Firing Up The Magic Mountain

I want to get past the election, past a bit of legal business, and get onto "Chasing Ashes." Reading The magic of Thomas Mann by J.C.D. Clark (Engelsberg Ideas) is an example of a piece that makes me both write and consider what I want to write about.

Rival superpowers, rising inequality, environmental degradation – today’s visitors to Davos have their own subjects to discuss. The naïve fatalism Hans displays is not the sickness of contemporary society, and to a modern reader the tuberculosis cure is more likely to recall the recent confinements of Covid. Similarly, the displaced existence of the sanatorium patients suggests the alternative communities found online, where truth is hidden among the complex webs of conspiracy and falsehood. ‘A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual’, Mann writes, ‘but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.’

The warning of The Magic Mountain endures. At the Berghof Sanatorium, scholarship is a seduction and argument, a kind of enchantment. While learning offers the illusion of understanding, intelligence cannot protect you from illness, nor does dying guarantee any insight. ‘What we’re here to do is to get healthier, not cleverer,’ Hans is warned, yet he himself must pass through disease in order to be cured, must face the spectre of death to overcome its fascination. Reading Mann’s masterpiece again, 100 years after publication, that lesson becomes a slender source of hope. For it hints that our present upheavals are not signs of sickness, but the first steps towards recovery.

 I read Mann's Magic Mountain while in prison and wondered why no one said this is a long book worth reading. It is. Go read it rather than wait. It may have fewer jokes than Ulysses, and it is shorter than Proust, but it has its own sense of humor and depth that does not depend on anything esoteric. 

But for "Chasing Ashes", it makes me wonder if I have thought enough on the societal aspects. Tunnel vision or information silos will not suffice. Ideas pop up that need interrogating - not just on the personal level, which has been the concern in what I wrote in prison and the one written since.

I also have a theory - not quite tested yet - that Magic Mountain influenced what I consider to be the Great American Novel: Raintree County. Ross Lockridge, Jr. interrogated American ideas through conversations between his characters in a way that did not stop the plot. Character developed through exposing the ideas of the characters.

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