Thomas Mann
La montagna incantata

Sometimes one starts, but they don't imagine they will never finish, that all their expectations and predictions will be swept away like chaff, yes, like chaff in the wind.

If, then, they haven't made any predictions or developed any particular expectations, but just started, that one, who doesn't imagine they will never finish, finds themselves lost in a vast ocean, to which, unexpectedly, the watercourse they were following has led them. And yet, watercourses all tend toward the ocean, it is well known, but it's easy to forget this, or disregard this hardly insignificant detail, as one is caught up in the busy swarming of hormones fueled by the excitement felt when one sets out to begin. To begin any kind of work, it is understood. If then the work, the effort, is nothing other than what is usually referred to as a "literary inspiration," or "poetic," then we're in for it. A certain German from Lübeck, he's in for it too.

When he starts writing, inspired by a visit to a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in Switzerland, he expects to craft a little story, a short story, a sort of humorous version of Death in Venice. Thomas the German also expects this audacious prediction to come true, punctually. He got lost in the ocean too. After all, it was to be expected, knowing Herr Mann's tendencies toward digression and speculation, but above all, what can you expect if you decide to write a book with a prose akin to an English humorist, slow and musical, slimy? Yes, I said slimy.

Reading the prose of The Magic Mountain often brings to mind, or at least brings to my mind, the image of a slimy worm moving, slithering slowly, with the characteristic sluggishness of slimy creatures, worms, which one does not quite understand what they want to do, or even if they know what they are doing, or where they are going: slowly forward, then a slight curve to the left, slowly forward, another slight curve to the left, backwards?!?

But then you return to the slimy beginning, what do you do?

In reality, unlike worms, our Thomas knows exactly where he is going and why. With this musical score of words, which accelerates, then slows down, then raises the tone, then lowers it... with this orchestral writing, I was saying, Thomas Mann tells a story, the story of a mediocre bourgeois from the plains, a new engineer, legally named Hans Castorp, and his curious journey to the Swiss mountains, visiting his cousin in a sanatorium for tuberculosis treatment.

Time planned for the visit: three weeks. Poor deluded Hans Castorp. In the mountains, in the sanatorium, time works differently than in the bourgeois and ingenious plains. Here your first day lasts 90 pages, while your last week is condensed into a few lines. Here you will be forced to stay much longer than expected. Indeed, you too will be diagnosed with tuberculosis and will have to extend your stay among these half-mad patients from whom you hoped to soon part.

It is so. It's unfortunate.

Still more pages with the eccentric counselor Behrens, the superb Enlightenment thinker Settembrini, the atypical Jesuit Naphta, the charming Madame Chauchat, your good-hearted cousin Joachim... but do not despair, your narrator has in store at least a singular story for you, all played out in repetitions and references, re-proposals of formulas, sentences, thoughts, situations identical to themselves or even reversed hundreds of pages from each other. All this back and forth won't be empty and useless: the strange disparity of pages devoted to the first weeks of your stay will give you a chance to think about time and its relativity, the sudden encounter with illness and death will open the doors to life, or at least to a certain ideal of life, and of humanity too, perhaps a dream of humanity more than anything else, carefully cultivated and spurred on by the meetings with Settembrini the humanist, from whom you will part to attempt a synthesis of your own. You will start with love, love for a woman, Madame Chauchat, and perhaps discover another kind of love, better and more important, perhaps. All this in hundreds and hundreds of pages of thoughts, impressions, suppositions, dialogues, monologues, soliloquies, interpretations, symbolism, metaphors, impressive encounters, and recurring memories. All this for you. For you, not for another, dear Hans. You who were a mediocre bourgeois from the plains become like a modern Perceval in search of the Holy Grail, not the magical cup, the Grail for you is something else, the sense of the human, its ideal and its consistency, its dream, maybe.

And then enough, the rumble of thunder will bring about war.