thomas mann's "the magic mountain"

I mean yeah but it's early 20th century upper class Old Europe philosophical depressing, which I find easier to deal with than a lot of other types of depressing. Josh off the money at the start of this thread - obviously it's the perfect Winter book!

I think a lot about the narrator's memories of, like, the furniture and cutlery his grandfather had, how emblematic these kinds of memories are of a lost world and a profound generational gap. The house my grandparents lived in in Hamburg was, according to my parents, terrible kitsch in design but I never realised; it was where I got chocolates, it felt cozy.

Mann originally thought of Settembrini and Behrens as two satirical characters but as fascism began to rise he started to side explicitly with Settembrini - Behren's austere philosophy is clearly destructive but tbh there were few arguments where I didn't side with Behren; Settembrini just bloviates a lot about the brotherhood of man and hopes it sticks. I guess you could see him as the quintessential hapless liberal whose wishy-washy thinking allows for the rise of Behrens.

Mordy said he was going to start reading The Magic Mountain and having recently picked up a copy myself, it seemed a good time to begin! I haven't read this thread (and probably won't until I'm done), but will be recording my thoughts here diary-style just for the sake of it. Others should join in too if they are so inclined! I know nothing of the book other than what I've vaguely gleaned about Thomas Mann, and what I've guessed from other books.

Chapter 1 - Arrival

- The opening reminds me of Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent The Shining). Heading deep into some sublime unconscious, the privileged man removed from the security of his society etc
- Impressed immediately by the active presence of psychoanalytic thought: “Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.” It’s like Winnicott’s writing about primary unintegration. The air holds “no associations”!
- Amazing how much depth of meaning he is cramming into every sentence. Wonder if he can continue like this
- I want a (faux) “alligator-skin hand-bag”
- Three pages in and nature already seems enraged
- The characters are afraid to show too much feeling…something tells me this book will be somewhat an undoing of that
- I bet Ari Aster has read this - something in the slightly off, uncanny interactions between Hans and his cousin who knows more than him about the mountain and its designs
- Buildings (man-made structures) are “porous”, permeable, impermanent. The forest is dense and opaque…(self-) knowledge itself?
- Dangers and extremities of nature are initially imperceptible. You get sick of looking at the snow…looking at the self is difficult and infinitely hidden
- I love the hysterical laughter at the prospect of psychoanalysis! That is a very appropriate and fearful response

Chapter 1 - Number 34

- Some very Tarkovsky-esque settings already. Lots of features described that still make little sense. Reminds me of Aphichatpong Weerasethakul as well. Close to sci-fi
- Our Hans housed in a room ‘between’ stoic, military cousin and ‘loud, offensive’ couple. Egoic centre
- Hans’ room is a blank slate to project into
- The horror of death haunts everything and Hans is excited by it. A sense of his having already left behind his youth, staring into the abyss.

I really hope this is not too irritatingly spoilery to anyone who sees it.

Chapter 1 - In the Restaurant

- Everyone struggling to keep their emotion under wraps. A fear of the danger within
- Building of a liminal space - time in the sanatorium is fast and slow, Hans is hot and cold, restlessness is “pleasurable and troubling”. A place of transformation. The imminence of letting go…
- They are suspended in a time supposedly outside of ‘progress’, unlike ‘down below’. This is pretty relatable to my current situation in life. A feeling of not being able to progress in the real world until I am better, as life hurtles by indifferently. It’s weird how books seem to present themselves at opportune moments. I’m sure others find this too?
- I love the introduction of the psychoanalyst next to the fire, and this:

…with him all formality was superfluous, and only jocund mutual confidence in place…

Omg I just looked ahead at some of the upcoming chapter titles! I am excited. I'm not in analysis at the moment and I've just fallen ill, so I feel like this is really the perfect time to start this odyssey.

Okay I'm not going to continue my note-taking here, but will check in with broader reflections later. Suffice to say though, this is an incredible book so far

I enjoyed reading your notes! It's been half a life since I read this, and I suspect re-reading it will blow me away again, albeit in a completely different way than the first time 'round. I should do this re-read, soon.

The characters are afraid to show too much feeling…something tells me this book will be somewhat an undoing of that

It's been a while for me too, but I'm curious to see what you have to say about this as you move through the novel.

This book is close to me for a couple of reasons. I read it because it's a favorite of someone I admire, but I also just relate to the emotionally isolating and disorienting experience of being in a "sanatorium" (in Germany, no less). Might re-read it now.

There's an uncharacteristic and funny moment toward the end of the novel that I'd also be curious to read your thoughts on.

- Amazing how much depth of meaning he is cramming into every sentence. Wonder if he can continue like this

hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

I'm amused by how amused you are by that statement, Brad.

My reading experience with TMM was one of my favorites: on a Sanibel beach, as close to Hans Castorp and the mountain sanitarium as you can imagine.

TMM was the first novel I completed after a dry spell of, I don't know, like three years?

You want density? Check out Joseph and His Brothers, the subject of another amazing experience three years ago.

Oo there's an Everyman Library edition.

Lol at Brad’s laughter! What is going to happen...

Maybe I’ll keep chronicling my thoughts here. I do feel it’s kind of embarrassingly impressionable of me to have a brief heart/lung scare so soon after reading about the half-lung club. :| Joseph and His Brothers is on the list.

I’d like to hear more about how you relate to this book at some point Variablearea!

Ehhhhh

Probably not

Lol at Brad’s laughter! What is going to happen...

if anything he crams more and more depth of meaning into every sentence as the book advances. when you get to hans "playing god" you'll see what i mean

That is completely fair enough!! Sorry to pry. Still very interested in hearing everyone's thoughts about it in general as it unfolds. Recent notes have been shorter as typed on phone during journeys.

Chapter 2 - Of the Christening Basin, and of Grandfather in his Two-fold Guise
- Hans’ mother died of a sort of stroke whilst laughing when he was 5, and his father from something like pneumonia when he was 7, his father’s father a year and a half later of the same thing
- “something in the depth of his being responded to it” - to his grandfather’s collar. Indescribable pleasures. His grandfather is very refined and austere, which inspires Hans greatly. His grandfather smoked cigars. Identifies with him more strongly, though he is extremely old-fashioned even for the time
- Impressed by the artifice of everything. The trappings of life that distracts from death
- Of the Christening basin: “That great-great-great-great - what a hollow sound it had, how it spoke of the falling away of time, yet how it seemed the expression of a piously cherished link between the present, his own life, and the depth of the past!” - hereditary memory, ghosts in the nursery, intergenerational trauma, the transience of life. Closely connected to stories of his own and his father’s and grandfather’s infant lives.
- Hans wishes for the strange feeling of ‘recurrence in continuity’. A good candidate for therapy!
- A close family tie not infrequently skips a generation
- Everyday grandfather is superseded in Hans’ mind by a ‘pure’ grandfather depicted in a rather old-fashioned (medieval-style) painting of his grandfather in ceremonial attire. Formation of superego. Painting grandfather also presented on the day of his funeral - in his true guise
- At the age of 9, Hans is already a ‘connoisseur’ of death, and adapts by adopting a kind of detachment. It affects his ‘senses’ more than his ‘spirit’. He forms defences to survive. Tears no longer seem natural to him
- A solemn spiritual, dignified death vs profane, physical, ugly death, which is counteracted by flowers, which “prevent one from being conscious of it”, this other aspect makes his grandfather look like a wax doll - “a shell made of its own substance” - this makes it not sad. The removal of life, so the removal of feeling. Dealing with something hollow
- A fly touching his grandfather’s hand reminds him with embarrassment of a former schoolfriend who seemed to be gay
- Hans now dislocated to another new home

Chapter 2 - At Tienappels’, and of Young Hans’s Moral State
- Hans is sensible and no stranger to hard work, but also an aesthete - gives himself over to the pleasures of life
- He assimilates into his new wealthy life with the Tienappels with ease. An aesthetic front masking the pain of a childhood full of death
- An importance is ascribed to ‘his lot in life’, which is greater than considerations of personality - the past has played a bigger part in the development of his character than should have been the case
- He sees ‘no reason’ to exert himself mentally. There is a great sense of lack at his core
- A ‘laming of the personality’ occurs as a result of Hans living the life of his epoch and taking for granted without analysis his past life. He might be more predisposed to it out of a wish to avoid the traumas of his past - especially the more ‘upright’ he is - it permeates the spiritual, physical and organic!
- Chooses a profession in ship-building (instead of ship-painting) - constructing strong but ultimately permeable facades of vessels!
- Hans considers work the sole meaning of man, like then immortality projects of Terror Management Theory, but it does not agree with him. He likes free time and no obstacles - like a baby. He also realises deep down the hollowness of work, and the value of thought, daydreaming with his cigars - ‘dozing’
- His political morals as a young man are undecided and could favour either extreme. He is 23 at the start of his journey

Chapter 3 - Drawing the Veil
- The book is an attack on reason!
- Hans feels not rested but fresh - like that Bion thing about running for miles in one’s dreams. Waking state is not privileged over sleeping state
- The unconscious is so frequently referred to - reminds me of Anna Freud’s saying about how we almost never know the real reasons for doing anything we do
- Hans again feels shame and repressed excitement in proximity with sex

Chapter 3 - Breakfast
- The building is described as ‘porous’ - again the permeability and transience of human things
- Hans starting to become unstuck very early on. He clings to his defences (hat, stick, cigars etc) but his eyes water and his face is red
- The dining room is opulent. A feast for the senses
- Excitation in someone ‘homely’ seems offensive to Hans - link to grandfather’s special grandeur etc
- Hans jolted by a banging door - some unseen dread?
- Dr Behrens is not acclimatised to the air. His face is purple, his eyes water - signs of physical strain in those who open themselves to the elements
- Hans would be a ‘better patient’ than his cousin - it ‘takes talent'. Some people do not make 'good' candidates for analysis - at least, preparatory work is required. A lot of these thoughts are going to be heavily psychoanalytically skewed btw because that's how I am prone to reading most books and especially this one, my god! No idea if that's going to be borne out in the fullness of the plot or not though...
- Doctor is wild! Recognises Hans’ anaemia immediately. Preternatural ability to read him, like the analyst, but without any of the same restraint of character (just like irl)

Chapter 3 - Banter. Viaticum. Interrupted Mirth
- The narration is close third person, but extends slightly beyond Hans to his cousin as well - creates a weird omnipotence slightly outside the self (we can hear what Joaquim thinks of Hans etc)
- The appearance of life often turn quickly to death - the people coming down the hill full of liveliness and the woman’s lung whistling
- Hans is obsessed with cigars. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar... He can’t stomach them up there, believes it connected with the heat in his face. Repressed sexuality? Links earlier with the memory of the boy at school. Drugs (cigars etc) seem hollow and lose their taste in the presence of a real cure
- Being ill and dying are not serious to them up there, “life is only serious down below”
- Why do they hide death at the sanitarium? When they are otherwise so open and exploratory??
- The description of death throes sends Hans into another fit of laughter

Chapter 3 - Satana
- Settembrini refers to them as being ‘sunk’ in depths - deeper into the ucs
- The impertinence of the well to dally in the world of the sick for however long they see fit. The obstinacy of what 'wellness' even is
- Equating work with Satan - a severe resistance to that which is contrary to infantile relating
- Rhadamanthus is a judge of the underworld - this is how Settembrini thinks of Dr Behrens.
- They share in common the vice of smoking cigars - they depress the doctor
- Malice is the beginning of enlightenment
- Settembrini harbours the notion of a ton of sinister clinicians. Believes Krokowski to be smutty! Strong mistrust of clinicians abusing power
- Described himself as a reactionary humanist and teacher. Battle between reason/humanism and psychoanalysis?

Chapter 3 - Mental Gymnastic
- The phenomenological experience of time is subjective. Different to the senses
- A sonorousness overcomes Hans as his stay increases. He wishes to lie down. Talk of a chair that Behrens has perhaps specially commissioned, not unlike Freud’s chair. The sanatorium prepares the spirit for the psychoanalytic encounter

if anything he crams more and more depth of meaning into every sentence as the book advances. when you get to hans "playing god" you'll see what i mean

This is exciting! It's so rare to find something like this. There are so few writers I can think of who really pack that much profound thought in (Woolf... Idk, I probably need to read a lot more).

Chapter 3 - A Word Too Much
- Chapters have strange time and space demarcations. They follow on from the previous point
- Chasing thoughts is ineffectual - they disappear if you try too hard to find them
- Of his palpitations, Hans says: “it is disturbing and unpleasant to have the body act as if it had no connexion with the soul” - psychosomatic manifestations. Hans very open to the idea of finding a psychic cause for the illness. Joaquin is not - always dismissive.
- ‘Mazurka’! That is the name of our record player
- Everyone goes pale or red at any mention of sensuality. Clearly some depraved things bubbling just under the surface
- Settembrini’s term for them ‘horizontallers’ - is meant negatively, a self-deprecating joke at their inactivity, but it suggests their closeness to both sleep and death, or the betweenity of their situation
- Hans’ body compels him to sleep - he is desperate to dream and draw out meanings not attainable in a waking state

Chapter 3 - Of Course, A Female!
- I want to poll these chapter titles…
- Hans has the fantasy that everyone stayed in place in the dining hall as he slept. Omnipotent fantasy coming into play
- Frau Stöhr regales the table with stories of clandestine sexuality - the dining hall has uncanny and beastly properties
- Hans is drawn to the ‘heedless’ woman - drawn to those who can act with abandon, unlike him
- What does ‘blue Peter’ mean in this context?? Why does it cause Hans so much mirth?
- Blood from the mouth - physical ailments given less importance on the mountain

Chapter 3 - Herr Albin:
- Herr Albin acts recklessly. Chekhov’s gun (and knife) introduced
- The death instinct is in turmoil on the mountain, brought into greater relief against the feeling of timelessness. Herr Albin flippant about suicide - at peace with death as he ‘doesn’t count’ (being terminally ill)
- Hans relates to his story about the relief in no longer having to try at school. The giving up. And how this relates to death - the removal of shame, and how freeing it could be. A sense of pleasure in death is frightening for him

Chapter 3 - Satana Makes Proposals That Touch Our Honour:
- On the mountain, the healthy are the ones who are ignored. Like an abject heterotopia for the diseased othered of society to be accepted
- Talk of suicides at the sanatorium cause Hans disquiet to the point of wanting to leave
- Paranoid fantasies of Marusja laughing at him. Overcome by weariness. Without access to the resources of the sick, sleep is the only place his thoughts can be exorcised
- Entertainments in one ‘salon’ is purely visual - stereoscopes, zoetropes etc - the language of dreams. The images seem linked to Hans’ past and present (a schoolmaster chastising a boy etc)
- The links between body and mind, internal and external are beginning to disintegrate (or unintegrate!) for Hans. He doesn’t know his age or how he feels
- Settembrini entreats Hans to leave the mountain immediately, but Hans doesn’t see why. Needs the chains of signification to be broken - he is too rigid in his acceptance of reality, but yet not so much as Settembrini. A great Lacanian analysand! Neurotic
- He is feeling more miserable than ever in his life and “suddenly he was moved by a man extraordinary and extravagant thrill of joy and suspense” - the euphoria of real change! Or the possibility of it
- What is the “new, penetrating sense” of understanding why his cousin went pale at the mention of Marusja?
- In his dreams he runs from Dr Krokowski’s analysis and wakes up sweating! Settembrini and his rationalism also won’t be budged in dream - the two forces vying for primacy. Control and submission
- He dreams twice of the woman in the white sweater - free-association links her to a sense of abandon and unrefinedness; the joy of freedom, of death, with joyful shame - a thousandfold stronger than when awake! The force of energies spent on repression have been redirected

Chapter 4 - Necessary Purchases:
- Sublime landscape and shifts in weather echo internal states
- The binary opposites set up at the beginning of the novel are beginning to mingle - blurred boundaries between internal/external, hot/cold
- Settembrini is cynical about the cost of the establishment and the hierarchical control of the clinicians over the inhabitants of the sanitarium. He had a happy childhood, and perhaps this is why he finds it difficult to engage with the idea of the cure. His father liked the warm and he cannot understand or appreciate coldness - it has little to offer him
- Settembrini freaking out about Hans saying that there is an aesthetic inconsistency when disease and dullness are combined. Thinks he is mistaken to ascribe disease any air of dignity. Of course, Hans is fiercely protecting the memory of his grandfather. Settembrini rants on about progress and reason and enlightenment. Alludes to Hans being regressive - ‘backsliding’ - spiritually. Says the real tragedy is that a decaying body cannot hold a noble spirit
- Again Settembrini casts himself as a schoolmaster! He teaches through pedagogy. Hans hates him lol. Likes the beauty of his words but is very critical
- Settembrini torn between happiness at teaching Hans, and thinking ill of him for staying and submitting to the cure

wait till Naphta and Settembrini duel on Mustafar!

:O That sounds against reason!

Chapter 4 - Excursus on the Sense of Time:
- The wrapping with the blankets creates a womb-like security. Something impermeable and safe
- “The unanalysable, the almost mysterious properties of his reclining chair” - Hans takes comfort in the safety of the incommunicado core. Something of the self is kept safe
- The strict timings of everything provide a secure, holding space. Uniformity makes the perception of time fall away, and therefore so too does consciousness. Monotony stretches out immediate time but makes bigger spaces of time disappear
- Older years pass quicker because “habituation is...a fatiguing of the sense of time”
- Change rejuvenates our sense of time and renews our perception of life. When we return from a holiday we adjust “more quickly to the rule than to the exception” and almost forget the holiday of the senses even existed
- I want to write these ideas into an essay about how The Magic Mountain teaches us to be a good analysand. How to be a ‘good’ candidate

Chapter 4 - He Practises His French:
- Hofrat has a very cavalier attitude towards the dying, the ‘moribundus’
- Hans is the ‘disinterested spectator’ - he holds himself as special by keeping himself apart from the group. Shelters himself from further envy of the group’s togetherness in this way
- ‘Tous-les-deux’ - both (her children, ill? Or something about a between state). When he speaks to her it comes out as ‘tous les dé’ - all the dice. Putting everything on the table, the risk of putting everything of life out there
- Hans feels in his ‘element’ when people are sad, when there is grief. A displaced experience of his own unfelt grief. Thinks a career of clergyman would have suited him. One of his chiefest defences involves using ‘dignity’ to defend from the reality of death. He can get near to it without internalising the losses he has experienced

Chapter 4 - Politically Suspect:
- Enjoying an outdoor concert every other Sunday - romance hinted at amongst all the young people.
- Settembrini considers music too abstract and against reason. Thinks it politically suspect for being able to go too easily towards or against progress. He’s a persuasive talker

Chapter 4 - Hippe:
- Hidden attractions for both Madame Chauchat and Marusja, though they each remind him of someone different
- Krokowski’s course - ‘love as a force contributory to disease’. Is this critical of the limits and wilder reaches of psychoanalysis? Of its more chastising and controlling bent? Or is it simply the overwhelming effect of love on the body
- Hans goes alone for a morning walk to find freedom from the oppressiveness of the sanatorium (and of what it forces him to confront) and sings with pleasure, free-associating the words and music, until he is nearly faint and gives in to despair
- Hans mistakes his grandfather’s ‘dignity’ around illness, which was surely rather his attempt to shield his grandson from the trauma of illness
- Explores the landscape with child-like awe but also terrifying abandon. Takes the left-hand path…
- He ‘lets blood’ in the form of a nosebleed, but feels ‘no need’ to breathe and does so only superficially. Human meaning being removed, proximity to death is intoxicatingly close
- Hans is lifeless in the moment, alive in past memory. What I think about each self being alive in the present moment
- Of school colleague Hippe, “Hans Castorp was penetrated by the unconscious conviction that an inward good of this sort was above all to be guarded from definition and classification” - fear of homosexuality, protection of love. Resolved to inactivity about it until one day a brief conversation about a pencil - the apex of his life! This is who Chauchat reminds him of (any link to Charcot…?)
- He cries. He came on the walk to recall the memory (therefore not really escaping any of the strangeness of the sanatorium). The space allowed his unconscious thought to take hold. Self-analysis. Realises he must return to the ‘real’ psychoanalytic lecture and moves only with difficulty towards it. Freud’s layman’s analysis. Winnicott’s ‘the cook can be a therapist’

Next chapter - 'Analysis'! I'm scared about how this is going to go

Chapter 4 - Analysis:
- Dr Krokowski is poetic and erudite, but also very scientific; Hans feels as though he is hiding the ‘profane’ in plain sight and could get away with saying anything in this way. “He demolished illusions, he was ruthlessly enlightened”, he “made an impression profoundly otherworldly” - the distance of psychoanalysis from much of lived reality
- Speaks of the unreliability of the feeling of love, which made up of many impulses, mostly perverse. That because we don’t see the whole of love as perverse, we justify the ‘perversity’ of the attendant impulses; normative defences urge this conformity to a ‘valid and irreproachable whole’.
- Others do not arrive at this ‘whole’, and in these people the force of a) the compulsion to love, and b) the shame and disgust (and chastity) working against it is too intense compared with bourgeois standards. According to Krokowski, this ends in the triumph of chastity, love being suppressed by fear and a desire to be pure (or in Hans’ case, ‘dignified’). Puts me in mind of part-object relating, of patients between neurotic and psychotic states (classically speaking), of an unresolved Oedipus complex (or navigation of the ‘third’ to be more contemporary), which would fit with the liminality of the mountain and the extremes of the love experienced
- Hans thinks Krokowski is a vision of the conflict he describes!
- Krokowski’s dramatic reveal is that “Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed”. Truly, repressed instincts can clearly be linked to illnesses, but not in this extreme! Dangers of absolutism in psychoanalysis at the time. Susan Sontag’s writing on consumptive illness
- Follows that Hans has been feeling iller on the mountain the more he was wrestled with love feelings
- Hans meditates on Madame Chauchat, is drawn in turn to the more perverse associations with dirtiness and unrefinedness, and illusions of desire perpetuated in her see-through sleeve. He decides it must be immoral for a woman who is diseased and therefore not fit to be a mother to arouse desire. He thinks attraction of this kind is equally as pointless for procreation as his affection for Hippe, but the comparison surprises him.
- Krokowski looks like ‘Christ on the cross’. He is a sacrifice for the sins of the sanitorium. Also signals the cult-like religiosity and guru-ness psychoanalysis can sometimes be inflected with. Indeed, it seemed he “was making propaganda for psycho-analysis”, spoke of the redeeming power of the analytic, the bringing of light into the unconscious transforming ‘abnormalities’ into conscious affect… This bespeaks the difficulties of proselytising about belief!
- Audience follows him like the Pied Piper. Hans wilfully considers himself healthy still at the end of the lecture

Chapter 4 - Doubts and Considerations:
- Behrens doesn’t own the sanatorium. It is overseen by ‘higher powers’ - a corrupt cultural superego?
- Hans speculates that one who has suffered (as Behrens has) is perhaps well-placed to help others who also do, but wonders if one who is ailing can securely care for others
- Krokowski’s room in is the ‘basement’ (descending steps into the unconscious)
- A twilight prevails in Krokowski’s inner sanctum compared to the bright white of the corridors - like Bion’s ‘penetrating beam of darkness’ (for repressed objects to emerge in a vacuum)

Chapter 4 - Table Talk:
- Hans realises his tremor is partly ‘the outward expression of his inner stimulation’
- Fräulein Engelhart cheers on Hans’ fascination with Madame Chauchat. Wouldn’t be surprised if Hans ends up involved with her
- Plays a game with her where he displaces his own infatuation over Madame Chauchat onto Engelhart, and also vice versa. The novel explores nice bisexual tensions
- ‘Questionable situations’ disgust Hans. His superego is loosening its grip on the id, but Hans’ ego is still wary. He wrestles with instinctual expressions of desire and feels contempt towards them
- “In a state of mind when music particularly appeals” - love, being closer to infantile relating, brings back a joy over that which is separate from language
- Has he contrived an infatuation to explain the otherwise inexplicable beating of his heart? To gain peace from deeper concerns?

Chapter 4 - Mounting Misgivings. Of the Two Grandfathers, and the Boat-ride in the Twilight:
- Hans and Madame Chauchat form a telepathic link - primordial telepathy
- The physical and social ‘gulf’ between the two represents the force of Hans’ defences, instilled by a strong traditional superego (the ‘painting’ grandfather)
- His love becomes the meaning for his stay. Is this an avoidant strategy? Or a working through? Reminds me of that transference paper about patients in love being impossible to treat
- Down below is a ‘plain’, a ‘flatland’ - somewhere where affect is hidden and people aren’t given to such destructive flights of the senses
- As an internal guardian figure, Settembrini beats Behrens for seeming more secure and sound of mind. He is very outward-looking (if not at all inward). Knows much of the world and society. Reminds Hans that progress is not just material
- Settembrini and Hans’s grandfathers both wore black up to death - one (a revolutionary) to mourn his nation, the other to celebrate traditionalism - Hans is struck by how different they are. But both created a gulf between themselves and ‘the evil present’. Just as Hans is doing with his love
- The two grandfathers represent the two worlds - past and future
- Settembrini states that technical progress draws people together. That the world is organised by perpetual conflict between opposing forces: tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge etc. East the former, West the latter. Prides triumph to the West, to the enlightenment of ‘rational advance’. The Asiatic principle must be crushed, starting with Vienna! Home of psychoanalysis
- Love Hans’s muted responses to Settembrini’s ramblings!
- Concludes from it all that the waking man has an advantage over the sleeping and dreaming! Ignores his misgivings about S in waking life, runs from him in sleep. Forces his instinctive disagreement down and engages him to find a balanced view, but more and more gladly feels his dreams taking him in the other direction
- Love works against rational forces. Hans wrapped in “the mist and moonbeams” of the eastern heavens. An eastern philosopher

does anyone know what's up with the temperatures in this book? they all seem pretty normal - like ppl getting worried about 99.7 or even 98.7 not being a great temperature. of course 98.6 is the ideal human range and not a sign of illness. so i'm not sure - is this a historical thing (like maybe they thought the numbers should've been lower?), a climate thing (maybe they *should* be lower in the mountains), a hypochondriac thing? i did some google research but i couldn't turn anything up.

they’re using celsius why because in europe

that's ridiculous

:D

I too made my way up the mountain again, and started re-reading this work of marvel. No chance I'll catch up with you tt, but it's been a joy reading your thoughts and tidbits so far.

What edition are you reading? For once, I'm reading a German-Dutch translation. It feels a bit more archaic in a way my English copy isn't, but it suits it.

You might catch me up! Time has a way of distorting itself, after all! How long ago did you read it? I wonder what will strike you anew second time round.

My translation is by H. T. Lowe-Porter. I can imagine an archaic translation would be fitting! I’ve been surprised by the extent of differences in translation I’ve seen thus far. I wish I had more German...one day.

I put Mordy’s question about temperature to a science teacher yesterday and she had no better clue as to why they’re considered so high. The mystery persists...

I just bought this book in German and English because they were both like a dollar on Kindle. I don't read German very well at all but the English translation I have is so bad that I think I'll try to struggle through the German one with a dictionary. I'll let y'all know how it goes (probably very badly.)

A fresher one got published in the nineties.

reading this book now couldn't be timelier

feel like the world is taking a rest cure

"This is the typical mode of experience of someone lost in a mountain snowstorm, woh never finds his way home," he thought as he struggled along, the phrases emerging in tattered, breathless fragments - discretion forbade his putting it more explicitly. "Someone hearing about it later imagines how ghastly it must have been, but forgets that illness - and my present situation is more or less an illness - batters its victim until they get along with one another. The senses are diminished, a merciful self-narcosis sets in - those are the means by which nature allows the organism to find relief. And yet you have to fight against such things, because there are two sides to them, they're really highly ambiguous. And your evaluation all depends on which side you view them from. They mean well, are a blessing really, as long as you don't make it home; but they also mean you great harm and must be fought off, as long as there is any chance of getting home--" (475)

Passion -- means to live life for life's sake. But I am well aware you Germans live it for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget oneself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves. C'est ça. You haven't the least notion how repulsively egoistic that is of you and that someday it may well make you the enemy of humankind." (p. 585)

Has anyone written about the ways tmm anticipates WW2, prefigures it (or leads away from it) and similar ideas about the German type/personality as Mann saw it and Nazism? I do have this Mann essay on brother Hitler i have yet to read but i'm interested in critical/scholarly work on the theme too if anyone can recommend it?

“Guazzabuglio” what a word

Wehsal as proto-incel

You're way ahead of me (I'm at page 280 or so), but googling I've not found what you are after specifically. There are some jstor hits about Mann and anti-semitism, and Mann and the rise of fascism (which he strongly denounced).

Myself I'd be intrigued to see how WWI crept in the book, since he worked on it from 1912 to 1924. But I'm not far in enough to see the influence of WWI come to the fore, however obliquely, I think.

Still immensely enjoying the book btw.

An ok essay on Mann in the New Yorker (Alex Ross) though I never got on with The Magic Mountain, and I don't see that he was that much of Modernist, as I understand it. V good discussion of his Diaries (which need a reissue) and "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man" is sold by Ross discussing just how far apart from a lot of his work it is.

Notes is a...weird fucking book. I read its NYRB edition last May and had a few thoughts.