Kenyon College - Reveille Yearbook (Gambier, OH)

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Castorp must in the end find his own way to knowledge. Time becomes his ally and his great teacher, for it is only time that admits growth and only time that provides experience. The pedagogues, having become the rigid captives of particular beliefs or modes of being, are as far removed from time as the mountain world in which they dwell: they are already “dead.” It is left to Castorp to discover the relationship between life and death that has escaped his mentors. Out of the constant experimentation that Settembrini has urged upon him, out of the eternal debate between the champions of this view and that, out of his observations of the representatives of humanity that surround him, Castorp creates his own vision of life. Death, he learns, must be put in its proper place. It can equally well be understood as the force which enhances life, which supports it and continually refreshes it: It is from the root-pierced grave that the young tree draws life, from the body of the victim that the predator sucks his sustenance, and from the death of each generation that the next has its existence. The paradox is extended: art, which imposes death upon a moment of existence by arresting its flow, holds life's beauty forever fast; out of a jumble of frozen ideas we construct the frame that lets us define the vital world about us; building upon the dead past we enjoy the riches of the present. The education of I Ians Castorp is the discovery, ultimately, of form and of love. All form, he discerns, has death somehow behind it. for form means giving definition to thrusting, bursting life, thus ending movement and development. Yet without form there can be no life, no relationship of a self to an external reality, no intercourse between one being and the next. “All things are the vehicle of both life and death,” Castorp can finally say to himself and within that paradox lies the implicit choice for man. Mis form-giving activity can either enhance life or destroy it. Which he chooses will depend on his capacity to love—to love in the sense that Castorp understands the word. Love is not the impulse to life, but the will to sustain it. It means a sympathy for the naive, for the growing and developing, but also for that out of which it has grown. It means living without wishing to possess, living for the others as well as for the self. All that humanity has to sustain itself in face of the horrible aspect of death is love. Above all else, to love means to give back to life at least as much as one takes from it. for only thus can we repay the debt that we, the living, owe to life. In the end Castorp must go down from the mountain, for it is down in the fiatland that the eternal struggle rages between the forces which support life and those which threaten it. He must take his stand in the service of those other children of life whom he loves and who. alas, in the midst of life will be denied the vision afforded him. On the mountain death still holds sway, still offering to other children of life who find their way there a place removed from time and a chance to sit above the dance of life and observe its moving pattern. It is a world where life can be put upon the dissecting table for a moment, examined under the microscope, glimpsed through the prism of art. It can provide a vision of life, so long as the children do not fall victim to death’s allurement. “All things are the vehicle of both life and death”—this is the supreme paradox of the mountain, the supreme paradox of being. Gamhicr. Ohio April 19. 1967 Bruce Haywood

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PREFACE Hans Castorp, “that still unwritten page as Mann calls him, is what heredity and an affluent industrial society have made him when, on the threshold of manhood, he goes up the mountain to join his cousin, Joachim. The world of Davos and the sanitarium, its rarefied atmosphere ambiguously “good for the disease, eventually yields to Castorp an understanding of the human condition such as the flatland would never have provided. For on the mountain, removed for a time from the necessity to cope with that flatland world on its own terms, Castorp comes first to know himself—the dimensions of his own person, his lusts and needs, his inadequacies and his strengths—but only after he has been shocked out of his complacent acceptance of the rightness of everything “down below by confronting the fact that death rules “up above. It is “death in a host of manifestations that the mountain world shows to Castorp. First he sees death only as a force that crushes the living, bringing an end to movement, growth, love and joy. But he comes to understand the presence of death also in the printed page, the painting that holds nature permanently fast, the idea that becomes the binding slogan, the faith that paralyzes the believer. All these at first seem evidence of the superiority of death and its sovereignty over life and Castorp plunges into their study, thinking to find a clue to the riddle of existence. A series of eager pedagogues offer to guide him, each claiming the whole truth for his particular approach. There is the Italian, Settembrini, who preaches a threadbare humanism and advocates the individual’s surrender to the masses’ progress. There is the Jesuit Naphta, bom a Jew, whose road to salvation passes through terror and absolutism. There are the two doctors, men of science, who in turn explain the spiritual in terms of the physical and the physical by means of the spiritual. And above all there is the seductive Madame Chauchat who, Castorp feels instinctively, has more to teach him than do his teachers. Yet each one, Castorp comes to see, is more concerned to make him a receptacle for a particular and confining faith than to encourage his growth to understanding.

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FROM THOMAS MANN THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN