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Page 11 text:
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FROM THOMAS MANN THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
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Page 10 text:
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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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