciousness, neurologists face in their attempt to explain how consciousness stems from the workings of the brain. Consciousness-explainers are currently going to all sorts of lengths to weave a viable theory -- studying the development of neurons, tracing the precise pathways and stages of visual processing, drawing inspiration from artificial intelligence research, and, in the case of Roger Penrose and his followers, proposing that quantum effects inside the microtubes of cells will somehow do the trick...

p173 ... Life and nonlife... once considered fundamentally irreconcilable, were eventually seen to have a common basis thanks to the advent of molecular biology. In physics, magnetism and electricity were united by Maxwell’s field equations; mass and energy, and space and time, were linked through Einstein’s monumental work. But the divide between neural events and consciousness, brain and mind, is of a different order entirely. As Konrad Lorenz described in Behind the Mirror:

The “Hiatus” between soul and body . . . is indeed unbridgeable. . . . I do not believe that this is a limitation imposed just by the present state of our knowledge, or that even a utopian advance of this knowledge would bring us closer to a solution. . . . It is not a matter of a horizontal split between subjective experience and physiological events, nor a matter of dividing the higher from the lower, the more complex from the more elementary, but a kind of vertical dividing line through our whole nature.

There is an interesting parallel -- and it may be more than a parallel -- between the attempts of neurologists to explain how consciousness is produced by the brain and the efforts of cosmologists to show how the material universe was created or why it should even exist at all. At first sight, these programs seem poles apart. But in both cases, there is a persistent failure on the part of the investigators to recognize one simple truth beyond the complexity and ingenuity of their theories. And this simple truth is that what they are trying to do is not just difficult but fundamentally, categorically impossible. Even if physicists eventually discover... the... Theory of Everything -- it will not be possible to deduce from this why there should be an actual, material universe instead of the potential, abstract universe described by mathematical equations. Why should there be actuality instead of mere potentiality? Why should the equations have come to life? Why should there be both a script and a play? ….”
...
[More about the brain and consciousness.]

p174 ... the moment we stand back, shake off our conditioning, and look at the issue anew, we can begin to appreciate that the scientific tenet that matter -- the entire objective world -- is primary is an arbitrary and totally unsubstantiated claim. [I used bold there just to make the sentence easier to read.] There is no prima facie reason at all to go along with the assertion that mind is an emergent property of matter -- that, at some point, mind came into being when matter, in the form of brains, acquired some critical level of complexity. On the contrary, it is the material world which is very evidently conditional, for it is just one among many objects of our experience, and an object, moreover, that is not strictly given but known only through interpretation.
...
p175 ...quantum physics insists, consciousness has to be seen in a radically new light -- not as some quirky, local by-product of matter but as the very groundswell of creation. Only our stubborn, outmoded attachment to Newtonian reductionism [I think THIS is the sense of reductionsim he means... wait! No THIS is probably it] and Cartesian dualism -- an attachment that, not surprisingly, remains strongest among many scientists... is blocking the acceptance of this fundamental truth.

Consciousness is not new, isolated, and relatively unimportant; it is ubiquitous and essential. It is a permanent, inherent property of the universe, a fact that becomes most immediately obvious to us when we escape temporarily from our normal, egocentric state of mind during mystical or transcendental interludes. At such times, “we” vanish altogether and in our place is simply consciousness. As soon as the analytical activity of the brain is suppressed or circumvented, pure consciousness -- the background consciousness of the universe -- floods in. [A personal aside here, this is what so unsettled me during my sole experience with LSD. Hanging on desperately to my “self” became my focus, which made it impossible for me to sleep and lead to a very long (and colorful but) not very enjoyable night. This is also why I fear I could become one of those people who cling to life past the point when it makes any sense. I hope I’m wrong.] And of all the occasions when this happens none is more profound or revealing than at the point of death when, with the brain almost totally disabled, a condition of the most indescribably profound and expansive awareness takes hold. 

I’m surprised he doesn’t bring in the seemingly volitional aspect to dying (in some cases) -- people who seem to wait for a milestone or for people to leave the room before “crossing over.” This would seem to argue for the primacy of consciousness over sheer matter. 


p176 Without the brain, it is true, there cannot be selves. And our preoccupation with the self is perhaps the main reason for our long-standing confusion. In the West, we have tended to equate having thoughts and memories and, above all, selves, with being conscious. But this is a serious mistake. As long as the self is in residence we can never truly be conscious, for while ‘we’ exist we are trapped in a kind of fantasy -- Einstein's "optical delusion’"-- in which memories and conditioning cause us to put a private and false interpretation on the world. Only when thought and self come to an end, when symbolizing, analyzing, boundary-defining, and ego-building cease, can genuine, unfettered consciousness begin.

Foucault's "unthought" once again. 

... the world is already integrated. It is already as perfect, whole, and well conceived, throughout all of space and time, as it will ever be. What the brain really does is to sample extremely narrow aspects of reality through the senses and then subject these to further drastic and highly selective reinterpretation.

To grasp the truth about the universe we need to adopt a new, broader perspective. We have to see that reality is an unbroken unity, and that within this unity are aspects of the whole that think of themselves as being separate....
...
p177 ...as Freud put it:

Our present I-feeling is . . . only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive -- indeed, all-embracing -- feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the I and the world about it.
...
...The only reality that exists... is right in front of us; nothing is hidden, nothing is beyond our ken. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: “Other world! There is no other world! Here or nowhere is the whole fact.” 

I would have liked some context for Emerson as this could be read in at least two ways. But following the Wiki link above, it does look like he meant it as Darling would have us believe.


... The core message of the world’s great religio-philosophical systems, Eastern and Western, is to forget about yourself, lose yourself, and so, in the process, make contact with the much more important truth of the timeless awareness of the universe.

...Even a hardened pragmatist like J.B.S. Haldane felt moved to write that [I would have put a colon here and an ellipsis at the beginning of the next line] 

if death will probably be the end of me as a finite individual mind, that does not mean that it will be the end of me altogether. It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere byproduct of matter....

p179 But as regards my own very finite and imperfect mind, I can see, by studying the effects on it of drugs, alcohol, disease, and so on, that its limitations are largely at least due to my body.

Without that body it may perish altogether, but it seems to me quite as probable that it will lose its limitations and be merged into an infinite mind or something analogous to a mind which I have reason to suspect probably exists behind nature. How this might be accomplished I have no idea....

This is also, I believe, the Dionysian state Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy) would have us understand the dithyrambic chorus achieved in it’s worship of/contact with the godhead. 


It may seem as if I have reached two very different and incompatible conclusions in this book. Earlier, I reasoned that after death the feeling of being a self continues. I argued that this can be thought of as a form of reincarnation: the death of one brain followed by the birth of another being functionally and experientially equivalent to a person in life forgetting who they are and subsequently remembering they are someone else. How can this conclusion be squared with the idea that at death we effectively rejoin the unbroken sea of consciousness that lies outside us? Surely, when we die, there can be only one outcome.

p180 But, in fact, there is no incompatibility. We simply need to appreciate that we are dealing with two complementary aspects of the universe. And I use the word "complementary’"here advisedly to highlight a comparison with the wave-particle complementarity of modern physics and the subject-object complementarity of Eastern philosophy. The cosmos exists en bloc and yet within it individual selves have evolved. The one does not preclude the other; in fact, the two appear to be in some kind of extraordinary, intimate symbiosis, the significance of which will doubtless become clearer as our species further matures.

This is the point I had in mind back when I said he was not being entirely honest about “really” believing what he was arguing. Still not sure if I’m satisfied about that.  


New selves emerge as new brains emerge, because what a brain does is to act as a funnel, a filter, a limiter of consciousness, and therefore a shaper of self -- a separator of subject and object. The brain effectively pinches off a little bubble of introverted awareness and stores and manipulates information relevant exclusively to the survival needs of the individual so created... And... the projected self not only feels itself to be tangible, but it fails to appreciate, or even suspect, that it is never the same from one moment to the next.

OK, I’m mostly on-board with this as it matches well with the Devi’s Dream way of looking at reality. I don’t see the importance of the “never the same from one moment to the next” part, but that seems to be important to the author. Because this is built on the foundation (not in Haidt’s sense) of what we learned about the brain/mind relationship earlier in the book, he is unable to include a “pure” form of reincarnation (like the Tibetan version). Memories and characteristics can’t migrate from brain to brain, consciousness to consciousness. In the pure Devi’s Dream interpretation, this is not a problem. What he said above about pinching off little bubbles of awareness still works, but there’s no reason that “little bubbles” of Devi’s consciousness can’t include memories of previous “little bubbles.” And, of course, it’s nonsense to speak of “previous” at all. 

...
p181 ...we appear to be far from the masters of our situation. Our brains are in thrall to the automatically encoded programs in our genes, and “we” are shaped not by our own efforts but by the influence of our brains and our environments. It is a sobering realization that, in an important sense, we don’t really own or exert will over our bodies and minds; we are simply part of an endlessly unfolding process... if we can embrace a... wider panorama [of the self], we can begin to see that the differences between us are so slight and the similarities so great that all of us alive today are really just minor variations on the same person. The fragmentation or plurality of consciousness is only an appearance, like the hundreds of little pictures that a multifaceted crystal reflects without multiplying the object in reality...

I'm still hoping the film Lucy will turn out to be an eventual cult hit, like Blade Runner, so I'm going to talk about it even though few people seem to have seen it. Your loss. The conceit of Lucy is that the protagonist has taken a drug that allows her to use more and more of her brain, up to 100% at the end. The consequences, in the movie, are that she is able to defy the physical laws of the universe, among other things. Luc Besson is like Michael Bay's intellectual twin... neither makes much sense, but at least Besson is interesting.

If, instead of the drug and the brain, you think of Lucy as transcending her self and merging more and more with universal consciousness (god), then the movie makes much more sense. The physical "laws" of the universe would be irrelevant to a consciousness that was dreaming that space-time reality. I may have to watch it again to see if Besson dropped any hints that that was what he was really talking about. 

...
We have a future, then, beyond death, as new individuals -- as participants in “I-mode” continuity, or what amounts to secular reincarnation. However, standing behind this is the unfragmented consciousness of the universe. And, in some ways, this is the ideal and only genuine state in which to exist. It is that to which we ultimately aspire -- the timeless, all-knowing condition in which subject and object, life and death, you and I, God and man, are one.

I’m not sure I agree with his belief in the continued existence of an “individual.” He seems to be contradicting himself in his eagerness to please everyone. Unless you want to view the new “all” as an individual, which seems disingenuous. There will be other selves, other individuals, but they are only related to us as we are all related to each other, as pinched off bits of mind (or god.) 

Also, as is so often the case, he doesn’t give any thought to the dream state as a more profound form of consciousness, a case of our being unrestricted by our brains even while we maintain a (sometimes tenuous) hold on our identities. Why people don’t pay more attention to their dreams in this sense is a mystery to me. 

...
p182 Death of the self is seen as the gateway to what Buddhism calls nirvana and Christianity refers to as heaven. Buddhism urges us to escape the Wheel of Life, the cycle of death and rebirth, by achieving enlightenment through meditation -- by becoming a new Buddha. Zen goes a step further and tells us, effectively, not to even bother trying to escape; we should simply stop thinking about it, because there has never been a time when we haven’t been free. [This sound very much like what I like about Tantra Hinduism, as covered HERE.] In Christianity, the same message is couched in different terms. All we need do, it says, is become like little children (whose selves are not yet well defined) in order to enter God’s kingdom.
...
The plain fact is we are already one with the universe; we have never really been apart from it. And only the presence of self prevents us from seeing this... As Bertrand Russell wrote:

p183 The best way to overcome {the fear of death} -- so it seems to me -- is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river -- small at first, narrowly confined within banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks receded, the water flows more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thoughts of rest will not be unwelcome.

I'm thinking right now that I should go back and cite the age at which everyone quoted in this blog wrote or made their statements. I'm guessing Russell was not young when he wrote this.  

Death is not the end. In the truest sense, it is the essential prelude to change and new life. Death is the point where the individual and the cosmos meet, where differences are reconciled, and where physics and Zen, so long held apart in uneasy tension, merge effortlessly in a realm beyond words and thought.

Our revels are now ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air . . .
. . . We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

-Shakespeare, The Tempest


To die will be an awfully big adventure.

-James Barrie, Peter Pan
  

I was tempted to hold off publishing this, the ending of Zen Physics, until I also wrapped up The Righteous Mind. But it would have been strange to have such a long pause in the blogging of this book. Aside from the few reservations I've noted along the way, I don't have much of a problem with Darling's position here. I think it's very plausible that death will be like putting down a particularly engrossing novel, or coming to the end of a very good film. And if it isn't, no one will be the wiser.

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