[ What Mika would call "Thoughts in Sickness" ;-) ]
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How queer that I began to get sick the moment I finished reading The Magic Mountain. Disease and illness, physical and spiritual, features paramountly in the book; although the same is true in other works of Mann that I have read (Death in Venice, Doktor Faustus).Yet even though I have fatigue, chills, fever, watery eyes, extremely discomforting right-side hemicrania that worsens everytime I attempt to read (not being able to read is what hurts the most), nasal congestion, and fluid pressure coming from my sinuses provoking my upper back teeth to ache, I assure loved ones that this sickness is “nothing major”. Sinusitis, it is simply an old acquaintance paying me a seasonal visit, but this time, flaunting its exhaustive symptoms. Nonetheless, there is something very sagacious about sickness whether “major” or “minor” if we just bring ourselves to ponder about our conditions.
I purposely avoided being macabre in my reflections on The Magic Mountainbut in truth, the line that impinged greatly upon my mind was in the fifth chapter titled “Sudden Enlightenment”: “… for the first time, he understood that he would die.” Besides knowing himself, Hans Castorp’s other great accomplishment is in understanding that one must go through sickness to achieve an elevated mental health. “It is this notion of disease and death as a necessary route to knowledge, health, and life that makes The Magic Mountain a novel of initiation,” Thomas Mann also defines in the afterword – quite Nietzschean in this sense, but I do agree, and we have also heard something like this being stated from Pascal to Proust.
Don’t you think this is somehow associated to the need of knowing sickness and acknowledging that we are sinners/sickly and not invincible, in order to be redeemed? It is also biblical for one who has sinned much to be forgiven much. While this should not be misconstrued as an encouragement to sin much, the passage also gives us a certain view that those who have experienced much will be rewarded much in a way, just as sheltered lives, no matter how intelligent, will always be lacking in a profounder sort of knowledge. This is also manifested even in great artists.
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It is much distressing to be in this present state but somehow, I cannot be pessimistic about this. Let nature’s cathartic tempering do me good and help me grow… and at least obliterate a contemptible complaining attitude. There is wisdom in being called a “patient”.
.“Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?” thus concluded The Magic Mountain.
There is an enigmatic beauty in novels that give refuge to romantic language and a modernistic obscurity. However, the obscurity of The Magic Mountain would have been too excessive had Thomas Mann failed to foresee the daunting challenge he set before the reader, and so with a very necessary afterword, he aided me. Still, reading the novel turned out to be a formidable uphill climb with its indefatigable nebulous symbolisms and warring ideologies between characters. Furthermore, the gooseflesh that Mann lent me in Doktor Faustus gripped my mental and emotional reins. Mann’s proficience in the field of merging art and psychoanalysis is evident here that taking a breath in between heavy chapters, I was led to ask, “Can there be anything more psychologically thrilling than reading Thomas Mann?”
The Magic Mountain is a metaphorical reconstruction of a historical era replete with its philosophies and political dogmas incarnated in complex characters to which our average-minded protagonist, Hans Castorp, lends an ear. The author has also described this book as a “swan song” of a pre-World War I existence in Europe. All of these were fascinating to me as the roles pondered on the meaning of my desired timeless topics; literature, music, time, religion, life, and death. Nevertheless, the most meaningful element for me was the protagonist’s episodic journey of knowing himself – a topic very significant to me at this time in life.
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Hans Castorp did his best at this point to listen and comprehend and in the hope of finally learning wherein had consisted the crass ignorance of Magnus the brewer, and finding out what else literature actually was, above and beyond “beautiful characters”.
If there are reasons that prevented me from answering straightaway a close kin’s query of personal preferences, “Proust or Mann?” it was because I found both author’s lifeworks (Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and Mann’s The Magic Mountain) similar in these respects; their treatment and utilization of Time, and that their works are not merely stories but the “unburdening” of their lives and personalities and mediums of their search for lost time and their selves. Eventually, I answered, “Thomas Mann”.
It usually takes ages for us to fully know a person, but with the event of being finally acquainted with a particular soul comes a profound impression on one’s life. This sort of knowledge is not entirely unsolicited, but neither can it be hurried, and no one knows of its advent, or whether it will ever take place, but when at last this knowing inhabits one’s heart, only then can one apprehend the total cruciality or need for such an arrival – that of knowing a life intimately.
To know a life, its sorrows and joys, its pride and insecurities, its failures and hopes, its concealed motives and apparent interests, its lusts and loves, its triumphs and defeats, its fallacies and truths, its fears, its hypocrisies and sincerities, its Faith, the ugliness of its carnality and the beauty of its spirit, all of these and so much more. To know a life and the process of disclosure is by no means pretty. It is initially confounding, astonishing and horrifying, but I believe it is a graver tragedy to never experience this because it is certainly most worth going through, especially when the person concerned, the person we ought to be adeptly enlightened with, is our own self.
Is not the most baffling riddle, “What is life?” a mere by-product of “Who am I?” I suspect that by finding ourselves first, it is then that we may tackle such questions, it is then that we will be ready to know another soul deeply, or love someone thoroughly, it is only then that we may confront who we truly are and accept our limitations and gradually hope to conquer our weaknesses, welcome essential changes and eventually find peace within.
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The days leading to a certain event in my life are somber and at the same time exciting as a result of an inner voice surging like a passionate stream exclaiming, “Eureka!” I have found myself! This is who I am. I will no longer journey through life as a being unknown to myself. After a quarter of a century, overdue or ahead of time, and notwithstanding the accountability that comes with this cognition, I have found myself and am filled with such an immense serenity, and gratitude for Him who gives Peace and Life.
Bob and Florence are poetry lovers from the fifties who dwell in the pages of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Sonnets and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Inheriting these antique books via book rummage was merriment enough, but discovering that both passed through the hands of the same poetry lovers was sentimentally touching.
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Noticing that both books were bequeathed to Florence in August of 1951, I composed this pruned pruning poem for them:
