The Magic Mountain (2). Thomas Mann.

Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library 1924 (1952).

Why Read It? Want to know what the hereafter will be like? In my opinion, Hans Castorp’s experience in the tuberculosis sanatorium was very much like the popular belief of life after death—life without time. On the mountain, time does not exist. Events repeat themselves. Experiences repeat themselves. The patients have satisfied appetites. All of the patients’ desires are met. Regularity and routine are the everyday, undeviating experiences. On the mountain, one floats over the real world down below, the world of accomplishment and achievement.

The basic plot of the novel is simple, but it requires 700+ pages to work it out. Hans Castorp decides to visit a tuberculosis sanatorium on the mountain for three weeks. He soon shows symptoms of the disease and spends seven years there. Cured, he returns to the world below to fight for the German army in World War I. During his stay on the mountain, he encounters a humanist and a traditional believer in Christianity and their various arguments about the meaning of life take up considerable pages of abstract thought. Castorp studies biology and therefore life and gradually begins to develop his own personality, rather than being in the shadow of other, stronger personalities who at first dominate him with their thought. RayS.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“Oh, what a schoolmaster…. He never leaves off setting you right—first by means of anecdotes, then by abstractions.” p. 201.

“Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good…but it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action….” p. 221.

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.” p. 224.

“I represent the world, the interest of this life, against a sentimental withdrawal and negation, classicism against romanticism.” p. 248.

“By all means I am a humanist, because I am a friend of mankind, like Prometheus, a lover of humanity and human nobility. That nobility is comprehended in the mind, in the reason….” p. 248.

“Tut, living consists in dying, no use mincing the matter.” p. 265.

“…there may have been those who employed the hours of the rest-cure with some serious intellectual occupation, some conceivably profitable study, either by way of keeping in touch with life in the lowlands, or in order to give weight and depth to the passing hour, that it might not be pure time and nothing else besides.” p. 272.

“It seemed forbidden to life that it should understand itself.” p. 280.

“Dualism, antithesis, is the moving, the passionate, the dialectic principle of all spirit. To see the world as cleft into two opposing poles—that is spirit. All monism is tedious.” p. 374.

“The Orient abhors activity. Lao-Tse taught that inaction is more profitable than anything else between heaven and earth. When all mankind shall have ceased to do anything whatever, then only will perfect repose and bliss reign upon this earth.” p. 376.

“Democracy has no meaning whatever if not that of an individualistic corrective to state absolutism of every kind.” p. 399.

“…conceives of humanity not as a conflict between the ego and society but as a conflict between the ego and God, between the flesh and the spirit….” p. 404.

“No, death was neither specter nor mystery. It was a simple, acceptable, and physiologically necessary phenomenon; to dwell upon it longer than decency required was to rob life of its due.” p. 457.

To be continued.

The Magic Mountain (1). Thomas Mann.

Trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter Garden City, NY: International Collectors Library 1924 (1952).

Why Read It? Want to know what the hereafter will be like? In my opinion, Hans Castorp’s experience in the tuberculosis sanatorium was very much like the popular belief of life after death—life without time. On the mountain, time does not exist. Events repeat themselves. Experiences repeat themselves. The patients have satisfied appetites. All of the patients’ desires are met. Regularity and routine are the everyday, undeviating experiences. On the mountain, one floats over the real world down below, the world of accomplishment and achievement.

The basic plot of the novel is simple, but it requires 700+ pages to work it out. Hans Castorp decides to visit a tuberculosis sanatorium on the mountain for three weeks. He soon shows symptoms of the disease and spends seven years there. Cured, he returns to the world below to fight for the German army in World War I. During his stay on the mountain, he encounters a humanist and a traditional believer in Christianity and their various arguments about the meaning of life take up considerable pages of abstract thought. Castorp studies biology and therefore life and gradually begins to develop his own personality, rather than being in the shadow of other, stronger personalities who at first dominate him with their thought.

The author, Thomas Mann, says Castorp is a seeker, a “questor” after what? Knowledge, self-knowledge. He goes through sickness and death to reach self-knowledge.

The author admits that he is not the best judge of his own work. The suggestion that Hans Castorp is a “questor,” he borrows from a critic.

Well, I have my own view of what his story means. It’s a description of life in the hereafter. Is this theme worth 700+ pages? I think so. I have always thought of the hereafter as being a place with no growth and therefore without the fire that animates us in the world.

At first the experience seems static. However, there are any number of stories and characters to keep the reader turning the pages. But for me, even though the author never mentions the symbolism of the hereafter as part of his meaning, the explicit description of the way of life on the “Magic Mountain” is enough to make me realize that the hereafter is a place of intellectual growth. An intellectual growth that helps Hans Castorp to learn who he is, to develop his understanding of his own independent personality. He grows to discover and understand the nature and mystery of his life. [Why do we read? To discover the nature and the meaning of the mystery of life and humanity.] For me, this novel is an interesting view of the experience of life in the hereafter. RayS.

Sample quotes and ideas:

“You can’t call it time—and you can’t call it living either!” p. 12.

“A year is so important at our age. Down below, one goes through so many changes, and makes so much progress, in a single year of life. And I have to stagnate up here—yes, just stagnate like a filthy puddle; it isn’t too crass a comparison.” p. 13.

“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.” p. 14.

“When ‘accused’ of being a talented artist…Hans Castorp only laughed good-humoredly, and not for a moment considered letting himself in for a career of being eccentric and not getting enough to eat.” p. 31.

“I can tell by looking at people, you know, whether they’ll make good patients or not; it takes talent, everything takes talent…. …maybe he shows up on the parade-ground for aught I know; but he’s no good at being ill.” p. 44.

“…when one is interested the understanding follows.” p. 49.

“Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment.” p. 59.

“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.” p. 95.

“I don’t like music if it’s supposed to be good for me.” p. 111.

Music puts us to sleep when our purpose is to awaken the reason. p. 111.

“And then a wedding ring seems so prosaic, it is almost repellent. It is a symbol of possession; it is always saying, ‘Hands off!’; it turns every woman into a nun.” p. 135.

“Herr Settembrini seemed to bring together in a single breath categories which in the young man’s mind had heretofore been as the poles asunder—for example, technology and morals.” p. 154.

“Two principles, according to the Settembrini cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.” p. 155.

To be continued.

The Outermost House (5). Henry Beston.

The Outermost House (5): A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).

Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.

Sample ideas and quotes:

“Now came flash after stabbing flash amid a roaring of rain, and heavy thunder that rolled on till its last echoes were swallowed up in vast detonations which jarred the walls.” p. 186.

“Stars came out after the storm, and when I woke again before sunrise I found the heavens and the earth rain-washed, cool, and clear.” p. 188.

“Had I room in this book, I should like to write a whole chapter on the sense of smell.” p. 189.

“I like a good smell—the smell of a freshly ploughed field on a warm morning after a night of April rain, the clove-like aroma of our wild Cape Cod pinks, the morning perfume of lilacs showery with dew, the good reek of hot salt grass and low-tide blowing from these meadows late on summer afternoons.” p. 189.

“The duneland air burns with the smell of sand, ocean, and sun.” p. 194.

“ ‘June bugs’…strike my screens with a formidable look and linger there buzzing; let me but open the door, and half a dozen are tilting at my table lamp and falling stunned upon the cloth.” p. 197.

“…the creation is still going on….” p. 220.

“Creation is here and now.” p. 220.

“So near is man to the creative pageant, so much a part is he of the endless and incredible experiment, that any glimpse he may have will be but the revelation of a moment, a solitary note heard in a symphony….” p. 220.

“Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science.” p. 221.

“It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.” p. 221.

“ ‘Nature—that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang…’ Whenever I hear the phrase or its intellectual echoes, I know that some passerby has been getting life from books.” p.221.

“The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life—all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.” p. 221.

“…beloved birds of the great beach, and of their beauty and their zest of living.” p. 221.

“A human life, so often likened to a spectacle upon a stage, is more justly a ritual.” p. 221.

“…rest your spirit in her [Nature’s] solitary places.” p. 222.

Comment: Beston’s book is a combination of image and abstract thought suggested by the image. Not as easy to read as you would expect of a nature study. It could more properly be called a meditation. It provides many an idea about the sea, nature. solitude and humanity. RayS.

The Outermost House (4). Henry Beston.

The Outermost House (4): A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).

Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.

Sample ideas and quotes:

“…a flock of geese flying over the meadows along the rift of dying, golden light, their great wings beating with a slow and solemn beauty, their musical, bell-like cry….” p. 116.

“To understand this great outer beach, to appreciate its atmosphere, its ‘feel,’ one must have a sense of it as the scene of wreck and elemental drama.” p. 123.

“Go about in the cottages, and you may sit in a chair taken from one great wreck and a table taken from another; the cat purring at your feet may be himself a rescued mariner.” p. 123.

“Eighteenth-century pirates, stately British merchantmen of the mid-Victorian years, whaling brigs, Salem East India traders. Gloucester fishermen, and a whole host of forgotten nineteenth-century schooners—all these have strewn this beach with broken spars and dead.” p. 125.

“I woke last night just after two o’clock and found my larger room brimming with April moonlight and so still that I could hear the ticking of my watch.” p. 143.

“An April morning follows, spring walks upon the dunes, but ocean lingers on the edge of winter.” p. 145.

“Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night.” p. 168.

“The beach at night has a voice all its own, a sound in fullest harmony with its spirit and mood—with its little, dry noise of sand forever moving, with its solemn, over-spilling, rhythmic seas, with its eternity of stars that sometimes seem to hang down like lamps from the high heavens—and that sound, the piping of a bird.” p. 175.

“Learn to reverence night and to put away the vulgar fear of it, for, with the banishment of night from the experience of man, there vanishes as well a religious emotion, a poetic mood, which gives depth to the adventure of humanity.” p. 176.

To be continued.

The Outermost House (3). Henry Beston.

The Outermost House (3): A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).

Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.

Sample ideas and quotes:

“Those trillions of unaccountable lives [insects], crawling, buzzing intense presences which nature created to fulfill some unknown purpose or perhaps simply to satisfy a whim for a certain sound or a moment of exquisite color….” p. 65.

“As I muse here, it occurs to me that we are not sufficiently grateful for the great symphony of natural sound which insects add to the natural scene…all those little fiddles in the grass, all those cricket pipes, those delicate flutes….” p. 65.

“Living in outer nature keeps the senses keen, and living alone stirs in them a certain watchfulness.” p. 81.

“Being struck in the face by this sand and sleet was like being lashed by a tiny, pin-point whip.” p. 87.

“From the moment that I rose in the morning and threw open my door looking toward the sea to the moment when the spurt of a match sounded in the evening quiet of my solitary house, there was always something to do, something to observe, something to record, something to study, something to put aside in the corner of the mind.” p. 92.

“As I walk the beach on a bright and blustery January morning, my first impression is one of space, beauty, and loneliness.” p. 96.

“…no one really knows a bird until he has seen it in flight.” p. 98.

“I pause here to wonder at how little we know of the life span of wild animals.” p. 109.

To be continued.

The Outermost House (2). Henry Beston.

The Outermost House (2): A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).

Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.

Sample ideas and quotes:

“The sea has many voices…hollow boomings…heavy roarings, great watery tumblings and tramplings, long hissing seethes, sharp, rifle shot reports, splashes, whispers, the grinding undertone of stones, and sometimes vocal sounds that might be the half-heard talk of people in the sea.” p. 43.

“The ocean…constantly changing its tempo, its pitch, its accent, and its rhythm, being now loud and thundering, now almost placid, now furious now grave and solemn-slow, now a simple measure, now a rhythm monstrous with a sense of purpose and elemental will.” p. 44.

“Every mood of the wind, every change in the day’s weather, every phase of the tide—all these have subtle sea musics all their own.” p. 44.

“…the surf process must be understood as mingled and continuous, waves hurrying after waves, interrupting waves, washing back on waves, overwhelming waves.” p. 47.

“Away from the beach, the various sounds of the surf melt into one great thundering symphonic roar…an endless, distant elemental cannonade.” p. 47.

“I can watch a fine surf for hours, taking pleasure in all its wild plays and variations.” p. 53.

“We lose a great deal, I think, when we lose this sense and feeling for the sun….the adventure of the sun is the great natural drama by which we live….” p. 59.

“That multiplicity of insect tracks, those fantastic ribbons which grasshoppers, promenading flies, spiders, and beetles printed on the dunes as they went about their hungry and mysterious purposes, have come to an end in this world of winter….” p. 65.

To be continued.

The Outermost House (1). Henry Beston.

The Outermost House (1): A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod. Henry Beston. New York: The Viking Press. 1928 (1956).

Why read it? Like Thoreau at Walden, Beston took up a solitary residence in a cottage on the beach where he could observe the life of the sand and the dunes and the moods of the ocean.

Sample ideas and quotes:

“Bird migrations, the rising of the winter stars out of the breakers and the east, night and storm, the solitude of a January day, the glisten of dune grass in midsummer….” p. viii.

“Man can either be less than man or more than man, and both are monsters, the last more dread.” p. ix.

“On bright moonlit nights, I can see both the whitewashed tower [of the light house] and the light; on dark nights, I can see only the light itself suspended and secure above the earth.” p. 18.

“Animals are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travails of the earth.” p. 25.

“In a world older and more complete than ours they [animals] move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” p. 25.

“…the solemn unrest of the ocean….” p. 37.

“The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach.” p. 43.

To be continued.