The Magic Mountain

"We’re hurtling across the years now from third grade to graduate school, and from an underground Wonderland to the airy heights of a mountain top! Thomas Mann ‘s The Magic Mountain introduces us to Eros and Thanatos, the twin forces of life and death, and they become the subject of profound meditations and conversation. There’s more than a whiff of spookiness to the work, a fascination with disease, suffering, and death. Mann described his novel as a Zeitroman , a novel that takes time as its subject matter but also captures an entire era. The hermetic space of the sanitarium Berghof gives us a microcosm of the pre-World War I era. Mann presents philosophical debates between Lodovico Settembrini, apostle of the Enlightenment , and Leo Naphta, a Jesuit attracted to totalitarianism and Marxism, and to the dark side of life in general. Mann aimed to create a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art—richly operatic and sounding full chords. The Magic Mountain packs everything in – philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, science, and technology, along with the paranormal and the banal. In a chapter called “Schnee” (“Snow”) Hans Castorp, the novel’s protagonist, has a near-death experience while learning to ski. Suddenly he understands the seductive power of death and yet finds the will to live when faced with nature’s cruel indifference to his fate. When I was in graduate school, I had something resembling that “Schnee” experience while skiing in Austria. I lost all sense of orientation and might have been buried in a snowstorm had I not managed to find my way back to the ski lift. Hans Castorp sustained me. After that, I somehow knew that I would find life in literature and literature would always be in my life. It’s a book about making a wrong turn but finding ways to grow and transform despite that. And it takes us into the mythical and magical (Castorp is somewhat like Tannhäuser, who dwells too long in the realm of Venus), a fact that reminded me of how foundational cultural stories (myths, legends, parables, and fairy tales) are perpetually morphing into new versions of themselves. Every writer is a bricoleur, a tinkerer who puts together bits and pieces of what is close at hand. That mix of the old and the new has a steadying force, one that I recognized only later in life."

"Thomas Mann has a chapter: ‘Excerpts on Subjective Time.’ It’s like an essay in the middle of The Magic Mountain where he has an actuarial author explain to the reader how subjective time works. Almost everything that I have said and what Douwe Draaisma says was already voiced by Thomas Mann, in 1924. “In the ever-repeating sameness of the Magic Mountain Resort, time accelerates because all novelty is lost” The protagonist of the book, Hans Castorp, visits his cousin in a clinic in Switzerland, in the Alps, because he has a cough and tuberculosis. The first day the protagonist is at the clinic he sees everything anew, and that takes a certain amount of pages in the book. Then the next week he experiences takes the same amount of pages in the book as the first day did. Then the first month and the next month takes about the same amount of pages as the first week had, and so on. And later the first year takes the same amount of pages as the first day had. So because he stays there in the ever-repeating sameness of being in the Magic Mountain Resort, time totally accelerates because he loses all novelty. You could say time increases retrospectively for him in speed. It is a starting point of where to get inspiration, ideas and hypotheses, which you then try to validate empirically and compare. There is the wisdom of science where you intricately and more mechanistically find out how these things work, and brain science where you can identify that the hippocampus is related to memory and other brain regions that are involved in time perception. But I also relate very much to philosophers and novelists. This idea that time and all mental faculties are related to our bodily feelings is something you also find in novels and movies."