By Thomas Mann
This book could be classified as an adult substitute rendition of Animal Farm as the Berghof grows hostile. It is the story, written between the World Wars taking place in the run up to World War I of Hans Castorp, a young German with a future who makes a three week trip of visiting his cousin up in the Alps. The specific destination in the mountains is a sanitarium for those with tuberculosis. Given the time period the word tuberculosis is never used. Only the condition, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment are described in many scenarios where you finally say aaah tubular…tuberculosis. But all this is the back drop to Mann’s exploration in to the perceptions of time and the rift between social science and religion. Castorp ends up staying in the sanitarium out of choice.
In the beginning of each chapter Mann puts forth a hypothesis on time in a novel narrative. The rest of the chapter is suggestive color commentary on the antics of people in a 1920’s Sanitarium. I call this poetry in prose. This takes longer to tell the rest of the story, which is mildly intriguing at best, but engages the reader to examine his own philosophies. In the end time becomes secondary in conflict of the soul between that which is spiritual and that which is material to which all social problems are secondary of which this is the only kind of Individualism that can be constant.
Mann uses three characters to create the analysis of society. Setrmbrini, is an advocate of secular civic norms; Naphta, is an exiled not quite ordained Jesuit priest. Both pedagogs are introduced early in the book and provide on going debate to out wit the other to the benefit of Hans Castrup. Peepercorn arrives late to the sanitarium and is incoherent in his commanding communication who imparts a don’t worry be happy final ruling on all. Mann himself author weighs-in on one position over the other in the voice of Hans Castrup who surmises “There are many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is the worst". Hans Castrop's many previous observations of the pedagogic debate between Setembrini and Naphta was contradictory in whole and on each person's part. Their clever wit was no better than Peeperkon's incoherent incomplete sentences. In the end personality prevails over intelligence in societies. It pains me to see too many examples of this phenomena being the reality.
The subject of time the ends up being an undercurrent in theme. I believe Mann suggests that the cosmos is infinite and therefore there exists no supersensible world, no dualism. In the voice of Naptha: “The Beyond is absorbed in to the Here, the antithesis between God and Nature falls, and man ceases to be the theater of struggle between two hostile principles and all becomes unitary and harmonious.” And therefore without man, there is no time.
In my commented bibliography below, each note is categorized as either philosophical, or that to do with time, or both.
Walk by the Ocean of Time
The one prime mover of our earth; outwardly demonstrating
Time, an array of water molecules in simultaneous motion
One could only stand on the seashore in awe at the contemplation
Upon the loosely thrown out metaphor on ourselves; fluid motion
A seashore that once landed explorers to change a continent
Yet another seashore that witnessed a landing liberating army
Navies patrol a sovereign’s boarder twenty-four seven vigilant intent
The hands of time sweep over them, despite challenges on humanity
Hand in hand lovers stroll along; lost in love among rolling waves
Early years they talk of their ambitions, o’re head a cry of seagull heard
The conversation moves to children through time’s accidental haze
The sands of time as family buries their bodies and carries their word
Regardless of man’s quests to conquer, solve, and challenge father time
The seashore the very representative of the realities of opposition
Surf and turf coexist in harmony need not reason but only rhyme
Seashore time is forever; sand through hourglass merely our deposition
Objectivity in Time
While time is an illusive phenomena
One can always count on applied science
The inventers of objects in motion
Co creating the measured passing of time
The mechanics of gears and levers
Over a face a circle akin to earths rotation
Looking upon the face of his watch
The two delicately curved gold hands
Moving in and out over it
While the second hand taking its busy ticking course
Around its own small circle
I stand watching the second hand
Essayed to hold time by the tail
The little hand tripped on its way
Unheeding the figures it reached, passed over
Left behind, left far behind, approached
And came on to again, no feeling for time limits
By the way it passed over the tiny intervening
Unmarked strokes showed that all the figures
And divisions on its path were simply beneath it,
That it moved on, and on
Peach Preserves
Step one: the peaches are cleaned and sliced the cook’s celebrate
Sugar is added setting tiny objects in motion, events to measure
Into the jar; fruit and sugar hermetically sealed, time’s capsule
Could this preserving, find chemists at war with clock makers
What is it that we preserved a concoction congealed of time itself
Has time stalled at its station, steam with no motion, signal lights frozen
Surely we are extending time, days in a jar, sealed, and that too
Is a marvel of contraction on cooling, kitchen counter science
On its own that same peach may last a week on nature’s time
For on the counter there are nature’s objects in motion
Before what was once a source of nourishment
In its decomposition, a source for germ, a life of its own
The molecules of the air we breathe were set in motion
Upon the surface of that peach, a collision course
The alchemy of objects in motion produced an event
Events, the sire of the illusion of time!
Decomposition, its scientific label, left to recursive thought
Labeling, the first layer of thought done unconscientiously
To the busy mind of a modern man, lost to his existence
Taking for granted that peach preserves don’t punch a clock
From off the shelf in the grocery store, they simply appear
Was once an activity in everyone’s kitchen, were knowing
The virtues of nature, the application of simple science
From the lessons of mothers working from tradition and intuition
What they then were engaged in was on second glance
Construction of a time machine, organic in its composition
In a Petri-er-jar, mother’s chemistry of love’s devotion
Meticulously brought on isolation of objects in motion
Though a clear jar; look in side at time in suspended animation
Preserved the illusion of the passing of time?
Illusion; is it a function of perspective does motion in space
The product time of or does time cause motion? Insert mankind.
Why would a poet go to such lengths? To spend or waste his time
While enjoying an English muffin with peach preserves
Could he not have simply thought of something else
Or not to think of anything at all, letting time set on nothing at all
There is time well spent and time wasted. Is one faster than the other?
Or would peach preserves save him from the drama
Played on the stage of society’s woes, where one is his judge
Upon simple situations in constant and random flux, your destiny
I simply say in answer to a question drawn upon the word illusion
That only a jar of peach preserves knows, it keeps it simple
Open the jar and listen the for the pop
A burst of instant knowledge, if useful for only a moment
The ever present Now! Expanded left to right, past to future
Vertical, it shoots up! As you rise in consciousness to the occasion
Stop and meditate on nature, sometimes know it as the word of God…
Stop thinking Experience timelessness…nature…God
Dancing Through Midnight
The moon silently sleuths across a coal pitched panoramic stage
With majestic grace of radiance to the pitch of night she responds
Cloud to cloud she hides her charm, an aura, dance steps pre arranged
Her celestial partner bears witness to the dance upon mirrored ponds
On evening’s horizon mankind’s contemplation confident is her allure
It’s silent voice of men capable of an ocean tide, God’s whisper
Partner to partner she sleuths in a game of hide and seek
Behind each cloud an instigator of mystery upon our ethos
Flashing in the dark, of her audience full control she keeps
Aside man’s clever clock boldly marking objects of our cosmos
Passes the night with epiphanies dawned upon those attuned
To the power in her majesty, moving spirit in to motion
In deed humanity has been moved by her graceful dance
Mysteriously she glides a silent gate of romance and intrigue
Under her radiance, lovers entangle in heated embrace
Full spectrum of emotion touches all ware wolf in league
Mortality unrestrained, they leverage her energy for legendary advance
Science examines her thinking it may one day master her
Science measures the gravitational dynamics of celestial bodies
Does it rotate or some how keep one face to the earth
Do the tides spin the moon or does the moon raise the tides?
A distance it must travel to match the earth’s journey’s worth
It is a simple math equation of objects in motion thru space
So then you may wonder a hypothesis on man’s place in time
You and I may simply sit below it in wonderment
Or give it a casual glance a sigh with collective nuance
To hypothetical time as it passes regardless of our consent
We marvel her triumphant rise in the east a breath of romance
And spend the night toiling the powers of her mysteries
Giving birth to a peace found in a Morning Star
Post study reading: De miseris humanece conditions, by pope Innocent III
Page 11: [Time] “But it must go fast up here.” Was Hans Castorp’s view. “Fast or slow, as you take it,” answered Joachim. “ It doesn’t go as all I tell you. You can’t call it living either!” he said with a shake of his head, and fell to his glass again.
Page 30: The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Chancellor: either sober, even godly, civilian habit of bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-assertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to perpetual continuity of things, and perfect soundness of its business signature.
Page 39: Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life; when you came down to it, there was nothing else estimable, It was the principle by which one stood of fell, the Absolute of the time; it was so to speak, its own justification. His regard for it was thus religious in its character, and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter, whether he loved it; and that he could not do, however great his regard, the simple reason being that it did not agree with him. Exacting occupation dragged at his nerves, it wore him out; quite openly he confessed that he liked better to have his time free, not weighed with leaden load of effort; lying spacious before him, not divided up by obstacles one had to grit one’s teeth and conquer one after the other. These conflicting sentiments on the subject of work, had strictly speaking to be reconciled.
My comment: If time were indeed a function of objects in motion through space, then too it must be one’s philosophy and in his constitution to do thing, [work] as a function of creating the perception of time itself.
Page 63: You had a pleasant journey hither I hope?” he turned to Hans Castorp. “ and do you already know your fate – I mean has the mournful ceremony of the first examination taken place? Here if he had really been expecting a reply he should have paused, he had put his second question, and Hans Castorp prepared to answer. But he went on” “ Did you get off easily? One might put – “here he paused a second, and the crisping at his mouth grew crisper – “ more than one interpretation upon your laughter. How many months have our Minos and Rhadamanthus knocked you down for? “ The slang phrase sounded droll on his lips. “Shall I guess six? Nine? You know we are all free with time up here”.
My comment: Here is where the reader is introduced to the affect of being sentenced has on ones psyche. In this sanatorium where one does not work, time loses its effectiveness.
Page 71: “ You say actually”, Hans Castorp answered. He sat with one leg flung over the balustrade, and his eyes bloodshot. “But after all, time isn’t actual.’ When it seems long to you, then it is long; when it seems short to you then it is short. But how long or how short, it actually is, that know body knows.” He felt unaccustomed to philosophize, yet somehow felt the impulse to do so.
Page 72: “Keep quiet! I am very clear headed today. Well then, what is time”? Asked Hans Castorp, and then bent the tip of his nose so far round that it became white and bloodless. “ Can you answer me that? Space we perceive with our organs, with senses of sight and touch. But which is our organ of time – can you tell me that if you can. You see, that’s where you stick. But how can we possibly measure anything about which we know nothing, not even a single one of its properties? We say of time that it passes. Very good let it pass. But to be able to measure it – wait a minute: to be susceptible of being measured, time must flow evenly, but who ever said it did that? As far as our consciousness is concerned it doesn’t , we only assume it does, so for the sake of convenience, and our units of measure are purely arbitrary, shear conventions—
Page 104: [Setembrini to Castorp] “I may arouse your mistrust of it if I tell you have an ancient and ugly this conception is. It comes down to us from a past seething with superstition, in which the idea of humanity had degenerated and deteriorated into shear caricature: a past full of fears, in which well-being and harmony were regarded as suspect and emanating from the Devil, whereas infirmity was equivalent to a free pass to heaven. Reason and enlightenment have banished the darkest of these shadows that tenanted the soul of man – not entirely, for even yet the conflict is in progress. But this conflict, my dear sirs, means work, earthly labor, labor for the earth, for honor and the interests of mankind; and by that conflict daily steeled anew, the powers of reason and enlightenment win in the end set humanity wholly free and lead it in the path of progress and civilization toward an even higher, milder, and purer light”
“ Lord bless us.” Thought Hans Castorp, in shamefaced consternation. “What a homily! How, I wonder did I call all that down on my head? I must say I find it rather prosy. And why does he talk so much about work all the time? It is his constant theme, not a very pertinent one up here, one would think.” Aloud he said: How beautifully you do talk, Herr Setembrini! What you say is very well worth hearing and could not be more plastically expressed, I should think.”
My comment: Setembrini is a Free Mason and obviously a student of civil works. An organized society of reason is his mission. His means to that mission is work, material reconciliation of one’s existence in that society; meaning of life on solely a material plane.
Page 105: Do not, for heavens sake, speak to me of the ennobling effects of physical suffering” A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul- though the latter is the rule and the former the exception. It is the body, as a rule, which flourishes exceedingly, which draws everything to itself, which usurps the predominant place and lives repulsively emancipated from the soul. A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement. In most cases he is little better than a carcass.
My comment: On how many levels is Setembrini, who will later debate with Naphta Jesuit Priest in exile, wrong. He is consistent with his previous argument, but takes it to extreme. Keep in mind this book was written pre WWII. I am intrigued, that Mann is German writing about his own premise. Was this thinking at the base of enough German people of that time to unleash the atrocities of the times.
Page 109: But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long as a time? It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time , so closely bound up with consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment.
Page 121: “Bravo!” cried Settembrini. “Bravo Lieutenant! You are describing very well indeed an aspect of music which has indubitably a moral value: namely that her peculiarly life-enhancing method of measuring time imparts a spiritual awareness and value to its passage. Music quicken time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time, she quicken – insofar she has moral value.
Page 135: And Dr Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.
Page 138: Their affair dispatched at the cashier’s window, a note changed, money received, the bill receipted; the cousins preserving throughout these transactions the solemn, discreet, almost overawed bearing which the young German’s respect for authority leads him to assume in the presence of pens, ink, and paper, or anything else which bears to his mind an official stamp.
My comment: Is this part and parcel the character of a German youth that found his way to follow Hitler. Keep in mind a book written about his fellow German, prior to WWII. He was characterizing Germans of the pre WWI era, an evolution of German philosophy since the 1850’s.
Page 147: Time did not hang heavy on his hands – rather he began to feel the end of his stay approach all too near. The second week was passing; soon two-thirds of his holiday would be gone, the third week would no sooner begin than it would be time to think of packing. The refreshment of his sense of time was long since a thing of the past, the days rushed on – yes, in mass they rushed on, though at the same time each single day stretched out long and longer to hold the crowded, secret hopes and fears that filled it to overflowing.
Page 160: For these good gifts he praised Germany, praised her for her past, but awarded his own country the palm, and enlightenment, at a time when all other lands were wrapped in the darkness of superstition and slavery. Yet in paying due honor, as upon their first meeting, at the bench by the watercourse, to commerce and technology, Settembrini apparently did so not foe the sake of these forces, but purely with reference to their significance for the ethical development of mankind. For such significance, he declared, he joyfully ascribed to them.
Page 163: But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity; where as in the Middle Ages, in striking contrast, had been sunk not only to in superstitious hostility to the human spirit, but also in a shameful formlessness.
Page 164: Settembrini added. For writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well, all moral perfection from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics.
Page 189: Which is surprising; yet quite in order, and conformable to the laws that govern the telling of stories and the listening to them. For it is in accordance with these laws that time seems to us just as long, or just as short, that it expands or contracts precisely in the way and to the extent, that it did for young Hans Castorp… but in such a connection it would be paradoxical to speak of time as passing slowly, and paradox, with reference to such a hero, we avoid.
Page 205: “For death, as an independent power, is a lustful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the human spirit is prone.”
Page 224: Freedom: How did it deem now to our young Hans Castorp? Was is as though the seven weeks which, demonstrably and without shadow of doubt, he had spent them up here, were only seven days? Or, on the contrary, did they seem much longer than had actually been the case? He asked himself, inwardly, and also by the way of asking Joachim; but he could not decide. Both were probably true: when he looked back, the time seemed both unnaturally long and unnaturally short, or rather it seemed anything but what it actually was – in saying which we assume that time is a natural phenomena, and that is admissible to associate with it the conception of actuality.
Page 243: What a blessed dispensation of Providence, he thought, that there should be regular Sunday afternoon distribution of letters! One might say that he spent the week in waiting for the next week’s delivery. And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting we say is long. We might just as well – more accurately - say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system.
Page 246: Have you never remarked that when a Russian says four hours, he means what we do when we say one? It is easy to see that the recklessness of these people where time is concerned may have to do with the space conceptions proper to people of such endless territory.
Page 278: What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but did it know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance of conscious processes at any point in the history of the individual or the race; impossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms have no nervous system, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritably to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life, a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed – a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil – and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself.
Page 279: For death was only the logical negation of life, but between life and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. The tried to close it with hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming any less deep or broad. Seeking a connecting link, they had condescended to the preposterous assumption of structure-less living matter, unorganized organisms, which darted together of themselves in albumen solution, like crystals in the mother liquor; yet organic differentiation still remained at once condition and expression of all life. One could point to no form of life that did not owe is existence to the pro-creation of parents. They had fished the primeval slime out of the depths of the sea, and great had been the jubilation – but the end of it all had been shame and confusion. For it turns out that they had mistaken a precipitate of sulphate of lime for protoplasm. But then, to avoid giving pause before a miracle – for life that built itself up out of, and fell in to decay into the same sort of matter as inorganic nature, would have been, happening of itself, miraculous – they were driven to believe in a spontaneous generation- that is, in the emergence of the organic and inorganic – which was just as much a miracle. They went on, devising intermediate stages and tranisitions, assuming the existence of organisms which stood lower down yet known, but temselves had forerunners still more primitive efforts of nature to achive life; primitive forms of which no one would ever catch sight, for they were all of less than microscopic size, and previous to those hypothetic existence and synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken place.
When then is life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too ingenous in structure. It was the existence of the actuality impossible to co-exist, of half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing in this restricted and feverish process and renewal, upon the point of existence.
My comment: While laced with philosophy on life, I am sure if Mann wrote this in 2012, he would change at least the technical description of life. And I say to this; would he then be inclined to change his philosophy. Would the tail indeed wag the dog?
Page 281: he understood that this ego was a living unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it was built out of myriads of such small organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied uses and functions, separated, differentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the condition and result of their growth.
Page 284: He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he enjoyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic nature generally, was now threefold; it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological; and all of these, he felt were in being human, they were variations of one and the same pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic thought.
Page 290: [of the death of bob-sled rider] Outwardly they had been somewhat garnished and set off; inwardly that had held sway in the heads and hearts of men for their appointed time; then leaving behind them some deposit of impressions out of the common run, they slipped away in to the recent, then in to the past.
My comment: Of human spirit. Hence religion. Imagine this being the fate of Jesus’ message. I say this with a sense of responsibility bestowed on the Church. It is of human nature to ‘add to’ the story. It is at the core of cognition and communication. This is recursive thought played on more than one data-base. The concatenation of data will produce different outputs.
Page 291: [Tim] Christmas Eve came on apace, one day it was at hand, the next it was here. When first it had been told of at table – to Hans Castorp’s great surprise – it had yet been yet a good six weeks away. As much time as his original term up here, plus three weeks in bed. But those first six week, as he thought of them in retrospect, seemed a very long time, while the six weeks just past had been significant. His fellow guests were right to make light of them. Six week, why, that was not so many as the week had days, from Monday to Sunday and Monday again.
Page 307: [Death] The expense, he whispered, was fixed at a thousand francs, including the anesthesia of the spinal cord; practically the whole thoracic cavity was involved, six or eight ribs, and the question was weather it would pay. Behrens would like to persuade him; but the doctor’s interest in the matter was single, whereas his own seemed equivocal; he was not at all clear that he would be better to just die in peace, with ribs in tact.
My comment: So health insurance helped to resolve one variable of the equation that is not singular in a patient’s mind, but then the doctors equivocal and now both the medical world and as well Barack Obama’s government has intruded on what was once a persons private decision. Some how they conspire in what is presumed equivocal (an equation where prime numbers are not allowed) upon a singular mind. Some where along the line in the 20th century medicine got ahead of themselves in the moral practice of saving lives. Just because they could they insisted on it, regardless of the peace a person wanted. Prior to this century, it was very much a part of practicing medicine to help a person die without pan and with his dignity. When putting off the inevitable violates either, we have violated this objective of our Constitution: secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves.
Page 319: [Time] But when the last flicker of the last picture in a reel had faded away, when the lights in the auditorium went up, and in the field of vision stood revealed an empty sheet of canvas, there was not even an applause. There was nobody there to be applauded…. Their hands lay powerless in face of the nothing that confronted them. They rubbed their eyes, stared vacantly before them, blinking in the brilliant light and wishing themselves back in the darkness, looking at sights, which had had their day and then, as it were had been transplanted into fresh time, and bedizened up with music. …They were present at all these scenes [of the motion picture], space was annihilated, the clock put back, the then and there played on by music and transformed into a juggling, scurrying now and here.
My comment: and to know 100 years later how absorbed we are in motion pictures. What has it done to us as a society? Where was, is the responsibility to those who produce film? Worse yet where is the responsibility to those individuals that give those producers power of choice by spending ten buck a wack.
Page 321 [Time] The minute hand on time’s clock moved one space further on; not one of the large spaces, not one which measured the centuries or decades; it was only the year that had been shoved forward by one figure…
Page 332: [Time] … or time with human progress, and how if there was no time there could be no human progress, and the world would only be a standing drain and stagnant puddle. \
Page 349: [Time] What is time? A mystery, a figment – and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married and mingled with existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there was no motion? Or space of time? No motion, if no time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say “a thing is ‘brought about’ by time”. What sort of thing! Change! Now not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is not circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement – for three there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite – apparently in hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more than the other. But is not this affirmation of the eternal and the infinite the logical-mathematical destruction of every and any limit of time or space, and the reduction of them, more or less zero? Is possible in eternity to conceive of a sequence of events, or in the infinite of a succession of space-occupying bodies? Conceptions of distance, movement, change, even of the existence of finite bodies in the universe – how do these fare? Are they constant with the hypothesis of eternity and infinity we have been driven to adapt? Again we, and again echo answers.
Page 351 [Time] Its peaked summits, its domes and crests and brown-green-reddish forests stood their silent, and mortal time flowed over and about them: sometimes luminous against deep blue sky, sometimes shrouded in vapors, sometimes glowing rosy in the parting sun, sometimes glittering with hard diamond like brilliance in the magic of moonlight – but always in snow, for six long, incredible though scurrying months.
My comment: I would never think to mark time but the changing complexion of a mountain-scape. What is incredible here is the author calls this passing of time ‘scurrying’
Page 360: [Philosophy] “ It is remarkable,” he said [Setembrenni] . “ Am man cannot make a general observation to any extent, on any subject, without betraying himself, without introducing his entire individuality, and present, as in allegory, the fundamental theme and problem of his own existence.
My comment: I ask myself as I noted this passage marked for bibliography, why did I check it? I suppose to make note that a single phrase is a ‘DNA’, a kernel, of our whole being? There are many that think this way.
Page 371: [Time] Long days- the longest, objectively speaking, and with reference to the hours of daylight they contained; since their astronomical length could not affect the swift passage of them, either taken singly or in their momentous general flow. The vernal equinox lay three months back, the solstice was at hand. But the seasons up here followed the calendar with halting steps, and only within the last few days had spring fairly arrived: a spring still without a hint of summer’s denser air, rarefied, ethereal, and balmy, with the sun sending silvery gleams from blue heaven, and the meadows blither with parti-colored flowers.
My comment: Notice how many standards of measurement are applied to the passage of time.
Page 374: [Time] “ No, not of course at all – it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the wintertime, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, towards winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one loses hold of the fact that is ‘of course’, it’s quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke – that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead, but a ‘merry-go-round’.
Page 377: [Philosophy] Indicating the Italian by a sidewise nod, with deliberate enunciation: “ Hark to the Voltairian, the rationalist! He praised nature, because even when she has the chance she doesn’t befog us with mystic vapors, but preserves a dry and classic clarity. And yet – what is the Latin for humidity?
“Humor”, cried Setembrini…. “and humor in the professor’s nature observations lies in the fact that like Saint Catherine of Siena he thinks of the wounds of Christ when he sees a red primula in the spring.”
“That would be witty, rather than humorous,’ Naphta retorted. “But in either case a good spirit to import nature, and one of which stands in need.”
“Nature’ said Setembrini…. “needs no importations of yours. She is Spirit herself.”
Page 385: [Time] But all motion is in circles,” said Hans Castorp. “In space and time, as we learn from the law of periodicity an the conservation of mass. My cousin and I were talking about it lately. How then can progress be conceived of, in closed motion without constant direction? When I lie in the evening and look at the zodiac – that is, the half of it that is visible to us – and think about wise men of antiquity-
Page 453: [Philosophy] Naphta, continuing, derived the reverence which the Christian Middle Ages paid to physical suffering from the fact that it acquiesced on religious grounds in the sight of the anguish of the flesh. For the wounds of the body not only emphasized its sunken state, they also corresponded in the most edifying manner to the envenomed corruption of the soul; and thereby gave rise to emotions of true spiritual satisfaction; whereas blooming health was a misleading phenomenon, insulting to the conscience of man and requiring to be counteracted by an attitude of debasement and humility before physical infirmity, which was infinitely beneficial to the soul. Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? Who will deliver me from my body of this death? There spoke the voice of spirit, which eternally the voice of true humanity.
Page 461: [Time and Philosophy] “Foe” he [Naphta] added, “ it has nothing to do with life. Life is based on conditions and built up on foundations, which are partly the result of experience, and partly belong to the domain of ethics. We call the first kind time, space, and causality; the second, morality and reason. But one and all of these are not only foreign to utterly a matter of indifference to the nature of religion; they are even hostile to it. For they are precisely what make up life – the so-called normal life, which is to say, arch Philistinism, ultra bourgeoisedom, the absolute antithesis of which the very genius of antithesis to which is the life of religion.”
Page 462: [Time and Philosophy] Naphta went on to say that he would not deny to the other sphere the possibility of genius. There was much to admire in the monumental respectability, the majestic Philistinism of the middle-class consciousness. But one must never forget that as it stood, straddled-legged, firmly planted on earth, hand behind his back, chest well out, it was the embodiment of irreligion.
Hans Castorp like a schoolboy, put up his hand He wished, he said not to offend either side. But since they were talking about progress, and thus, to a certain extent also, about politics, and the republic of eloquence and civilization of the Occident, he might say that it seemed to him the difference – or if Her Naphta insisted, the antithesis – between life and religion went back to that between time and eternity. Only in time was there progress; in eternity there was none, nor any politics or eloquence either. There, so to speak, one laid one’s head back in God, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the difference between religion and morality – he was aware that he had put it very badly.
Page 464: [Philosophy] They talked of “humanity” of mobility – but it was spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man’s spirit, then resided his true mobility and his merit – in his state of disease, as it were, in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he more the man. The genius of disease was disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as a friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning mans humanity?
Page 478: [Philosophy…of snow] For this powder was not made of tiny grains of stone, buy myriads of tiniest drops of water, which in freezing had darted together in symmetrical variation – parts then, of the same inorganic substance which was the source of protoplasm, of plant life, of the human body. And among these myriads of enchanting little stars, in their hidden splendor that was too small for man’s naked eye to see, there was not one like not like on to another; and endless inventiveness governed the development the unthinkable differentiation of one and the same basic scheme, the equilateral, equi-angled hexagon. Yet each in itself – this was uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all – each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was to this degree – the living principle shuddered at this perfect precision, found it deathly, the vary marrow of death – Hans Castorp felt he understood now the reason why builders of antiquity purposely and secretly introduced minute variation from absolute symmetry in their columnar structures.
My comment: I just watched a documentary on happiness, called Happy. It suggests that one of the key elements to happiness is variation. I also note Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theory, detailed in Hofstadter’s book Godel - Escher - Bach. And finally the doctrine of Unity a faith, in Christianity whose founding principle recognizes that man’s journey back to God is to transcend his ego, the agent of separation from God. By doing this man finds himself at One with Nature, a metaphor for God.
What if the scientist transcended his ego while still pursuing his trade. What would he study? What cures would he discover? Would he find balance with nature rather than objection to nature…God?
Page 492: [Philosophy] The great soul anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion, The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our moment of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy its peace – and blood sacrifice.
Page 495: [Philosophy] [As Hans Castorp faced grave threat of death]For the sake of Goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. – And with this – I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal. Long, long have I sought after this word, in the place where Hippie appeared to me, in my loggia everywhere. Deep in to the snow mountains my search has led me. Now I have it fast. My dream has given it me, in utter clearness, that I may know it forever. Yes, I am in simple raptures, my body is warm, my heart beats high and knows why. It beats not solely on physical grounds, as fingernails grow on a corpse; but humanly, on grounds of my joyful spirits. My dream world was a draught, better than port or ale, it streams through my veins like love and life, I tear myself from my dream and sleep, knowing as I do, perfectly well, that they are highly dangerous to my young life. Up, up! Open your eyes! These are your limbs, your legs here in the snow! Pull yourself together, and up! Look…fair weather!”
Page 499: [Philosophy] He is the soul of honour – but what is honour, is what I want to know, when body and soul act together?
Page 513: [Philosophy] What are we? Master builders and builders on building? The purpose is all one, the good of the whole the fundamental tenant of brotherhood. What is that good, what is this building? It is the true social structure, the perfecting of humanity, the new Jerusalem. But tell me which that is political or non political? The social problem, the problem of our existence is in itself is politics, politics through and through, and nothing else than politics. Whoever devotes himself to the cause – and he does not deserve the name of man that would withhold himself from that devotion – belongs to politics, foreign and domestic; he understands that the art of the Freemason is the art of government.
Page 522: [Philosophy] Ah Naphta well knew – pitiable scoffer though he was! – tat is was a matter of not drawing symbols but of literature as a human impulse, of its spirit, which Spirit itself ,the miraculous conjunction of analysis and form.
Page 533: [Philosophy] “Idyllic – affair of the heart my dear lady,” Behrens said, and held Louis Ziemssen’s hand in his own two, the size of two shovels, looking down at her with his goggling, watery, bloodshot eyes. “I’m tremendously glad it is taking such a gratifying course, and he doesn’t need to go through with oedema of the gloittis or an indignity of that sort, he will be spared a lot of messing about. The heart will give out rapidly, lucky for him and for us; we can do our duty with camphor and injections and the like, without much chance of drawing things out. He will sleep a good deal at the end, and his dreams will be pleasant, I think I can promise you that; even if he shouldn’t go off in his sleep, still it will be a short crossing.
My comment: It seems to me with my little reading on medical history that doctors prior to our technological boon in medicine were better prepared for death.
Page 543: [Time] There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering between hope and fear, to be some three days. It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would appear then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under – rather than over estimate time.
Page 545: [Time] Hans Castorp, watching the second hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, un heeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came onto again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should not it pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the tiny intervening un marked strokes showed that all figures and divisions on its path were simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on,. Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashutte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.
Page 584: [Philosophy] Mynheer Peeperkorn has a gift, say what you like; and thus is he can stick us all in his pocket. Put Herr Napthta in one corner of the room, and let him deliver a discourse on Gregory the Great and the City of God – it would be highly worth listening to – and put Mynheer Peeperkorn in the other, with his extraordinary mouth and wrinkles on his forehead, and let him say not a word except “By all means – capital-settled, ladies and gentlemen!” You will see everybody gather around Peeperkorn, Herr Naphta will be sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, though he may be uttering such penetrating wisdom, that it pierces through marrow and cumber, as Behrens says—
Page 595: [Philosophy] “No, justice is a phlegmatic passion. In contrast to jealousy – when phlegmatic people are jealous, they always make themselves ridiculous.”
Page 599: [Philosophy] We make bold enough to laugh at the idea. Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kids of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly? All ambiguity is therein resolved; love cannot be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshliness. It is always itself, as the height of shrewd “geniality” as in their depth of passion; it is organic sympathy, the touching sense embrace of that which is doomed to decay. In the most raging as in the most recreant passion, there must be caritas. The meaning of the word caritas? In God’s name, then, let it vary. That it does so makes it living, makes it human; it would be regrettable lack of “depth’ to trouble over fact.
Page 648: [Philosophy] Let us put it thus: a conception which is of th spirit, and therefore significant, is so because it reaches beyond itself to become the expression and exponent of a larger conception, a whole world of feeling and sentiment, which whether more or less completely, is mirrored in th efirst, and in this wise, accordingly, the degree of its significance measured. Further, the love felt for such a creation is in itself “significant”: betraying something of the person who cherishes it, characterizing his relation to that broader world the conception bodies forth – which, consciously or un consciously, he loves along with and in the thing itself.
May we take it that our simple hero, after so many years of hermetic pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of being to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious of the ‘meaningfulness” of his love and the object of it?
Page 649 [Philosophy] It was the fruit of life, conceived of death, pregnant of dissolution; it was the miracle of the soul, perhaps the highest, in the eye and sealed with the blessing of conscienceless beauty, but of cogent grounds regarded with mistrust by the eye of shrewd geniality dutifully ‘taking stock’ in its love for the organic; it was a subject of self conquest at the definite behest of conscience.
Page 651 [Philosophy] The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the sub-consciousness, though they might perhaps better be called the super-consciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a knowingness beyond anything of which conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may be connexions and associations between the lowest and the least illuminated regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul.
My comment: I prefer the term ‘holy knowing’ It is a holy moment when you can make that connection.
Page 663: [Philosophy] Delusions? [a mixture of reality and dreams] The mystery of life? Caromio? When moral courage to make decisions and distinctions between reality and deception degenerates to that point, then there is an end of life, of judgment, of creative deed; the process of decay sets in, moral sepsis, and does its deadly work. “ Man he went on to say was the measure of things. His right to recognize and to distinguish between good and evil, reality and counterfeit, was indefensible, woe to them who dared to lead him astray in his belief in this creative right.
My comment: I find it intriguing and worth a pause to find a philosophic thesis claiming that judgment, the scientific process of categorizing his world around him as though he were separate from it, was his creative right. The awakened mind sees himself separate from reality, an observer. The enlightened mind recognizes that he is an active participant.
Page 686: [Philosophy] All the rest was liberalism – in which nobody nowadays (1920} took any stock. Justice, in short, was an empty husk, a stock-in-trade of bourgeois rhetoric, to get down to business, one had always to know which justice he was dealing with: the one which would give man his own, or the one which would give everybody alike. Out of his shoreless stream of words, we have hit upon these in illustration of the way he talked about science – I which he did not believe. He did not believe; he said, in it, because it was permissible to exercise choice, whether to believe in it or not. It was a belief, like any other, only worse, stupider than any, the word “science” was the expression of the silliest realism, which did not blush to take their face value the more than dubious reflections of objects in the human intellect; to pass them current, and to shape out of them the sorriest, most spiritless dogma ever exposed to humanity. Was not the idea a material world existing by itself for itself the most laughable of all self contradictions?
Page 701: [Time] Time- yet not told by the station clock, but moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the tiny time piece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time grass keeps when it grows so unobservable one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable – time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points ( and now we are sure the unhappy, deceased Naptha would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time we say had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes.
Page 702: [Time] Thus he did honor to his abiding everlasting, has walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become the fundamental adventure of his life, in which all the alchemistical processes of his simple substance found full play.
This book could be classified as an adult substitute rendition of Animal Farm as the Berghof grows hostile. It is the story, written between the World Wars taking place in the run up to World War I of Hans Castorp, a young German with a future who makes a three week trip of visiting his cousin up in the Alps. The specific destination in the mountains is a sanitarium for those with tuberculosis. Given the time period the word tuberculosis is never used. Only the condition, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment are described in many scenarios where you finally say aaah tubular…tuberculosis. But all this is the back drop to Mann’s exploration in to the perceptions of time and the rift between social science and religion. Castorp ends up staying in the sanitarium out of choice.
In the beginning of each chapter Mann puts forth a hypothesis on time in a novel narrative. The rest of the chapter is suggestive color commentary on the antics of people in a 1920’s Sanitarium. I call this poetry in prose. This takes longer to tell the rest of the story, which is mildly intriguing at best, but engages the reader to examine his own philosophies. In the end time becomes secondary in conflict of the soul between that which is spiritual and that which is material to which all social problems are secondary of which this is the only kind of Individualism that can be constant.
Mann uses three characters to create the analysis of society. Setrmbrini, is an advocate of secular civic norms; Naphta, is an exiled not quite ordained Jesuit priest. Both pedagogs are introduced early in the book and provide on going debate to out wit the other to the benefit of Hans Castrup. Peepercorn arrives late to the sanitarium and is incoherent in his commanding communication who imparts a don’t worry be happy final ruling on all. Mann himself author weighs-in on one position over the other in the voice of Hans Castrup who surmises “There are many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is the worst". Hans Castrop's many previous observations of the pedagogic debate between Setembrini and Naphta was contradictory in whole and on each person's part. Their clever wit was no better than Peeperkon's incoherent incomplete sentences. In the end personality prevails over intelligence in societies. It pains me to see too many examples of this phenomena being the reality.
The subject of time the ends up being an undercurrent in theme. I believe Mann suggests that the cosmos is infinite and therefore there exists no supersensible world, no dualism. In the voice of Naptha: “The Beyond is absorbed in to the Here, the antithesis between God and Nature falls, and man ceases to be the theater of struggle between two hostile principles and all becomes unitary and harmonious.” And therefore without man, there is no time.
In my commented bibliography below, each note is categorized as either philosophical, or that to do with time, or both.
Poems inspired in me while reading this book:
Walk by the Ocean of Time
The one prime mover of our earth; outwardly demonstrating
Time, an array of water molecules in simultaneous motion
One could only stand on the seashore in awe at the contemplation
Upon the loosely thrown out metaphor on ourselves; fluid motion
A seashore that once landed explorers to change a continent
Yet another seashore that witnessed a landing liberating army
Navies patrol a sovereign’s boarder twenty-four seven vigilant intent
The hands of time sweep over them, despite challenges on humanity
Hand in hand lovers stroll along; lost in love among rolling waves
Early years they talk of their ambitions, o’re head a cry of seagull heard
The conversation moves to children through time’s accidental haze
The sands of time as family buries their bodies and carries their word
Regardless of man’s quests to conquer, solve, and challenge father time
The seashore the very representative of the realities of opposition
Surf and turf coexist in harmony need not reason but only rhyme
Seashore time is forever; sand through hourglass merely our deposition
Objectivity in Time
While time is an illusive phenomena
One can always count on applied science
The inventers of objects in motion
Co creating the measured passing of time
The mechanics of gears and levers
Over a face a circle akin to earths rotation
Looking upon the face of his watch
The two delicately curved gold hands
Moving in and out over it
While the second hand taking its busy ticking course
Around its own small circle
I stand watching the second hand
Essayed to hold time by the tail
The little hand tripped on its way
Unheeding the figures it reached, passed over
Left behind, left far behind, approached
And came on to again, no feeling for time limits
By the way it passed over the tiny intervening
Unmarked strokes showed that all the figures
And divisions on its path were simply beneath it,
That it moved on, and on
Peach Preserves
Step one: the peaches are cleaned and sliced the cook’s celebrate
Sugar is added setting tiny objects in motion, events to measure
Into the jar; fruit and sugar hermetically sealed, time’s capsule
Could this preserving, find chemists at war with clock makers
What is it that we preserved a concoction congealed of time itself
Has time stalled at its station, steam with no motion, signal lights frozen
Surely we are extending time, days in a jar, sealed, and that too
Is a marvel of contraction on cooling, kitchen counter science
On its own that same peach may last a week on nature’s time
For on the counter there are nature’s objects in motion
Before what was once a source of nourishment
In its decomposition, a source for germ, a life of its own
The molecules of the air we breathe were set in motion
Upon the surface of that peach, a collision course
The alchemy of objects in motion produced an event
Events, the sire of the illusion of time!
Decomposition, its scientific label, left to recursive thought
Labeling, the first layer of thought done unconscientiously
To the busy mind of a modern man, lost to his existence
Taking for granted that peach preserves don’t punch a clock
From off the shelf in the grocery store, they simply appear
Was once an activity in everyone’s kitchen, were knowing
The virtues of nature, the application of simple science
From the lessons of mothers working from tradition and intuition
What they then were engaged in was on second glance
Construction of a time machine, organic in its composition
In a Petri-er-jar, mother’s chemistry of love’s devotion
Meticulously brought on isolation of objects in motion
Though a clear jar; look in side at time in suspended animation
Preserved the illusion of the passing of time?
Illusion; is it a function of perspective does motion in space
The product time of or does time cause motion? Insert mankind.
Why would a poet go to such lengths? To spend or waste his time
While enjoying an English muffin with peach preserves
Could he not have simply thought of something else
Or not to think of anything at all, letting time set on nothing at all
There is time well spent and time wasted. Is one faster than the other?
Or would peach preserves save him from the drama
Played on the stage of society’s woes, where one is his judge
Upon simple situations in constant and random flux, your destiny
I simply say in answer to a question drawn upon the word illusion
That only a jar of peach preserves knows, it keeps it simple
Open the jar and listen the for the pop
A burst of instant knowledge, if useful for only a moment
The ever present Now! Expanded left to right, past to future
Vertical, it shoots up! As you rise in consciousness to the occasion
Stop and meditate on nature, sometimes know it as the word of God…
Stop thinking Experience timelessness…nature…God
Dancing Through Midnight
The moon silently sleuths across a coal pitched panoramic stage
With majestic grace of radiance to the pitch of night she responds
Cloud to cloud she hides her charm, an aura, dance steps pre arranged
Her celestial partner bears witness to the dance upon mirrored ponds
On evening’s horizon mankind’s contemplation confident is her allure
It’s silent voice of men capable of an ocean tide, God’s whisper
Partner to partner she sleuths in a game of hide and seek
Behind each cloud an instigator of mystery upon our ethos
Flashing in the dark, of her audience full control she keeps
Aside man’s clever clock boldly marking objects of our cosmos
Passes the night with epiphanies dawned upon those attuned
To the power in her majesty, moving spirit in to motion
In deed humanity has been moved by her graceful dance
Mysteriously she glides a silent gate of romance and intrigue
Under her radiance, lovers entangle in heated embrace
Full spectrum of emotion touches all ware wolf in league
Mortality unrestrained, they leverage her energy for legendary advance
Science examines her thinking it may one day master her
Science measures the gravitational dynamics of celestial bodies
Does it rotate or some how keep one face to the earth
Do the tides spin the moon or does the moon raise the tides?
A distance it must travel to match the earth’s journey’s worth
It is a simple math equation of objects in motion thru space
So then you may wonder a hypothesis on man’s place in time
You and I may simply sit below it in wonderment
Or give it a casual glance a sigh with collective nuance
To hypothetical time as it passes regardless of our consent
We marvel her triumphant rise in the east a breath of romance
And spend the night toiling the powers of her mysteries
Giving birth to a peace found in a Morning Star
Post study reading: De miseris humanece conditions, by pope Innocent III
Bibliography, with commentary:
Page 11: [Time] “But it must go fast up here.” Was Hans Castorp’s view. “Fast or slow, as you take it,” answered Joachim. “ It doesn’t go as all I tell you. You can’t call it living either!” he said with a shake of his head, and fell to his glass again.
Page 30: The painting showed Hans Lorenz Castorp in his official garb as Chancellor: either sober, even godly, civilian habit of bygone century, which a commonwealth both self-assertive and enterprising had brought with it down the years and retained in ceremonial use in order to make present the past and make past the present, to bear witness to perpetual continuity of things, and perfect soundness of its business signature.
Page 39: Work was for him, in the nature of things, the most estimable attribute of life; when you came down to it, there was nothing else estimable, It was the principle by which one stood of fell, the Absolute of the time; it was so to speak, its own justification. His regard for it was thus religious in its character, and, so far as he knew, unquestioning. But it was another matter, whether he loved it; and that he could not do, however great his regard, the simple reason being that it did not agree with him. Exacting occupation dragged at his nerves, it wore him out; quite openly he confessed that he liked better to have his time free, not weighed with leaden load of effort; lying spacious before him, not divided up by obstacles one had to grit one’s teeth and conquer one after the other. These conflicting sentiments on the subject of work, had strictly speaking to be reconciled.
My comment: If time were indeed a function of objects in motion through space, then too it must be one’s philosophy and in his constitution to do thing, [work] as a function of creating the perception of time itself.
Page 63: You had a pleasant journey hither I hope?” he turned to Hans Castorp. “ and do you already know your fate – I mean has the mournful ceremony of the first examination taken place? Here if he had really been expecting a reply he should have paused, he had put his second question, and Hans Castorp prepared to answer. But he went on” “ Did you get off easily? One might put – “here he paused a second, and the crisping at his mouth grew crisper – “ more than one interpretation upon your laughter. How many months have our Minos and Rhadamanthus knocked you down for? “ The slang phrase sounded droll on his lips. “Shall I guess six? Nine? You know we are all free with time up here”.
My comment: Here is where the reader is introduced to the affect of being sentenced has on ones psyche. In this sanatorium where one does not work, time loses its effectiveness.
Page 71: “ You say actually”, Hans Castorp answered. He sat with one leg flung over the balustrade, and his eyes bloodshot. “But after all, time isn’t actual.’ When it seems long to you, then it is long; when it seems short to you then it is short. But how long or how short, it actually is, that know body knows.” He felt unaccustomed to philosophize, yet somehow felt the impulse to do so.
Page 72: “Keep quiet! I am very clear headed today. Well then, what is time”? Asked Hans Castorp, and then bent the tip of his nose so far round that it became white and bloodless. “ Can you answer me that? Space we perceive with our organs, with senses of sight and touch. But which is our organ of time – can you tell me that if you can. You see, that’s where you stick. But how can we possibly measure anything about which we know nothing, not even a single one of its properties? We say of time that it passes. Very good let it pass. But to be able to measure it – wait a minute: to be susceptible of being measured, time must flow evenly, but who ever said it did that? As far as our consciousness is concerned it doesn’t , we only assume it does, so for the sake of convenience, and our units of measure are purely arbitrary, shear conventions—
Page 104: [Setembrini to Castorp] “I may arouse your mistrust of it if I tell you have an ancient and ugly this conception is. It comes down to us from a past seething with superstition, in which the idea of humanity had degenerated and deteriorated into shear caricature: a past full of fears, in which well-being and harmony were regarded as suspect and emanating from the Devil, whereas infirmity was equivalent to a free pass to heaven. Reason and enlightenment have banished the darkest of these shadows that tenanted the soul of man – not entirely, for even yet the conflict is in progress. But this conflict, my dear sirs, means work, earthly labor, labor for the earth, for honor and the interests of mankind; and by that conflict daily steeled anew, the powers of reason and enlightenment win in the end set humanity wholly free and lead it in the path of progress and civilization toward an even higher, milder, and purer light”
“ Lord bless us.” Thought Hans Castorp, in shamefaced consternation. “What a homily! How, I wonder did I call all that down on my head? I must say I find it rather prosy. And why does he talk so much about work all the time? It is his constant theme, not a very pertinent one up here, one would think.” Aloud he said: How beautifully you do talk, Herr Setembrini! What you say is very well worth hearing and could not be more plastically expressed, I should think.”
My comment: Setembrini is a Free Mason and obviously a student of civil works. An organized society of reason is his mission. His means to that mission is work, material reconciliation of one’s existence in that society; meaning of life on solely a material plane.
Page 105: Do not, for heavens sake, speak to me of the ennobling effects of physical suffering” A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul- though the latter is the rule and the former the exception. It is the body, as a rule, which flourishes exceedingly, which draws everything to itself, which usurps the predominant place and lives repulsively emancipated from the soul. A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body; therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement. In most cases he is little better than a carcass.
My comment: On how many levels is Setembrini, who will later debate with Naphta Jesuit Priest in exile, wrong. He is consistent with his previous argument, but takes it to extreme. Keep in mind this book was written pre WWII. I am intrigued, that Mann is German writing about his own premise. Was this thinking at the base of enough German people of that time to unleash the atrocities of the times.
Page 109: But what then is the cause of this relaxation, this slowing down that takes place when one does the same thing for too long as a time? It is not so much physical or mental fatigue or exhaustion, for if that were the case, then complete rest would be the best restorative. It is rather something psychical; it means that the perception of time tends, through periods of unbroken uniformity, to fall away; the perception of time , so closely bound up with consciousness of life that the one may not be weakened without the other suffering a sensible impairment.
Page 121: “Bravo!” cried Settembrini. “Bravo Lieutenant! You are describing very well indeed an aspect of music which has indubitably a moral value: namely that her peculiarly life-enhancing method of measuring time imparts a spiritual awareness and value to its passage. Music quicken time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time, she quicken – insofar she has moral value.
Page 135: And Dr Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.
Page 138: Their affair dispatched at the cashier’s window, a note changed, money received, the bill receipted; the cousins preserving throughout these transactions the solemn, discreet, almost overawed bearing which the young German’s respect for authority leads him to assume in the presence of pens, ink, and paper, or anything else which bears to his mind an official stamp.
My comment: Is this part and parcel the character of a German youth that found his way to follow Hitler. Keep in mind a book written about his fellow German, prior to WWII. He was characterizing Germans of the pre WWI era, an evolution of German philosophy since the 1850’s.
Page 147: Time did not hang heavy on his hands – rather he began to feel the end of his stay approach all too near. The second week was passing; soon two-thirds of his holiday would be gone, the third week would no sooner begin than it would be time to think of packing. The refreshment of his sense of time was long since a thing of the past, the days rushed on – yes, in mass they rushed on, though at the same time each single day stretched out long and longer to hold the crowded, secret hopes and fears that filled it to overflowing.
Page 160: For these good gifts he praised Germany, praised her for her past, but awarded his own country the palm, and enlightenment, at a time when all other lands were wrapped in the darkness of superstition and slavery. Yet in paying due honor, as upon their first meeting, at the bench by the watercourse, to commerce and technology, Settembrini apparently did so not foe the sake of these forces, but purely with reference to their significance for the ethical development of mankind. For such significance, he declared, he joyfully ascribed to them.
Page 163: But he who cherished beauty of form did so because it enhanced human dignity; where as in the Middle Ages, in striking contrast, had been sunk not only to in superstitious hostility to the human spirit, but also in a shameful formlessness.
Page 164: Settembrini added. For writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well, all moral perfection from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics.
Page 189: Which is surprising; yet quite in order, and conformable to the laws that govern the telling of stories and the listening to them. For it is in accordance with these laws that time seems to us just as long, or just as short, that it expands or contracts precisely in the way and to the extent, that it did for young Hans Castorp… but in such a connection it would be paradoxical to speak of time as passing slowly, and paradox, with reference to such a hero, we avoid.
Page 205: “For death, as an independent power, is a lustful power, whose vicious attraction is strong indeed; to feel drawn to it, to feel sympathy with it, is without any doubt at all the most ghastly aberration to which the human spirit is prone.”
Page 224: Freedom: How did it deem now to our young Hans Castorp? Was is as though the seven weeks which, demonstrably and without shadow of doubt, he had spent them up here, were only seven days? Or, on the contrary, did they seem much longer than had actually been the case? He asked himself, inwardly, and also by the way of asking Joachim; but he could not decide. Both were probably true: when he looked back, the time seemed both unnaturally long and unnaturally short, or rather it seemed anything but what it actually was – in saying which we assume that time is a natural phenomena, and that is admissible to associate with it the conception of actuality.
Page 243: What a blessed dispensation of Providence, he thought, that there should be regular Sunday afternoon distribution of letters! One might say that he spent the week in waiting for the next week’s delivery. And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction; it means making their actual content null and void, by mentally overleaping them. Waiting we say is long. We might just as well – more accurately - say it is short, since it consumes whole spaces of time without our living or making any use of them as such. We may compare him who lives on expectation to a greedy man, whose digestive apparatus works through quantities of food without converting it into anything of value or nourishment to his system.
Page 246: Have you never remarked that when a Russian says four hours, he means what we do when we say one? It is easy to see that the recklessness of these people where time is concerned may have to do with the space conceptions proper to people of such endless territory.
Page 278: What was life? No one knew. It was undoubtedly aware of itself, so soon as it was life; but did it know what it was. Consciousness, as exhibited by susceptibility to stimulus, was undoubtedly, to a certain degree, present in the lowest, most undeveloped stages of life; it was impossible to fix the first appearance of conscious processes at any point in the history of the individual or the race; impossible to make consciousness contingent upon, say, the presence of a nervous system. The lowest animal forms have no nervous system, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritably to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life, a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed – a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil – and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself.
Page 279: For death was only the logical negation of life, but between life and inanimate nature yawned a gulf which research strove in vain to bridge. The tried to close it with hypotheses, which it swallowed down without becoming any less deep or broad. Seeking a connecting link, they had condescended to the preposterous assumption of structure-less living matter, unorganized organisms, which darted together of themselves in albumen solution, like crystals in the mother liquor; yet organic differentiation still remained at once condition and expression of all life. One could point to no form of life that did not owe is existence to the pro-creation of parents. They had fished the primeval slime out of the depths of the sea, and great had been the jubilation – but the end of it all had been shame and confusion. For it turns out that they had mistaken a precipitate of sulphate of lime for protoplasm. But then, to avoid giving pause before a miracle – for life that built itself up out of, and fell in to decay into the same sort of matter as inorganic nature, would have been, happening of itself, miraculous – they were driven to believe in a spontaneous generation- that is, in the emergence of the organic and inorganic – which was just as much a miracle. They went on, devising intermediate stages and tranisitions, assuming the existence of organisms which stood lower down yet known, but temselves had forerunners still more primitive efforts of nature to achive life; primitive forms of which no one would ever catch sight, for they were all of less than microscopic size, and previous to those hypothetic existence and synthesis of protein compounds must already have taken place.
When then is life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of albumen molecules that were too impossibly complicated, too ingenous in structure. It was the existence of the actuality impossible to co-exist, of half-sweet, half-painful balancing, or scarcely balancing in this restricted and feverish process and renewal, upon the point of existence.
My comment: While laced with philosophy on life, I am sure if Mann wrote this in 2012, he would change at least the technical description of life. And I say to this; would he then be inclined to change his philosophy. Would the tail indeed wag the dog?
Page 281: he understood that this ego was a living unit of a very high order, remote indeed from those very simple forms of life which breathed, took in nourishment, even thought, with the entire surface of their bodies. He knew it was built out of myriads of such small organisms, which had had their origin in a single one; which had multiplied by recurrent division, adapted themselves to the most varied uses and functions, separated, differentiated themselves, thrown out forms which were the condition and result of their growth.
Page 284: He contemplated this fact with pleasure; he enjoyed the reflection that his relation to the femur, or to organic nature generally, was now threefold; it was lyrical, it was medical, it was technological; and all of these, he felt were in being human, they were variations of one and the same pressing human concern, they were schools of humanistic thought.
Page 290: [of the death of bob-sled rider] Outwardly they had been somewhat garnished and set off; inwardly that had held sway in the heads and hearts of men for their appointed time; then leaving behind them some deposit of impressions out of the common run, they slipped away in to the recent, then in to the past.
My comment: Of human spirit. Hence religion. Imagine this being the fate of Jesus’ message. I say this with a sense of responsibility bestowed on the Church. It is of human nature to ‘add to’ the story. It is at the core of cognition and communication. This is recursive thought played on more than one data-base. The concatenation of data will produce different outputs.
Page 291: [Tim] Christmas Eve came on apace, one day it was at hand, the next it was here. When first it had been told of at table – to Hans Castorp’s great surprise – it had yet been yet a good six weeks away. As much time as his original term up here, plus three weeks in bed. But those first six week, as he thought of them in retrospect, seemed a very long time, while the six weeks just past had been significant. His fellow guests were right to make light of them. Six week, why, that was not so many as the week had days, from Monday to Sunday and Monday again.
Page 307: [Death] The expense, he whispered, was fixed at a thousand francs, including the anesthesia of the spinal cord; practically the whole thoracic cavity was involved, six or eight ribs, and the question was weather it would pay. Behrens would like to persuade him; but the doctor’s interest in the matter was single, whereas his own seemed equivocal; he was not at all clear that he would be better to just die in peace, with ribs in tact.
My comment: So health insurance helped to resolve one variable of the equation that is not singular in a patient’s mind, but then the doctors equivocal and now both the medical world and as well Barack Obama’s government has intruded on what was once a persons private decision. Some how they conspire in what is presumed equivocal (an equation where prime numbers are not allowed) upon a singular mind. Some where along the line in the 20th century medicine got ahead of themselves in the moral practice of saving lives. Just because they could they insisted on it, regardless of the peace a person wanted. Prior to this century, it was very much a part of practicing medicine to help a person die without pan and with his dignity. When putting off the inevitable violates either, we have violated this objective of our Constitution: secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves.
Page 319: [Time] But when the last flicker of the last picture in a reel had faded away, when the lights in the auditorium went up, and in the field of vision stood revealed an empty sheet of canvas, there was not even an applause. There was nobody there to be applauded…. Their hands lay powerless in face of the nothing that confronted them. They rubbed their eyes, stared vacantly before them, blinking in the brilliant light and wishing themselves back in the darkness, looking at sights, which had had their day and then, as it were had been transplanted into fresh time, and bedizened up with music. …They were present at all these scenes [of the motion picture], space was annihilated, the clock put back, the then and there played on by music and transformed into a juggling, scurrying now and here.
My comment: and to know 100 years later how absorbed we are in motion pictures. What has it done to us as a society? Where was, is the responsibility to those who produce film? Worse yet where is the responsibility to those individuals that give those producers power of choice by spending ten buck a wack.
Page 321 [Time] The minute hand on time’s clock moved one space further on; not one of the large spaces, not one which measured the centuries or decades; it was only the year that had been shoved forward by one figure…
Page 332: [Time] … or time with human progress, and how if there was no time there could be no human progress, and the world would only be a standing drain and stagnant puddle. \
Page 349: [Time] What is time? A mystery, a figment – and all-powerful. It conditions the exterior world, it is motion married and mingled with existence of bodies in space, and with the motion of these. Would there then be no time if there was no motion? Or space of time? No motion, if no time? Or are they identical? Echo answers. Time is functional, it can be referred to as action; we say “a thing is ‘brought about’ by time”. What sort of thing! Change! Now not then, here not there, for between them lies motion. But the motion by which one measures time is not circular, is in a closed circle; and might almost equally well be described as rest, as cessation of movement – for three there repeats itself constantly in the here, the past in the present. Furthermore, as our utmost effort cannot conceive a final limit either to time or in space, we have settled to think of them as eternal and infinite – apparently in hope that if this is not very successful, at least it will be more than the other. But is not this affirmation of the eternal and the infinite the logical-mathematical destruction of every and any limit of time or space, and the reduction of them, more or less zero? Is possible in eternity to conceive of a sequence of events, or in the infinite of a succession of space-occupying bodies? Conceptions of distance, movement, change, even of the existence of finite bodies in the universe – how do these fare? Are they constant with the hypothesis of eternity and infinity we have been driven to adapt? Again we, and again echo answers.
Page 351 [Time] Its peaked summits, its domes and crests and brown-green-reddish forests stood their silent, and mortal time flowed over and about them: sometimes luminous against deep blue sky, sometimes shrouded in vapors, sometimes glowing rosy in the parting sun, sometimes glittering with hard diamond like brilliance in the magic of moonlight – but always in snow, for six long, incredible though scurrying months.
My comment: I would never think to mark time but the changing complexion of a mountain-scape. What is incredible here is the author calls this passing of time ‘scurrying’
Page 360: [Philosophy] “ It is remarkable,” he said [Setembrenni] . “ Am man cannot make a general observation to any extent, on any subject, without betraying himself, without introducing his entire individuality, and present, as in allegory, the fundamental theme and problem of his own existence.
My comment: I ask myself as I noted this passage marked for bibliography, why did I check it? I suppose to make note that a single phrase is a ‘DNA’, a kernel, of our whole being? There are many that think this way.
Page 371: [Time] Long days- the longest, objectively speaking, and with reference to the hours of daylight they contained; since their astronomical length could not affect the swift passage of them, either taken singly or in their momentous general flow. The vernal equinox lay three months back, the solstice was at hand. But the seasons up here followed the calendar with halting steps, and only within the last few days had spring fairly arrived: a spring still without a hint of summer’s denser air, rarefied, ethereal, and balmy, with the sun sending silvery gleams from blue heaven, and the meadows blither with parti-colored flowers.
My comment: Notice how many standards of measurement are applied to the passage of time.
Page 374: [Time] “ No, not of course at all – it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the wintertime, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, towards winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one loses hold of the fact that is ‘of course’, it’s quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke – that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead, but a ‘merry-go-round’.
Page 377: [Philosophy] Indicating the Italian by a sidewise nod, with deliberate enunciation: “ Hark to the Voltairian, the rationalist! He praised nature, because even when she has the chance she doesn’t befog us with mystic vapors, but preserves a dry and classic clarity. And yet – what is the Latin for humidity?
“Humor”, cried Setembrini…. “and humor in the professor’s nature observations lies in the fact that like Saint Catherine of Siena he thinks of the wounds of Christ when he sees a red primula in the spring.”
“That would be witty, rather than humorous,’ Naphta retorted. “But in either case a good spirit to import nature, and one of which stands in need.”
“Nature’ said Setembrini…. “needs no importations of yours. She is Spirit herself.”
Page 385: [Time] But all motion is in circles,” said Hans Castorp. “In space and time, as we learn from the law of periodicity an the conservation of mass. My cousin and I were talking about it lately. How then can progress be conceived of, in closed motion without constant direction? When I lie in the evening and look at the zodiac – that is, the half of it that is visible to us – and think about wise men of antiquity-
Page 453: [Philosophy] Naphta, continuing, derived the reverence which the Christian Middle Ages paid to physical suffering from the fact that it acquiesced on religious grounds in the sight of the anguish of the flesh. For the wounds of the body not only emphasized its sunken state, they also corresponded in the most edifying manner to the envenomed corruption of the soul; and thereby gave rise to emotions of true spiritual satisfaction; whereas blooming health was a misleading phenomenon, insulting to the conscience of man and requiring to be counteracted by an attitude of debasement and humility before physical infirmity, which was infinitely beneficial to the soul. Quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? Who will deliver me from my body of this death? There spoke the voice of spirit, which eternally the voice of true humanity.
Page 461: [Time and Philosophy] “Foe” he [Naphta] added, “ it has nothing to do with life. Life is based on conditions and built up on foundations, which are partly the result of experience, and partly belong to the domain of ethics. We call the first kind time, space, and causality; the second, morality and reason. But one and all of these are not only foreign to utterly a matter of indifference to the nature of religion; they are even hostile to it. For they are precisely what make up life – the so-called normal life, which is to say, arch Philistinism, ultra bourgeoisedom, the absolute antithesis of which the very genius of antithesis to which is the life of religion.”
Page 462: [Time and Philosophy] Naphta went on to say that he would not deny to the other sphere the possibility of genius. There was much to admire in the monumental respectability, the majestic Philistinism of the middle-class consciousness. But one must never forget that as it stood, straddled-legged, firmly planted on earth, hand behind his back, chest well out, it was the embodiment of irreligion.
Hans Castorp like a schoolboy, put up his hand He wished, he said not to offend either side. But since they were talking about progress, and thus, to a certain extent also, about politics, and the republic of eloquence and civilization of the Occident, he might say that it seemed to him the difference – or if Her Naphta insisted, the antithesis – between life and religion went back to that between time and eternity. Only in time was there progress; in eternity there was none, nor any politics or eloquence either. There, so to speak, one laid one’s head back in God, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the difference between religion and morality – he was aware that he had put it very badly.
Page 464: [Philosophy] They talked of “humanity” of mobility – but it was spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man’s spirit, then resided his true mobility and his merit – in his state of disease, as it were, in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he more the man. The genius of disease was disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as a friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning mans humanity?
Page 478: [Philosophy…of snow] For this powder was not made of tiny grains of stone, buy myriads of tiniest drops of water, which in freezing had darted together in symmetrical variation – parts then, of the same inorganic substance which was the source of protoplasm, of plant life, of the human body. And among these myriads of enchanting little stars, in their hidden splendor that was too small for man’s naked eye to see, there was not one like not like on to another; and endless inventiveness governed the development the unthinkable differentiation of one and the same basic scheme, the equilateral, equi-angled hexagon. Yet each in itself – this was uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all – each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was to this degree – the living principle shuddered at this perfect precision, found it deathly, the vary marrow of death – Hans Castorp felt he understood now the reason why builders of antiquity purposely and secretly introduced minute variation from absolute symmetry in their columnar structures.
My comment: I just watched a documentary on happiness, called Happy. It suggests that one of the key elements to happiness is variation. I also note Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theory, detailed in Hofstadter’s book Godel - Escher - Bach. And finally the doctrine of Unity a faith, in Christianity whose founding principle recognizes that man’s journey back to God is to transcend his ego, the agent of separation from God. By doing this man finds himself at One with Nature, a metaphor for God.
What if the scientist transcended his ego while still pursuing his trade. What would he study? What cures would he discover? Would he find balance with nature rather than objection to nature…God?
Page 492: [Philosophy] The great soul anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion, The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our moment of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy its peace – and blood sacrifice.
Page 495: [Philosophy] [As Hans Castorp faced grave threat of death]For the sake of Goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. – And with this – I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal. Long, long have I sought after this word, in the place where Hippie appeared to me, in my loggia everywhere. Deep in to the snow mountains my search has led me. Now I have it fast. My dream has given it me, in utter clearness, that I may know it forever. Yes, I am in simple raptures, my body is warm, my heart beats high and knows why. It beats not solely on physical grounds, as fingernails grow on a corpse; but humanly, on grounds of my joyful spirits. My dream world was a draught, better than port or ale, it streams through my veins like love and life, I tear myself from my dream and sleep, knowing as I do, perfectly well, that they are highly dangerous to my young life. Up, up! Open your eyes! These are your limbs, your legs here in the snow! Pull yourself together, and up! Look…fair weather!”
Page 499: [Philosophy] He is the soul of honour – but what is honour, is what I want to know, when body and soul act together?
Page 513: [Philosophy] What are we? Master builders and builders on building? The purpose is all one, the good of the whole the fundamental tenant of brotherhood. What is that good, what is this building? It is the true social structure, the perfecting of humanity, the new Jerusalem. But tell me which that is political or non political? The social problem, the problem of our existence is in itself is politics, politics through and through, and nothing else than politics. Whoever devotes himself to the cause – and he does not deserve the name of man that would withhold himself from that devotion – belongs to politics, foreign and domestic; he understands that the art of the Freemason is the art of government.
Page 522: [Philosophy] Ah Naphta well knew – pitiable scoffer though he was! – tat is was a matter of not drawing symbols but of literature as a human impulse, of its spirit, which Spirit itself ,the miraculous conjunction of analysis and form.
Page 533: [Philosophy] “Idyllic – affair of the heart my dear lady,” Behrens said, and held Louis Ziemssen’s hand in his own two, the size of two shovels, looking down at her with his goggling, watery, bloodshot eyes. “I’m tremendously glad it is taking such a gratifying course, and he doesn’t need to go through with oedema of the gloittis or an indignity of that sort, he will be spared a lot of messing about. The heart will give out rapidly, lucky for him and for us; we can do our duty with camphor and injections and the like, without much chance of drawing things out. He will sleep a good deal at the end, and his dreams will be pleasant, I think I can promise you that; even if he shouldn’t go off in his sleep, still it will be a short crossing.
My comment: It seems to me with my little reading on medical history that doctors prior to our technological boon in medicine were better prepared for death.
Page 543: [Time] There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering between hope and fear, to be some three days. It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would appear then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under – rather than over estimate time.
Page 545: [Time] Hans Castorp, watching the second hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, un heeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came onto again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should not it pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the tiny intervening un marked strokes showed that all figures and divisions on its path were simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on,. Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashutte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.
Page 584: [Philosophy] Mynheer Peeperkorn has a gift, say what you like; and thus is he can stick us all in his pocket. Put Herr Napthta in one corner of the room, and let him deliver a discourse on Gregory the Great and the City of God – it would be highly worth listening to – and put Mynheer Peeperkorn in the other, with his extraordinary mouth and wrinkles on his forehead, and let him say not a word except “By all means – capital-settled, ladies and gentlemen!” You will see everybody gather around Peeperkorn, Herr Naphta will be sitting there alone with his cleverness and his City of God, though he may be uttering such penetrating wisdom, that it pierces through marrow and cumber, as Behrens says—
Page 595: [Philosophy] “No, justice is a phlegmatic passion. In contrast to jealousy – when phlegmatic people are jealous, they always make themselves ridiculous.”
Page 599: [Philosophy] We make bold enough to laugh at the idea. Is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kids of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly? All ambiguity is therein resolved; love cannot be physical, at its furthest stretch of holiness; it cannot be impious, in its utterest fleshliness. It is always itself, as the height of shrewd “geniality” as in their depth of passion; it is organic sympathy, the touching sense embrace of that which is doomed to decay. In the most raging as in the most recreant passion, there must be caritas. The meaning of the word caritas? In God’s name, then, let it vary. That it does so makes it living, makes it human; it would be regrettable lack of “depth’ to trouble over fact.
Page 648: [Philosophy] Let us put it thus: a conception which is of th spirit, and therefore significant, is so because it reaches beyond itself to become the expression and exponent of a larger conception, a whole world of feeling and sentiment, which whether more or less completely, is mirrored in th efirst, and in this wise, accordingly, the degree of its significance measured. Further, the love felt for such a creation is in itself “significant”: betraying something of the person who cherishes it, characterizing his relation to that broader world the conception bodies forth – which, consciously or un consciously, he loves along with and in the thing itself.
May we take it that our simple hero, after so many years of hermetic pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of being to another, has now reached a point where he is conscious of the ‘meaningfulness” of his love and the object of it?
Page 649 [Philosophy] It was the fruit of life, conceived of death, pregnant of dissolution; it was the miracle of the soul, perhaps the highest, in the eye and sealed with the blessing of conscienceless beauty, but of cogent grounds regarded with mistrust by the eye of shrewd geniality dutifully ‘taking stock’ in its love for the organic; it was a subject of self conquest at the definite behest of conscience.
Page 651 [Philosophy] The field of his study had always been those wide, dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the sub-consciousness, though they might perhaps better be called the super-consciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a knowingness beyond anything of which conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may be connexions and associations between the lowest and the least illuminated regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul.
My comment: I prefer the term ‘holy knowing’ It is a holy moment when you can make that connection.
Page 663: [Philosophy] Delusions? [a mixture of reality and dreams] The mystery of life? Caromio? When moral courage to make decisions and distinctions between reality and deception degenerates to that point, then there is an end of life, of judgment, of creative deed; the process of decay sets in, moral sepsis, and does its deadly work. “ Man he went on to say was the measure of things. His right to recognize and to distinguish between good and evil, reality and counterfeit, was indefensible, woe to them who dared to lead him astray in his belief in this creative right.
My comment: I find it intriguing and worth a pause to find a philosophic thesis claiming that judgment, the scientific process of categorizing his world around him as though he were separate from it, was his creative right. The awakened mind sees himself separate from reality, an observer. The enlightened mind recognizes that he is an active participant.
Page 686: [Philosophy] All the rest was liberalism – in which nobody nowadays (1920} took any stock. Justice, in short, was an empty husk, a stock-in-trade of bourgeois rhetoric, to get down to business, one had always to know which justice he was dealing with: the one which would give man his own, or the one which would give everybody alike. Out of his shoreless stream of words, we have hit upon these in illustration of the way he talked about science – I which he did not believe. He did not believe; he said, in it, because it was permissible to exercise choice, whether to believe in it or not. It was a belief, like any other, only worse, stupider than any, the word “science” was the expression of the silliest realism, which did not blush to take their face value the more than dubious reflections of objects in the human intellect; to pass them current, and to shape out of them the sorriest, most spiritless dogma ever exposed to humanity. Was not the idea a material world existing by itself for itself the most laughable of all self contradictions?
Page 701: [Time] Time- yet not told by the station clock, but moving with a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the tiny time piece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time grass keeps when it grows so unobservable one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeniable – time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points ( and now we are sure the unhappy, deceased Naptha would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time we say had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes.
Page 702: [Time] Thus he did honor to his abiding everlasting, has walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become the fundamental adventure of his life, in which all the alchemistical processes of his simple substance found full play.
