Eternal Soup and Sudden Clarity: Discussing "The Magic Mountain," Eating Some Brunch

What we ate (this is important):

• quiches
• frittatas
• fruit and yogurt
• baked french toast
• biscuits and jam
• cupcakes
• banana bread
• sweet potatoes and brussel sprouts
• breakfast porter

What We Talked About:

Thanks perhaps to the icy air permeating our twin cities recently (good for the circulation!), we transformed our gathering into something of an alpine sanatorium of our own. We sequestered ourselves from the world; we breezily discussed ideas; we ate immodestly (see above). As it turns out, porter does go nicely with french toast. I had no idea. (We did only manage a single breakfast, but give us time. We'll be putting away five meals a day like aristocratic, fin-de-siecle tuberculars soon enough.)

But the similarities ended there. We still considered ourselves part of the world. The presence of a certain chuckling, big-eyed baby was a constant reminder that, y'know, there is such a thing as the future; bodies change; time is real.

Not so at the Berghof. On the one hand, the sanatorium is a last refuge for the remnants of a dying Continental aristocracy, who live in a state of obscene comfort and near-total inertia. Isolation and alienation are the watchwords; the place is defined by its remove from the social upheaval and political chaos of the actual world below. This remove, both geographical and conceptual, seemed to us to be what lends the Berghof its fairy-tale quality. Familiar modes of expression wither away and are forgotten. Illness and decay are the dominant metaphysical conditions. Time expands and contracts in unfamiliar ways. It snows in August.

On the other hand, the residents and administrators are in thrall to some perfectly modern bourgeois obsessions: scientific measurement and classification; organized, mechanistic bureaucracy; the pristine regimentation of daily life. Drs. Krokowski and Behrens' decrees of illness and health, reached through studious attention to the various rattles and wheezes of the human lungs, plus a strict regimen of temperature-taking, are more than simply medical diagnoses: they are statements of being. A patient's existential status is a function of her physical health. And likewise, her interior world, her desires and urges, are just as subject to medicalization as are the machinations of her thorax.

Which makes it a perfect place for our friend Hans Castorp, an un-serious, mediocre fellow if ever their was one. Much like the Berghof itself, young Herr Castorp seems to be suspended between two worlds. His instinctive political view is an inherited aristocratic conservatism; why change the world, after all, when everything works so well? when the world is so comfy and nice? His lack of self-awareness is definitive and total. Hans, says the narrator, "tended to believe in the infinite duration of the state and mood in which he happened to find himself at any given moment."

At the same time, though, he is a blithe champion of progress and modernity, of the rational ordering of society, of the bourgeois comforts. Needless to say, this perspective is no less conservative than his unearned noblesse oblige, and leads the narrator to quip that Hans Castorp and his cousin Joachim had long been "accustomed...to equating patriotic feelings with preservation of the established order." Not exactly a revolutionary, in other words.



We are beginning see, though, how Hans' predispositions have left him alienated from his emotions, a stranger to his own inner life. His lusts and yearnings, for the young "Kirghiz-eyed" Polish boy and for frail, dissolute Frau Chauchat, come to him as mysterious, nameless visitors from some far, dark shore. As we leave Hans, three weeks (?) into his stay, these funny feelings inside are almost as troublesome to him as his rattling chest and permanently flushed cheeks.

There is so much more. The Berghof's reflection of Mann's Weimar-era milieu; the bluff Settembrini and his high-volume humanism; zombies and automatons; decay, decay, decay. We'll meet again after three-hundred slow pages and untold years.

What We Referenced:

Thomas Mann's pal, Arnold Schoenberg and twelve-tone composition

The Frankfurt School

Der Blaue Reiter

Otto Dix

Anna Karenina

Ishmael and his coffins

poutine

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other Weimar-era zombie movies