Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

 The Magic Mountain and Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from the Top 100 works in World Literature list https://thegreatestbooks.org/lists/28

10 out of 10

 

 

The Magic Mountain is such a glorious, classic Magnum opus that you can find insights into present discoveries, along with dialogues, meditations on all the important issues, religious, philosophical, psychological and the analysis of time and the meaning of living on top of this Divine Mountain have in particular dazzled this reader, who is now in the process of reading the chef d’oeuvre for the second time, though in the time between the first and the second reading there has been the chance to get immersed into the radio adaptation that had the giant George Constantin playing an important role…

 

The name of the masterpiece suggests Flow and that Optimum experience is explained and studied by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/02/from-flow-by-mihalyi-csikszentmihalyi.html but it is astonishing to see Thomas Mann anticipating so many findings about the role that time plays in our lives, how it is distorted by different circumstances…in flow we find that there are some conditions for reaching Optimum State and one of them is the flexibility of time, and we see how time changes: a ballerina will spend only less than one minute on the stage, but it will feel like a week

In the same manner we could say we have Hans Castorp and the rest of the crowd in Davos (which is so famous in the world of business today for their annual shindig, at least yearly before the pandemic has started) experience the dilation and compression of time, depending on the activity or lack thereof which makes the seven minutes needed to consult Mercury pass with difficulty, whereas months seem to be days, or nothing at all as there is the element of Monotony, which reduces all days to one…

 

When there is no change, the result is zero Flow and that is evident in The Magic Mountain, where Thomas Mann anticipates the Science of Happiness by Stefan Klein http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-science-of-happiness-how-our-brains.html and the Lasagna Effect – one of the secrets of happiness is variation brings pleasure, though there is a quandary here, since we need rituals, good habits such as exercise every day and read, but we need to have on the other hand Change…

In Davos, the characters on the Magic Mountain have a different perspective on time and when Hans Castorp arrives and says he is going to stay for three weeks, it looks to them as if he is just coming in and packing at the same time; one of the doctors mocks the notion and then he also speaks about the futility of stating one is healthy, because he has never met anyone in perfect health and indeed, the hero will soon find he is not in the superb condition he assumed, albeit Clavdia Chauchat surely has something to do with it…

 

There is a duality, perhaps even a discrepancy between the notion that the Magic Mountain involves a society that is ‘high above’ not just literally, but in a metaphorical sense as well and the patients of The Berghof Sanatorium do look down on those who live in the flatlands, but in quite a few ways, many of them have nothing to recommend them as superior beings, and on the contrary, for quite a few, we have the perception that they are actually weak and their disease is not one of the lungs, but psychological, for they feel anxiety and do not adapt when they return to the plains and wish to and do return to the Mountain…

Flow is associated with Love and when Hans Castorp falls in love with Clavdia Chauchat, everything changes for him, we could argue that she is the real reason why instead of three weeks, he ends up becoming a patient, and maybe the high temperature and the illness are in fact ignited by the need to be with the woman he loves.

 

On the other hand, this might be a disguised homosexual attraction, for Clavdia looks like a boy that Hans Castorp has been infatuated with in his childhood, to the point where he kept in a drawer of his desk the shavings from the pencil borrowed by that colleague – Thomas Mann himself had homosexual desires we find from documentaries looking at his life, age, repressions and the monumental books he has written…

 

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