The Magic Mountain

"You see, what confuses the world is the incongruity between the swift flight of the mind and matter's vast clumsy slowness, its dogged persistence and inertia. One must admit such an incongruity would suffice to excuse the mind's lack of interest in reality, because as a rule the mind is disgusted by reality's ferment long before it erupts in revolution. Indeed, to a lively mind, a dead intellect is more abhorrent than basalt, which at least does not make any claims to life and thought." - The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, p601

There is nothing more disorienting than when an author characterizes his reader perfectly for the moment. Not only does the character become more familiar, more part of the reader, as the pages go on, but the character begins to pose questions which reflect back on the reader. Had I dealt so recklessly with time, as Hans Castorp had? The protagonist of the Magic Mountain becomes so fascinated with solitude, sickness, the beauty of decay, and the possible meaninglessness of it all, that for a fellow exile it is captivating. Castorp finds himself atop a mountain, above society, living with people who may as well be phantasms, ghouls, aetheric beings. He is in the sanatorium, the true birth place of modern society; the place in which all manner of sickness would come together: psychic, moral, tubercular, and of the manners and decorum which could not be kept up with whilst surrounded by so much decay.

Mann wrote this novel of altitude, of the vertigo of existence, at a time when manners, ethics, consistency, were narrow and elusive to many. His characterization of a woman from the Caucasus, the object of Castorp's fascination, is absurd; she has an elegance of suffering, of resisting complaint, allowing the suffering of her illness to give her new form, mannerisms, and to stage her as the libido of death, its physical form, what it may have shown to attract the living. She nonchalantly distresses, distracts, and disrupts, and her presence eradicates time for Castorp, whose entire experience of the sanatorium has been vertiginous, critical, and feverish, until covered with snow and silence, with lost time, Castorp is faced only with himself, his own indifference and incomprehension of the nature of being.

Mann's attempt to fathom the nature of life, the way forward through sickness, through the excess of the bourgeois, through the confidence of psychiatrists and physicians, who have much to say but little to show. Death abounds, death begins to assert itself because the reality of society in that time is superficial. Beautiful, elegant, with much in the way of delicacy, display, and treatment (however ineffective), but with little substance. Castorp loses time, grows feverish, because he knows and sees clearly how close living and death are entwined, and how this ought to be a more commonplace understanding. Castorp becomes aware of the indifference of time, even the indifference of matter and space, to our internal being. He is intimate with his own decay and that “instability trying to preserve form”, that “fever of matter”; for him it becomes safer to stay still and remember than to return, than to try on new customs, or reach a lower altitude.

For Mann, it is clear that sickness reminds us of our mortality, our ineffectiveness, and the redundancy of morals and shows of delicacy. Cholera epidemics would end tens of thousands of lives, and the tubercular illness would carry this deeper. An intimate illness, one which causes fever and long term suffering; it would pose the question of Really, is life and the world so indifferent to our spirit, our sense of meaning and attachment. It is this which causes the suffering of man: a lack, a deficiency of common understanding. It is slipping in this time. Decorum and the imperial mannerisms, the sense of gaiety and gregariousness of the early twentieth century all for show, unhitching with the outspread of cruel, indifferent sickness, belittling these and thereby having nothing to replace them with.

It was the very end. Mann understood then that man's solitude was equally distressing and character defining. So long as it altered something. Mann seizes upon the lack and void of existence, the indifference of the world and climate, and the efficacy of time. There is not good or evil, justice or injustice; it is a matter of perception, timing, and form. These ideas, if any, have survived the fatal implosion of Europe, the sickening of its peoples, the emotional collapse in the face of ineffectual reason. Passion shall always imprison reason, is the very essence of the real. The Bacchanalian forces of our existential desire, the desire to transcend over everything, whether it be sickness, meaninglessness, or even morality. Mann understands that death wears its own attractive costumes and has its own lures and rhythms. Castorp is the witness of this absurd slipping of meaning out of the world, the steady diminishing of heaven and hell as he breaths the lustreless air of the mountain.

So the novel ends and the reader slips away, drifts into his own deliriums, tries to use fragments to make sense of his own, the violence of his own worlds, real and daydream worlds which sometimes seem indistinguishable. Castorp is a reminder of how he has dealt negligently with time, having no other option but to retreat, being so overwhelmed by the vastness and inexplicable nature of place, of time, of being itself. It is as if the human had not understood that the laws of his being, of language, of taboo and limitation, were all merely temporal, that they too were mutable. Was anything sacred after all this time? Had we not only postured our intimate understanding of one another, our concern for each others well being? No, it was not a new world, but a more palpable sense of our suffering and disgust with ourselves became apparent.