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David Jacobson

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The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

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Reading for the 2nd time

read in January 2021

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David Jacobson said: " This novel opens as a satirical look at the luxury mountain tuberculosis sanitaria of pre-WWI Europe. Our protagonist, Hans Castorp, visits the International Sanitarium Berghof in Davos for three weeks to call upon his cousin, who is recuperating the This novel opens as a satirical look at the luxury mountain tuberculosis sanitaria of pre-WWI Europe. Our protagonist, Hans Castorp, visits the International Sanitarium Berghof in Davos for three weeks to call upon his cousin, who is recuperating there. But then the novel, and the life of Hans, takes a different turn. Suffering from a cold that might or might not be nascent tuberculosis, Hans remains. "Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!"

The novel remains on the surface funny and a pleasure to read, but underneath begins to probe the question of time. How can it be that an hour spent in boredom can seem like an eternity, but seven years spent eating and sleeping and milling around can pass in the blink of an eye?

Here in early 2021, the novel immediately raised questions about my own life. In the age of coronavirus, I have been paring back my interactions with the outside world and my daily schedule—while not as clockwork-regular as that of our Hans—does possess that cadence that can make it flow smoothly from week to week and month to month. Is the comfort I find in that no better than the comfort the Berghof inmates find in taking their rest cures? Or, put another way, if the recipe for a life well-lived is to balance our intrinsic motivations with the external constraints, what is to prevent us from cheating the system and guiding our motivations, which are surely mutable, to those that are simplest and most-easily satisfied?

Thomas Mann follows us straight along this line. For while the daily acts of Castorp's life become simple and repetitive, he experiences a Steigerung—an enhancement—of the mind. Through interactions with his fellow travelers and by taking stock of himself, Hans comes to grasp at something fundamental about the role of death in life that is the subject of this book and perhaps cannot be stated in many fewer words. We last see Hans in pitched battle on the Western Front; yet, not this but "his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible, had become the fundamental adventure of his life." ...more "

Jan 25, 2021 07:55PM · see review