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NUCLEAR FAMILY 19769

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE

MAGICALALPHABET

 

..................

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
THE RAINBOW LIGHT
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
3
THE
33
15
6
R
=
9
-
7
RAINBOW
82
37
1
L
=
3
-
5
LIGHT
56
29
2
-
-
14
-
15
THE RAINBOW LIGHT
171
81
9
-
-
1+4
-
1+5
-
1+7+1
8+1
-
Q
-
5
-
6
THE RAINBOW LIGHT
9
9
9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIS IS THE SCENE OF THE SCENE UNSEEN

THE UNSEEN SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN THIS IS THE SCENE

 

 

3
THE
33
15
6
4
MIND
40
22
4
2
OF
21
12
3
9
HUMANKIND
95
41
5
18
First Total
189
90
18
1+8
Add to Reduce
1+8+9
9+0
1+8
9
Second Total
18
9
9
-
Reduce to Deduce
1+8
-
-
9
Essence of Number
9
9
9

 

 

THE DIVINE COMEDY

OF

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321)

THE FLORENTINE

CANTICA I

HELL

(L'INFERNO)

INTRODUCTION

Page 9

"Midway this way of life we're bound upon

I woke to find myself in a dark wood,

Where the right road was wholly lost and gone."

 

 

M
=
4
-
6
MIDWAY
75
30
3
T
=
2
-
4
THIS
56
20
2
W
=
5
-
3
WAY
49
13
4
O
=
6
-
2
OF
21
12
3
L
=
3
-
4
LIFE
32
23
5
W
=
5
-
4
WE'RE
51
24
6
B
=
2
-
5
BOUND
56
20
2
U
=
3
-
4
UPON
66
21
3
-
-
30
-
32
-
406
163
28
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
1
I
9
9
9
W
=
5
-
4
WOKE
54
18
9
T
=
2
-
2
TO
35
8
8
F
=
6
-
4
FIND
33
24
6
M
=
4
-
6
MYSELF
80
26
8
I
=
9
-
2
IN
23
14
5
A
=
1
-
1
A
1
1
1
D
=
4
-
4
DARK
34
16
7
W
=
5
-
4
WOOD
57
21
3
-
-
45
-
28
-
326
137
56
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
5
WHERE
59
32
5
T
=
2
-
3
THE
33
15
6
R
=
9
-
5
RIGHT
62
35
8
R
=
9
-
4
ROAD
38
20
2
W
=
5
-
3
WAS
43
7
7
W
=
5
-
6
WHOLLY
95
32
5
L
=
3
-
4
LOST
66
12
3
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
G
=
7
-
4
GONE
41
23
5
-
-
46
-
37
-
456
186
42
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
121
-
97
First Total
1188
486
126
-
-
1+2+1
-
9+7
Add to Reduce
1+1+8+8
4+8+6
1+2+6
Q
-
4
-
16
Second Total
18
18
9
-
-
-
-
1+6
Reduce to Deduce
1+8
1+8
-
-
-
4
-
7
Essence of Number
9
9
9

 

 

THE DIVINE COMEDY

OF

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265-1321)

THE FLORENTINE

CANTICA I

HELL

(L'INFERNO)

INTRODUCTION

Page 9

"Power failed high fantasy here; yet, swift to move

Even as a wheel moves equal, free from jars,

Already my heart and will were wheeled by love,

The Love that moves the sun and other stars."

 

P
=
7
-
5
POWER
77
32
5
F
=
6
-
6
FAILED
37
28
1
H
=
8
-
4
HIGH
32
32
5
F
=
6
-
7
FANTASY
86
23
5
H
=
8
-
4
HERE
36
27
9
Y
=
7
-
3
YET
50
14
5
S
=
1
-
5
SWIFT
77
23
5
T
=
2
-
2
TO
35
8
8
M
=
4
-
4
MOVE
55
19
1
-
-
49
-
40
First Total
485
206
44
-
-
4+9
-
4+0
Add to Reduce
4+8+5
2+0+6
4+4
Q
-
13
-
4
Second Total
17
8
8
-
-
1+3
-
-
Reduce to Deduce
1+7
-
-
-
-
4
-
4
Essence of Number
8
8
8

 

 

E
=
5
-
4
EVEN
46
19
1
A
=
1
-
2
AS
20
2
2
A
=
1
-
1
A
1
1
1
W
=
5
-
5
WHEEL
53
26
8
M
=
4
-
5
MOVES
74
20
2
E
=
5
-
5
EQUAL
56
20
2
F
=
6
-
4
FREE
34
25
7
F
=
6
-
4
FROM
52
25
7
J
=
1
-
4
JARS
48
12
3
-
-
34
-
34
First Total
384
150
33
-
-
3+4
-
3+4
Add to Reduce
3+8+4
1+5+0
3+3
Q
-
7
-
7
Second Total
15
6
6
-
-
-
-
-
Reduce to Deduce
1+5
-
-
-
-
7
-
7
Essence of Number
6
6
6

 

 

A
=
1
-
7
ALREADY
66
30
3
M
=
4
-
2
MY
38
11
2
H
=
8
-
5
HEART
52
25
7
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
W
=
5
-
4
WILL
56
20
2
W
=
5
-
4
WERE
51
24
7
W
=
5
-
7
WHEELED
62
35
8
B
=
2
-
2
BY
27
9
9
L
=
3
-
4
LOVE
54
18
9
-
-
34
-
38
First Total
425
182
47
-
-
3+4
-
3+8
Add to Reduce
4+2+5
1+8+2
4+7
Q
-
7
-
11
Second Total
11
11
11
-
-
-
-
1+1
Reduce to Deduce
1+1
1+1
1+1
-
-
7
-
2
Essence of Number
2
2
2

 

 

T
=
2
-
3
THE
33
15
6
L
=
3
-
4
LOVE
54
18
9
T
=
2
-
4
THAT
49
13
4
M
=
4
-
5
MOVES
74
20
2
T
=
2
-
3
THE
33
15
6
S
=
1
-
3
SUN
54
9
9
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
O
=
6
-
5
OTHER
66
30
3
S
=
1
-
5
STARS
77
14
5
-
-
22
-
35
First Total
459
144
45
-
-
2+2
-
3+5
Add to Reduce
4+5+9
1+4+4
4+5
Q
-
4
-
8
Second Total
18
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
Reduce to Deduce
1+8
-
-
-
-
4
-
8
Essence of Number
9
9
9

 

 

3
THE
33
15
6
4
HOLY
60
24
6
7
MESSAGE
-
-
-
2
M+E
18
9
9
1
S
19
10
1
3
S+A+G
27
18
9
1
E
5
5
5
7
MESSAGE
69
42
24
14
Add
162
81
36
1+4
Reduce
1+6+2
8+1
3+6
5
Deduce
9
9
9

 

 

THE

FAR YONDER SCRIBE

AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE

THE

ZED ALIZ ZED

IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS

AT THE THROW OF THE NINTH NUMBER WHEN IN CONJUNCTION SET

THE

FAR YONDER SCRIBE

MADE RECORD OF THEIR FALL

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
=
1
-
5
ADDED
18
18
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
T
=
2
-
2
TO
35
8
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
A
=
1
-
3
ALL
25
7
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
M
=
4
-
5
MINUS
76
22
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
N
=
5
-
4
NONE
48
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
S
=
1
-
6
SHARED
55
28
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
B
=
2
-
2
BY
27
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
10
EVERYTHING
133
61
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
M
=
4
-
9
MULTIPLED
121
49
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
2
IN
23
14
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
9
ABUNDANCE
65
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
35
-
57
First Total
626
266
59
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
14
8
18
-
-
3+5
-
5+7
Add to Reduce
6+2+6
2+6+6
5+9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+4
-
1+8
-
-
8
-
12
Second Total
14
14
10
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
5
8
9
-
-
-
-
1+2
Reduce to Deduce
1+4
1+4
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
3
Essence of Number
5
5
5
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
5
8
9

 

 

26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
9
-
-
-
-
5
6
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
6
-
8
+
=
43
4+3
=
7
=
7
=
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
9
-
-
-
-
14
15
-
-
-
19
-
-
-
-
24
-
26
+
=
115
1+1+5
=
7
=
7
=
7
26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
-
-
1
2
3
4
-
-
7
8
9
-
2
3
4
5
-
7
-
+
=
83
8+3
=
11
1+1
2
=
2
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
-
-
10
11
12
13
-
-
16
17
18
-
20
21
22
23
-
25
-
+
=
236
2+3+6
=
11
1+1
2
=
2
26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
+
=
351
3+5+1
=
9
=
9
=
9
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
+
=
126
1+2+6
=
9
=
9
=
9
26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
1
occurs
x
3
=
3
=
3
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
2
occurs
x
3
=
6
=
6
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
3
occurs
x
3
=
9
=
9
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
+
=
4
occurs
x
3
=
12
1+2
3
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
+
=
5
occurs
x
3
=
15
1+5
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
+
=
6
occurs
x
3
=
18
1+8
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
+
=
7
occurs
x
3
=
21
2+1
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
+
=
8
occurs
x
3
=
24
2+4
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
+
=
9
occurs
x
2
=
18
1+8
9
26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
45
-
-
26
-
126
-
54
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4+5
-
-
2+6
-
1+2+6
-
5+4
26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
9
-
-
8
-
9
-
9
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
26
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z
-
-
9
-
-
8
-
9
-
9

 

 

CITY OF REVELATION

John Michell

1972

Page109

"At the root of our traditional units of measurement is the ancient, mystical science of numbers, to which Plato makes an obscure reference towards the end of Epinomis, here quoted from Lamb's translation.

The most important and first (study) is of numbers in themselves: not of those which are corporeal, but of the whole origin of the odd and the even and the greatness of their influence on the nature of reality. When he has learnt these things, there comes next what they call by the very ridiculous name of geometry, when it proves to be a manifest likening of numbers not like one another by nature in respect of the province of planes; and this will be clearly seen by him who is able to understand it to be a marvel, not of human but of divine origin. And then, after that, the numbers thrice increased and like to the solid nature, and those again which have been made unlike, he likens by another art, namely that which its adepts call stereometry.'

The text is probably corrupt, the expressions are unfamiliar and it is hard to follow Plato's meaning. But the reference, both here and in another passage in Laws, is to some method of relating different classes of phenomena to one numerical system, by which the adept may come to understand the unifying principle in nature. Of this knowledge Plato declares that it is the greatest of all blessings both to him who possessed it and to his community, but if it can not be acquired, the best substitute is simple faith in God since, on the / Page 110 / word of an initiate, matters are far better arranged than we can possibly conceive. He continues,

'Every diagram and system of number and every combination of harmony and the agreement of the revolution of the stars must be made manifest as one in all to him who learns in the proper way, and will be made manifest if a man learns aright by keeping his eyes on unity; for it will be manifest to us as we reflect, that there is one bond naturally uniting all these things.'

The number 666 in metrology

The number which above all others acts as a bond between the various units of measurement is the perfect number of Chaldean

mathematics, 666. For example, 666 feet = 150 cubits + 150 MY while 666 square feet = 90 square MY. Also 6660 square yards = 902 square MY and 66,600 square feet = 1502 square cubits. The Babylonians had a decimal system, but they also reckoned in units of 6, 60 and 600 and a curious survival of this system is found in the letters which the Romans used as numerals, for the sum of I, V, X, L, C and D is 666. "

 

THE

FAR YONDER SCRIBE

AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE

THE

ZED ALIZ ZED

IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER STAR DUST AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS

AT THE THROW OF THE NINTH NUMBER WHEN IN CONJUNCTION SET

THE

FAR YONDER SCRIBE

MADE RECORD OF THEIR FALL

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
=
1
-
5
ADDED
18
18
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
T
=
2
-
2
TO
35
8
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
A
=
1
-
3
ALL
25
7
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
M
=
4
-
5
MINUS
76
22
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
N
=
5
-
4
NONE
48
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
S
=
1
-
6
SHARED
55
28
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
B
=
2
-
2
BY
27
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
10
EVERYTHING
133
61
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
M
=
4
-
10
MULTIPLED
121
49
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
2
IN
23
14
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
9
ABUNDANCE
65
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
35
-
58
First Total
626
266
59
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
14
8
18
-
-
3+5
-
5+8
Add to Reduce
6+2+6
2+6+6
5+9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+4
-
1+8
-
-
8
-
13
Second Total
14
14
10
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
5
8
9
-
-
-
-
1+3
Reduce to Deduce
1+4
1+4
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
4
Essence of Number
5
5
5
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
5
8
9

 

ADVENT 2241 ADVENT

 

 

11
THE ADVENT
-
-
-
3
THE
33
15
6
6
ADVENT
66
21
3
9
THE ADVENT
99
36
9
-
-
9+9
3+6
-
9
THE ADVENT
9
9
9

 

WORDS OF POWER

 

-
-
-
-
15
WORDS OF POWER
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
5
WORDS
79
25
7
O
=
6
-
2
OF
21
12
3
P
=
7
-
5
POWER
77
32
5
-
-
18
-
15
WORDS OF POWER
177
69
15
-
-
1+8
-
1+5
-
1+7+7
6+9
1+5
-
-
9
-
6
WORDS OF POWER
15
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+5
1+5
-
-
-
9
-
6
WORDS OF POWER
6
6
6

 

 

I

ME

LIVING

MAGNETISM

POSITIVE + NEGATIVE

ISISIS MAAT IS IS MAAT ISISIS

I AM THAT EYE THAT EYE THAT AM I

I AM DROWNING ALWAYS DROWNING AM I

HAIL THE JEWEL AT THE CENTRE OF THE LOTUS

1818 ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ 8181

ONE EIGHT THREE SIX 1836 ISISIS 6381 SIX THREE EIGHT ONE

X X X 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 X X X 9 + 8 + 7 + 6 + 5 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 X X X

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ 9 9 9 ZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

ISISIS LOVE LOVE ISISIS ISISIS LIGHT 999 LOVE 999 LIGHT SISISI SISISI LOVE LOVE ISISIS

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
A
=
1
-
5
ADDED
18
18
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
T
=
2
-
2
TO
35
8
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
A
=
1
-
3
ALL
25
7
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
M
=
4
-
5
MINUS
76
22
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
N
=
5
-
4
NONE
48
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
S
=
1
-
6
SHARED
55
28
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
B
=
2
-
2
BY
27
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
10
EVERYTHING
133
61
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
M
=
4
-
9
MULTIPLIED
121
49
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
2
IN
23
14
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
9
ABUNDANCE
65
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
35
-
57
First Total
626
266
59
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
14
8
18
-
-
3+5
-
5+7
Add to Reduce
6+2+6
2+6+6
5+9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+4
-
1+8
-
-
8
-
12
Second Total
14
14
14
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
5
8
9
-
-
-
-
1+2
Reduce to Deduce
1+4
1+4
1+4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
3
Essence of Number
5
5
5
-
1
2
3
8
5
6
5
8
9

 

 

THE TIME IS COMING AND NOW IS

 

 

WHERE DOES THE WEIRDNESS GO

David Lindley 1996

WHY QUANTUM MECHANICS IS STRANGE BUT NOT AS STRANGE AS YOU THINK

Page ix

Introduction: Why do I trust my computer?

"The computer I've been using to write these words has been satisfactorily reliable: I switch it on and off repeatedly, calling up files that contain the words I wrote last time, adding new words, shuffling the old ones around, and saving the results for next time. I rarely trouble to think what is going on inside the computer that lets me see my words on the screen, or move them painlessly from one place to another, or restore a sentence that I accidentally erased, or play a game of solitaire in the odd moment when inspiration deserts me. And if I do think about these inner workings, I'm not nearly enough of a computer expert to be able to say at all accurately what is happening in the machine. Instead, I tend to comfort myself with plausible analogies that give me a sense that I more or less know how the computer works, without going to the difficulty of mastering the volumes of technical detail I would need to know to understand it properly (which, I'm happy to say, I don't need to. The reliability of my computer gives me ample confidence that there are dogged and knowledgeable people in the world who can indeed design and build these things).
At the bottom of it all are electric currents carried by microscopic charged particles called electrons. Rattling around in my computer, I like to think, are little streams and packages of electrons that constitute the electrical signals, the binary zeroes and ones that form the basis of its inner workings. Somehow, the letters on the screen are built from patterns of electrical signals, and somehow, my instructions to the computer from the key­board cause these patterns of electrical signals to change and / Page x / move. So I think of the computer as a vast, intricate electronic pinball machine, with unimaginable numbers of pathways and trajectories, and with exquisitely timed and delicately adjusted f1ippers that guide electrons this way and that to produce a constantly changing, frenetically busy but nevertheless consistently and accurately meaningful pattern of electronic flows. The reliability and precision of all this activity, despite its daunting complexity, is the truly stunning part of computer design, and that's the bit I don't pretend tounderstand. My words take shape as a buzzing pattern of circulating electrons, and that's about as much as I want to know.

And when I have done for the day and want to store what I have written, I can tell the computer to send the sequence of electrical zeroes and ones to the hard disk, where they are encoded now as a series of magnetic blips on the disk's surface. To get an idea of how the hard disk works, I imagine its surface to be studded with tiny magnets whose poles can be flipped one way or the other on command, to record either a zero or a one. The hard disk is perhaps ten centimeters across, and can store 120 megabytes of data (the computer is a few years old, or that figure would be more like 1,000 megabytes); one byte, in stan­dard computer technology, is a word of eight binary bits-eight zeroes or ones-so that all in all my hard disk can accommodate close to a billion blips of data. Each of those tiny magnets must, according to a quick calculation, be a few millionths of a meter across. This is the size of a grain of dust, too small to be seen by the unaided eye, and yet my computer can record and retrieve data on the hard disk as if these magnetized dust grains \vere levers that could be set firmly up or down, like the signal levers that an old-time railway signalman would operate, and it can set and read millions of these levers in a fraction of a sec- , ond. How can invisible dust grains be so dependable? How can I store and retrieve a file of written words hundreds of times without ever a single dust grain accidentally flipping the wrong way, or being disturbed by some wayward external influence?

Page xi

On the rare occasions that I think about the inner workings of my computer, I resort to mechanical images of this sort. I conjure up familiar pieces of machinery-pinball flippers, rail­way switches and signals-and then imagine that these devices can be reduced to the size of dust grains, and arranged into fan­tastically complicated networks. This doesn't really tell me how my computer works, but it lets me think I have the right kind of idea in my head, and that I could understand it, really, if I wanted to.
But then, in another part of my mind is the recollection of undergraduate physics lectures in which I learned that electrons are fundamentally not at all like pin balls. There was something called the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which says that you can never know exactly where a microscopic par­ticle such as an electron is at anyone time, or how fast it is moving, so that if you want a picture of an electron you have to think, perhaps, of a blurry, out-of-focus, smudged-out pinball. And there was another puzzling idea, by the name of wave-par­ticle duality, according to which an electron can behave some­times in ways that make you think it is a particle, but at other times in ways that make you think more of waves. It is both wave and particle, or perhaps neither wave nor particle but something in between, undefinable and unimaginable; at any rate, even the idea of a smudged-out pinball begins to seem dubious. And on top of all that there was a vague notion about measurements affecting in unpredictable ways the things you are trying to measure, so that even if you have a device that can tell where one of these smudged-out, wavey-particley things is, you can't quite be sure of the meaning or reliability of the answer you get.

And now, thinking about all this, my assurance that I under­stood how my computer works and how it can be so reliable begins to crumble. If I'm not allowed to think of the electrons as pin balls rattling around the precisely engineered pathways of the silicon chips, if they are really sloshing about like waves in / Page xii / channels, if the uncertainty principle tells me an electron cannot be altogether in this place but has to be also a little bit in that place at the same time, how can my computer perform the same tasks over and over again with such reliability? And if there's some unpredictability associated with every act of measurement, how can I trust the data I read off the hard disk since, in effect, reading the data amounts to measuring the orientations of all those little magnetized dust grains? Quantum mechanics, or so I recan from my education in physics, says that at the most "fundamental level, the world is not wholly knowable, and not ""wholly" dependable. In dealing with individual electrons or the magnetic alignment of individual atoms, I must think not in certainties but in probabilities.

Nevertheless, my computer continues to work, as imper­turbably as ever. A standard answer to this riddle is that, in fact, a computer does not rely on individual electrons and atoms for its operation. The signals that make up the zeroes and ones chasing around its silicon pathways are gangs of perhaps a tril­lion electrons. The magnetic dust grains on the hard disk are built from trillions of atoms. These things may be microscopic by human standards, but compared to the individual inhabitants of the quantum world they are nevertheless gigantic. And so, ifs sometimes claimed, the quantum mechanical strangeness that besets individual electrons and atoms, and bedevils our thinking about them, becomes negligible when we think about the trillions of electrons and atoms on whose collective behav­ior nlY computer depends.

But what sort of an answer is this? Why should an assembly of a trillion weird little quantum objects behave any less myste­riously than its components? A trillion drops of water make a bucket of water, not a concrete block. If it's true that the weird­ness of the quantum mechanical world seems to disappear when we look at "big" objects, then where, precisely, does that weirdness go? If we can't trust a single electron to be precisely in one place at one time, how can we trust a throng of electrons /Page xiii / to invariably represent the letter a on my computer screen, and not turn casually into a z?
For many decades, this question was resolved by flat assertion. It was simply declared that any measurement produced, of necessity, a definite answer, and thereby forced definition onto the uncertain, ambiguous quantum world. But what a mea­surement was, by what physical process it made indefinite things definite, was never accounted for. In the last few years, however, the beginnings of an answer to this long-standing puz­zle have begun to appear. The answer derives, in part, from the­oretical insights into the behavior of complex systems, which have made it possible to understand how assemblies of many interconnected quantum objects can behave in collective ways that are by no means obvious, or easily deduced, from the behavior of those single objects in isolation.
The purpose of this book is to explain this new understand­ing. We will see that although the weirdness does not altogether go away, it does fade into the background.

To understand the answer, you have to first formulate the ques­tion. The quantum world is an undeniably strange place, work­ing to unfamiliar rules, and in the first part of the book I have tried to explain, as clearly as I know how, what that strangeness consists of and (just as important) what it is not. With the essentials laid out, I delve briefly into some of the misguided efforts that have been pursued over the years in the hope of making quantum mechanics look less weird than it really is. Only, in the end, by accepting the true nature of quantum mechanical weirdness does it become possible to see exactly what the central problem is, and how, in practice, nature gets around it.
The book is organized in what I hope is a logical rather than a chronological manner. I have plunged in at the beginning with one of the well-established and much-discussed "paradoxes" of quantum mechanics, and tried to work from there to an under- / Page xiv / standing of why the paradox arises. The book's organization seems logical to me, anyway. The reason quantum mechanics is disconcerting is that it seems to make nonsense of our usual definitions of logic, leaving us with nothing to hang on to. But read on: in the end, logic reappears, and the world makes sense again!

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Niels Bohr-a sage, late of Copenhagen; the founding father and guiding spirit of the Copenhagen interpretation of quan­tum mechanics
Albert Einstein-physicist, father of relativity, godfather to quantum mechanics, though later estranged therefrom Erwin Schrodinger-owner of a cat, though not necessarily a cat-lover
Max Planck-originator, arguably, of quantum mechanics, though he sought in vain to disown his offspring
Dauid Bohm-heir to Einstein's mantle, who sought to install quaIltum mechanics on a classical foundation, and not vice
John Beli-a sympathizer of Einstein and Bohm, who devised a test the outcome of which would have disheartened Einstein Copenhagen-city of Denmark; also, a stern philosophy Electron-an elementary particle, of fixed mass and electric charge, discovered in 1897; later found also to be a wave Photon-a particle; also, a wave

ACT I

Mechanical Failure


From the days of Newton and Descartes up until the end of the nineteenth century, physicists had constructed an increasingly elaborate but basically mechanical view of the world. The entire universe was supposed to be a glorious clockwork, whose intricate workings scientists could hope to find out in limitless detail. By means of the laws of mechanics and gravity, of heat and light and magnetism, of gases and fluids and solids, every aspect of the material world could in principle be revealed as part of a vast, interconnected, strictly logical mechanism. Every physical cause generated some predictable effect; every observed effect could be traced to some unique and precise cause. The physicist's task was to trace out these links of cause-and­effect in perfect detail, thereby rendering the past understand­able and the future predictable. The accumulation of experi­mental and theoretical knowledge was taken unarguably to bring a single and coherent view of the universe into ever sharper focus. Every new piece of information, every new intel­lectual insight, every new elucidation of the linkages of cause­and-effect added another cog to the clockwork of the universe.
This was the tradition in which physicists at the end of the nineteenth century had been raised. Classical physics aspired to portray with perfect clarity the intricate workings of the mechanical universe. That the real universe was indeed mechanical, that physicists were depicting in ever sharper focus a reality that existed independently of them-these self-evident suppositions were never questioned.

Page 3

The mystery of the other glove

You and a friend are at Heathrow Airport, London. You each have a locked wooden box containing a glove. One box contains the right-handed glove of the pair, the other the left­handed glove, but you don't know which box is which. Both of you also have keys, but they are not the keys to the boxes you are carrymg.

Thus equipped; you board a plane and fly to Los Angeles.
Your friend flies at the sdme time to Hong Kong

When you get to Los Angeles you use your key to open a locker at the airport, and inside you find another key. This is the key to your wooden box, which you now open to discover that the glove you have brought to Los Angeles is the right­handed one. As soon as you know this, of course, you know also that your friend's wooden box, by now in Hong Kong, contains the left-handed glove. With that instantaneous realization, you have acquired a piece of knowledge about a state of affairs on the other side of the world.
Perfectly straightforward, you may say, and so it is. You may have heard of Albert Einstein's famous dictum that nothing, not even information, can travel faster than the speed of light, but no part of this little screenplay contradicts that injunction. You have indeed made a deduction, using information available to you as you wait at the Los Angeles airport, about a fact that pertains to your friend in Hong Kong. But we make these kinds of long-distance inferences, in big ways and small, all the time. An astronomer catching the feeble rays of light that reach a telescope here on Earth thereby deduces the surface temperature of / Page 4 / a distant star. You get out of the shower one morning, look at your watch, and realize that a meeting in your office that you had to attend has already started.
Figuring out what is happening in some distant place is a different thing from transferring that knowledge from one place to another. If, having discovered that your glove is right-handed, you wanted to tell your friend that she has the left-handed one, you would have to pick up the phone, or send a telegram, or mail her a postcard. A phone call might travel almost at the speed of light, the other two messages much slower. And you have no way of knowing whether she has already opened her box or not-unless you happen to get a phone call from her telling you that you must have the right-handed glove. The fact that you have found out which glove she has does not allow
you to beat the laws of physics and get that information to her faster than Einstein allows.

But still, you think there might be some way of exploiting your knowledge to influence your friend's behavior. Suppose, before you both set off on your plane trips, you had agreed with your friend that if she found the left-handed glove in her box she would proceed to Tokyo, but if she got the right-handed one she would fly to Sydney. Does your opening the box in Los Angeles determine where she ends up? By no means: whichever glove was in her box was there from the outset, so whether she has to fly to Tokyo or Sydney is predetermined. When you open your box in Los Angeles you instantly know where she must be going next, but her destination is as much of a surprise to her as it is to you. As before, you've now found out what happens next, but you haven't had any influence over it.

But now let's change the story. The gloves in the two boxes are, you are informed, of a strange and magical kind, unlike any gloves you have come across before. They still make up a pair, but for as long as they are sealed in their boxes, they are neither right-handed nor left-handed but of an unfixed, indeterminate / Page 5 / nature. Only when a box is opened; letting in the light, is the glove inside forced to become either right-handed or left­handed. And there is a fifty-fifty chance of either eventuality.
During the several hours you are in the plane flying from London to Los Angeles, you may well be puzzling over what the glove in your box-this strange glove, neither right-handed nor left-handed but potentially either-actually looks like. But you don't have the key that would let you open the box and peek inside, and in any case, as soon as you peeked the glove would have to take on a definite shape, right-handed or left­handed. The magical nature of this glove is such that you can never see it in its unformed state, because as soon as you look, it turns into something familiar and recognizable. A frustrating catch-22.

On the other hand, when you now arrive at Los Angeles and open your box to find, let us suppose, a right-handed glove, you begin to think that things are not as straightforward as before. You immediately know that when your friend opens her box, she must discover a left-handed glove. But now, apparently, some sort of signal or information must have traveled from your glove to hers, must it not? If both gloves were genuinely indeterminate before you opened your box and looked inside, then presumably as soon as your glove decided to be a right­handed one, hers must have become left-handed, so that the two would be guaranteed to remain a pair. Does this mean that your act of observing the glove in Los Angeles instantaneously reduced the indefiniteness of its partner in Hong Kong to a definite state of left-handedness?

But it occurs to you that there's another possibility. How do you know your friend didn't get to Hong Kong first and open her box before you had a chance to open yours? In that case, she evidently found a left-handed glove, which forced yours to be right-handed even before you looked inside your box. So if there was an instantaneous transmission of information, it might have gone the other way. Your friend's act of opening her / Page 6 / box determined what sort of glove you would find, and not the other way around.

And then, you think, the only way to find out which way the instantaneous information went, from your glove to hers or from hers to yours, is to pick up the phone, call Hong Kong, and find out what time she opened her box. But that phone call goes no faster than the speed of light. Now you are getting really confused: there seems to have been some kind of instantaneous communication between the two gloves, but you can't tell which way it went, and to find out you have to resort to old-fashioned, slower-than-light means of communication, which seems to spoil any of the interesting tricks you might be able to figure out if there. really had been an instantaneous glove-to-glove signal.

And if you think again of the strategy whereby your friend had to get on a plane to either Tokyo or Sydney, depending on which glove she found in her box, you realize you are no more able than before to influence her choice by your action in Los Angeles. The rules of the game are such that you have a fifty­fifty chance of finding either a right-handed or a left-handed glove in your box, so even if you are sure that you have opened your box before she opened hers, and even if you think that opening your box sends an instantaneous signal to hers, forcing her glove to be the partner of yours, you still have no control over which glove you find. It remains a fifty-fifty chance whether she'll end up in Tokyo or Sydney, and you still have no say in the matter.

And now you're even more confused. You think there's been some sort of instantaneous transmission of information, but you can't tell which way it went, and you can't seem to find a way to communicate anything to your friend by means of this secret link between the gloves.

And perhaps you conclude it's a good thing glove gloves aren't like this. / Page 7 / In that, you would be in agreement with Albert Einstein. It's true that gloves don't behave this way but, according to quantum mechanics, electrons and other elementary ary particles do. These particles have properties which, apparently, lie in some unresolved intermediate state until a physicist comes along and does an experiment that forces them to be one thing or the other. And that physicist cannot know in advance, for sure, what particular result any measurement is going to yield; quantum mechanics predicts only the probabilities of possible results.

This offended Einstein's view of what physics should be like.
Before quantum mechanics came along, at the beginning of this century, it was taken for granted that when physicists measure something, they are gaining knowledge of a preexisting state. That is, gloves are always either right-handed or left-handed, whether anyone is looking at them or not, and when you discover what sort of glove you have, you are simply taking note of an independent fact about the world. But quantum mechanics says otherwise: some things are not determined except when they are measured, and it's only by being measured that they take on specific values. In quantum mechanics, gloves are neither right-handed nor left-handed until someone takes a look to find out. At least, that is what quantum mechanics seems to say.

The story we just went through, about indeterminate gloves being taken to separate places and examined by two different people, is part of an experimental setup that Einstein and some colleagues devised as a way to show how absurd and unreasonable quantum mechanics really is. They hoped to convince their glovet colleagues that something must be wrong with a theory that demanded signals traveling faster than the speed of light.
But, as the Danish physicist Niels Bohr was quick to point out, it's far from clear if anything genuinely unacceptable has actually happened with these magical gloves. The whole thing may seem very odd, and it may seem quite inescapable that some sort of instantaneous communication between the gloves is essential for the trick to work, but in the end it seems impossible to/ Page 8 / do anything with the supposed communication. Bohr arrived at what he deemed an acceptable interpretation of this sort of puzzle by forcefully insisting that one must stick to practicalities: it's no good, and indeed positively dangerous, to speculate about what seems to happen in such a case; stick to what actu­all! occurs, and can be recorded and verified, and you'll be all right. If you can't actually send an instantaneous message of your own devising, then it's meaningless to guess at what might or might not have been furtively going on between the two
Nevertheless, Einstein persisted in objecting to what he called this "spooky action-at-a-distance": spooky action-at-a-distance because an occurrence in one place seems to have an instantaneous effect somewhere else, but spooky because the influence is implied rather than directly seen. Einstein accepted, more or less, Bohr's argument that you could stay out of trouble by stichng with documented and unambiguous facts, but to him this was a philosophy that worked only if you were willing to deliberately blind yourself to deeper issues. And many physicists and philosophers since then have found themselves dissatisfied by Bohr's workable but minimalist views.
To understand these disputes we need to take our gloves off and come to grips with the essentials of quantum mechanics. A good place to start is this matter of things being indeterminate until measured. What does this mean, and where does it come from

In which things are exactly what they are seen to be

Ultimately, there must be recourse to experimental evidence. If Quantum mechanics asserts that the act of measurement does not simply yield information about a preexisting state, but / Page 9 / rathr forces a previously indeterminate system to take on a definite appearance, there must be empirical reasons for the assertion. Even theoretical physicists would not come up with so bizarre and counterintuitive an idea if they were not forced to it."

 

THE LOVE THAT FITS YOU LIKE A GLOVE

 

 

HAND IN GLOVE IN HAND

HAND ON ART ON HAND

IF YOU BELIEVE THAT YOU WILL

BELIEVE ANYTHING BELIEVE

I SAY EXACTLY I SAY I SAY I EXACTLY SAY I

 

 

I

SAY

READING GLOVE READ LOVE READ GLOVE READING

COMMONSENSE LOVE SENSECOMMON

COMMON GOOD GODS LOVE GODS GOOD COMMON

GODS JOURNEY IS A LONG ONE LONG IS GODS JOURNEY

THERE IS KNOW ANOTHER KNOW ANOTHER IS THERE

 

 

THE LOST WORLDS OF 2001

Arthur C. Clarke

1972

Page 179

"A long time ago," said Kaminski, "I came across a remark that I've never forgotten-though I can't remember who made it.

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

That's what we're up against here. Our lasers and mesotrons and nuclear reactors and neutrino telescopes would have seemed pure magic to the best scientists of the nineteenth century. But they could have understood how they worked-more or less-if we were around to explain the theory to them."

Page 189

"The other is Clarke's Third* Law

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

 

 

GODS OF THE DAWN

Peter Lemesurier

1997

"As Arthur C. Clarke's perceptive Third Law puts it:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

 

 

THE SECRET HISTORY

OF

ANCIENT EGYPT

Herbie Brennan 2000

"The British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is said to have commented that

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

 

 

THE BIBLE CODE

Michael Drosnin 1997

THE SEALED BOOK

Page 70 (chapter four)

"The astronomer Carl Sagan once noted that if there was other intelligent life in the universe some of it would have certainly evolved far earlier than we did, and had thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or hundreds of millions of years to develop the advanced technology that we are only now beginning to develop.

'After billions of years of biological evolution - on their planet and ours - an alien civilization cannot be in technological lockstep with us,' wrote Sagan.

'There 'have been humans for more than twenty thousand centuries, but we've had radio only for about one century,' wrote Sagan. 'If alien civilizations are behind us, they're likely to be too far behind us to have radio. And if they're ahead of us, they're likely to be far ahead of us. Think of the technical advances on our world over just the last few centuries. What is for us technologically difficult or impossible, what might seem to us like magic, might for them be trivially easy.'

The author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke - who envisioned a mysterious black monolith that reappears at successive stages of human evolution, each time we are ready to be taken to a higher level - made a similar observation:

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'

Page 163

Chapter notes,pages 69-75

"The astronomer Carl Sagan suggested that an advanced alien technology 'might seem to us like magic' in Pale Blue Dot (Random House, 1994), p. 352

The author of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke, made a similar observation:

'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'

(Profiles of the Future, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984).

Paul Davies' imagined 'alien artifact' is described in his book Are We Alone? (Basic Books, 1995), p. 42. Stanley Kubrick, in his famous movie version of Clarke's 2001, showed a mysterious black monolith that seemed to reappear at successive stages of human evolution, each time we were ready to be taken to a higher level. When I told him about the Bible code, Kubrick's immediate reaction was, 'It's like the monolith in 2001.' "

 

 

FIRST CONTACT

THE SEARCH FOR EXTRA TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

Edited By

Beb Bova and Byron Preiss

1990

SEIZING THE MOMENT

A

UNIQUE MOMENT IN HUMAN HISTORY

Michael Michaud

ANTHROPOCENTRISM GOOD-BYE

Page311

The most profound message from the aliens may never be spoken: We are not alone or unique. Contact would tell us that life and intelligence have evolved elsewhere in the Universe, and that they may be common by-products of cosmic evolution. Contact would tend to confirm the theory that life evolves chemically from inanimate matter, through universal processes,implying that there are other alien civilizations in addition to the one we had detected. We might see ourselves as just one example of biocosmic processes, one facet of the Universe becoming aware of itself. We would undergo a revolution in the way that we conceive our own position in the Universe; any remaining pretense of centrality or a special role, any belief that we are a chosen species would be dashed for- ever, completing the process begun by Copernicus four centuries ago.

The revelation that we are not the most technologically advanced intelligent species could lead to a humbling deflation of our sense of self-importance. We might reclassify ourselves to a lower level of ability and worth. This leveling of our pretensions, this anti-hubris, could be intensified if we were confronted with alien technology beyond our understanding.

(Arthur C. Clarke has observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.)

 

"ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM MAGIC"

 

 

MAGI

THE

MAGICIAN

MAGIC INTO IMAGE

CE

 

 

JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

THOMAS MANN

1875 - 1955

MINERVA

1997

Page 968

"But we are speaking of two different things. My Majesty speaks of the fetters which the teaching puts upon the thoughts of God; yours refers to priestly statecraft, which divides teaching and knowledge. But Pharaoh would not be arrogant, and there is no greater arrogance than such a division. No, there is no arrogance in the world greater than that of dividing the children of our Father into initiate and uninitiate and teaching double words: all-knowingly for the masses, knowingly in the inner circle. No, we must speak what we know, and witness what we have seen. Pharaoh wants to do nothing but improve the teaching, even though it be made hard for him by the teaching."

Page 890 8 x 9 = 72

"In all there were two-and-seventy conspirators privy to the plot. It was a proper and a pregnant number, for there had been just sev-enty-two when red Set lured Usir into the chest. And these seventy-two in their turn had had good cosmic ground to be no more and no less than that number. For it is just that number of groups of five weeks which make up the three hundred and sixty days of the year, not counting the odd days; and there are just seventy-two days in the dry fifth of the year, when the gauge shows that the Nourisher has reached his lowest ebb, and the god sinks into his grave. So where there is conspiracy anywhere in the world it is requisite and custom-ary for the number of conspirators to be seventy-two. And if the plot fail, the failure shows that if this number had not been adhered to it would have failed even worse."

 

 

Daily Mail, Monday, January 17, 2022

Answers to Correspondents

Compiled by Charles Legge

Mystery of Sun's sizzle

QUESTION Does the Sun have its own atmosphere?
STELLAR atmospheres are similar to planets only in the fact they form discrete layers. The Sun's atmosphere is a super-hot shroud of plasma.
The photosphere is the visible layer, radiating a white light emission known as the solar surface. It is 250 miles thick and temperatures reach 5,700c.
Black sunspots form where the magnetic field is stronger and the temperature is lower than the surrounding area.
Observing the fact that sunspots move across the sun's surface led astronomers to conclude it rotates on its axis. Since the sun is a ball of gas, different regions rotate at different rates.
Solar flares are tongues of fire that extend hundreds of thousands of miles above the surface.
The layer above the photosphere is the chromosphere, which emits a reddish glow as super-heated hydrogen burns off. The red rim could once only be seen during a total solar eclipse, but astronomers can block the light of the photosphere and observe the Superhot Composite view of a solar eclipse and surrounding corona
between 3,700c at the bottom and 7,700c at the top.
There is then a narrow transition region, a 60-mile layer between the chromosphere and corona, where the temperature rises abruptly to 500,000c.
The corona is the outermost layer of the sun. It appears as white streamers or plumes of ionised gas that flow outward into space. Temperatures can reach two million degrees.
Just why the corona is up to 300 times hotter than the photosphere, despite being farther from the solar core, is one of the great mysteries in astronomy.
The corona extends far out into space:the Nasa estimate is that its five million miles above the sun's surface. The corona's great temperature causes its particles to move at very high speeds.

These speeds are so high that particles escape the sun's gravity, causing the solar wind that whistles through our solar system.

This wind carves out an enormous bubble within space called the heliosphere that engulfs our solar system.

Edward Smart, Inverness.

Superhot: Composite view of a solar eclipse and surrounding corona (Image omitted)

 

objective reality

poems and essays by

lloyd c. daniel

- takem from the Mission Statement of the Midwestern Free School, 1979

page 32

sun
energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy energy rrrraaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

 

Daily Mail

Friday, April 23

David Derbyshire and Claire Bates

Page 25

Ring of fire

"Arching thousands of miles into the void, a solar flare with the power of 100 hydrogen bombs is captured bursting from the surface of the Sun by cameras in space"

"The ring of fire, heated to tens of millions of degrees, stretches out tens of thousands of miles - and is so big it could contain more than 100 Earths.

P 25

".........Sun........."

".........Sun........."

".........Sun........."

".........Sun........."

".........Sun........."

".........Sun........."

".........Sun's........."

".........Sun's........."

".........sun's........."

 

 

Search ResultsSolar Eclipse January 2010: Sun turns into a blazing ring of glory ...16 Jan 2010 ... Longest solar eclipse for 1000 years turns Sun into a blazing ring of fire. By Daily Mail Reporter Last updated at 12:41 AM on 16th January ...
www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Solar-Eclipse-January-2010-Sun-turns-blazing-ring-glory.html

Longest solar eclipse for 1,000 years turns Sun into a blazing ring of fire

By Daily Mail Reporter


Last updated at 12:41 AM on 16th January 2010
Comments (39) Add to My Stories
The sun is reduced to a ring of gold against the black sky as the Moon slips between it and Earth.
This solar eclipse yesterday lasted for 11 minutes and eight seconds, setting a record that will not be beaten until December 23, 3043.
Such events, which only blot out the middle of the Sun, are known as annular eclipses. They occur about 66 times a century and can only be viewed in the narrow band on the Earth’s surface below their path.

The skies over Hongdao, China, where the spectacular 'ring of fire' could be seen. The eclipse was annular, meaning the Moon blocked most of the Sun's middle

WHAT IS AN ANNULAR ECLIPSE?


Not every eclipse of the Sun is a total eclipse. On occasion the Moon is too small to cover the whole of the Sun. This is because of the Moon's orbit around Earth which is oval or elliptical in shape.
This means that as the Moon orbits Earth its distance varies from about 221,000 to 252,000 miles. This 13 per cent variant makes its apparent size, from our perspective, vary by the same amount.
It is this effect that leads to the difference between total and annular eclipses. When the Moon is on the near side of its orbit, it will block out all of the Sun's light resulting in a total eclipse.
This will only be experienced at a specific point on Earth where a shadow cast by the Moon, called an umbra, reaches our planet.
However, if an eclipse occurs while the Moon is on the far side of its elliptical orbit, it appears smaller than the Sun and can't completely cover it. When this happens, the umbra cannot reach Earth and an antumbra shadow is created over the planet's surface.
The track it creates is called the path of annularity. If you are within this path, you will see an annular eclipse where, at its maximum phase, a ring (annulus) of sunlight surrounds the Moon. Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1243436/Solar-Eclipse-January-2010-Sun-turns-blazing-ring-glory.html#ixzz0m0ZRpMrk


SUN = 54 5+4 = 9 = 5+4 54 SUN

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

Page 708

"It was an especially well cured brand, with the best leaf wrapper, named" "Light of Asia"

LIGHT OF ASIA

 

 

THE LIGHT OF ASIA

Sir Edwin Arnold

1909

"THE LIGHT OF ASIA"

OR

THE GREAT RENUNCIATION

(MAHABHINISHKRAMANA)

BEING

THE LIFE AND TEACHING OF GAUTAMA

PRINCE OF INDIA AND FOUNDER OF BUDDHISM"

Page numbers 99/100 omitted

"Book the Fourth"

 

 

TIBET BETWEEN INBETWEEN NEW INBETWEEN BETWEEN

 

 

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

OR

The After-Death Experiences on the Bardo Plane, according to Lama Kazi Dawa-Samdup's English Rendering

Compiled and edited by

W.Y Evans-Wentz 1960

SRI KRISHNA'S REMEMBERING

"MANY LIVES, ARJUNA, YOU AND I HAVE LIVED, I REMEMBER THEM ALL, BUT THOU DOST NOT"

Bhagavad-Gita, iv, 5.

Page 222 (Addenda)

IV. THE GURU AND SHISHYA (OR CHELA) AND INITIATIONS

"Very frequently the Bardo Thodol directs the dying or the deceased to concentrate mentally upon, or to visualize, his tutelary deity or else his spiritual guru, and, at other times, to recollect the teachings conveyed to him by his human guru, more especially at the time of the mystic initiation. Yogis and Tantrics ordinarily comment upon such ritualistic directions by saying that there exist three lines of gurus to whom reverence and worship are to be paid. The first and highest is purely superhuman, called in Sanskrit divyaugha, meaning . heavenly (or "divine ") line'; the second is of the most highly developed human beings, possessed of supernormal / Page 223 / or siddhic powers, and hence called siddhaugha; the third is of ordinary religious teachers and hence called manavaugha, 'human line'.1
Women as well as men, if qualified, may be gurus. The shishya is, as a rule, put on probation for one year before receiving the first initiation. If at the end of that time he proves to be an unworthy receptacle for the higher teachings, he is rejected. Otherwise, he is taken in hand by the guru and carefully prepared for psychical development. A shishya when on probation is merely commanded to perform such and such exercises as are deemed suitable to his or her particular needs. Then, when the probation ends, the shishya is told by the guru the why of the exercises, and the final results which are certain to come from the exercises when successfully carried out. Ordinarily, once a guru is chosen, the shishya has no right to disobey the guru, or to take another guru until it is proven that the first guru can guide the shisya no further. If the shishya develops rapidly, be-cause of good karma, and arrives at a stage of development equal to that of the guru, the guru, if unable to guide the shishya further, will probably himself direct the shishya to a more advanced guru.
For initiating a shishya, the guru must first prepare himself, usually during a course of special ritual exercises occupying several days, whereby the guru, by 'invoking the gift-waves of the divine line of gurus, sets up direct communication with the spiritual plane on which the divine gurus exist. If the human guru be possessed of siddhic powers, this communion is believed to be as real as wireless or telepathic communication between two human beings on the earth-plane.
The actual initiation, which follows, consists of giving to the shishya the secret mantra, or Word of Power, whereby at-one-ment is brought about between the shishya, as the new member of the secret brotherhood, and the Supreme Guru / Page 224 / who stands to all gurus and shishyas under him as the Divine Father. The vital-force, or vital-airs (prana-vayu), serve as a psycho-physical link uniting the human with the divine; and the vital-force, having been centred in the Seventh Psychic-Centre, or Thousand-petalled Lotus, by exercise of the awakened Serpent-Power, through that Centre, as through a wireless receiving station, are received the spiritual gift-waves of the Supreme Guru. Thus is the divine grace received into the human organism and made to glow, as electricity is made to glow when conducted to the vacuum of an electric bulb; and the true initiation is thereby conferred and the shishya Illuminated.
In the occult language of the Indian and Tibetan Mysteries, the Supreme Guru sits enthroned in the peri carp of the Thousand-petalled Lotus. Thither, by the power of the Serpent Power of the awakened Goddess Kundalini, the shishya, guided by the human guru, is led, and bows down at the feet of the Divine Father, and receives the blessing and the bene-diction. The Veil of Maya has been lifted, and the Clear Light shines into the heart of the shishya unobstructedly. As one Lamp is lit by the Flame of another Lamp, so the Divine Power is communicated from the Divine Father, the Supreme Guru, to the newly-born one, the human shishya.
The secret mantra conferred at the initiation, like the Egyptian Word of Power, is the Password necessary for a conscious passing from the embodied state into the disembodied state. If the initiate is sufficiently developed spiritually before the time comes for the giving up of the gross physical body at death, and can at the moment of quitting the earth-plane remember the mystic mantra, or Word of Power, the change will take place without loss of consciousness; nor will the shishya of full development suffer any break in the continuity of consciousness from incarnation to incarnation."

 

 

SHISHYA AY HSIHS

HIS HERS HERS HIS

RISHI IHSIR

 

 

THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD

Page 224

In the occult language of the Indian and Tibetan Mysteries, the Supreme Guru sits enthroned in the peri carp of the Thousand-petalled Lotus. Thither, by the power of the Serpent Power of the awakened Goddess Kundalini, the shishya, guided by the human guru, is led, and bows down at the feet of the Divine Father, and receives the blessing and the benediction. The Veil of Maya has been lifted, and the Clear Light shines into the heart of the shishya unobstructedly. As one Lamp is lit by the Flame of another Lamp, so the Divine Power is communicated from the Divine Father, the Supreme Guru, to the newly-born one, the human shishya.
The secret mantra conferred at the initiation, like the Egyptian Word of Power, is the Password necessary for a conscious passing from the embodied state into the disembodied state. If the initiate is sufficiently developed spiritually before the time comes for the giving up of the gross physical body at death, and can at the moment of quitting the earth-plane remember the mystic mantra, or Word of Power, the change will take place without loss of consciousness; nor will the shishya of full development suffer any break in the continuity of consciousness from incarnation to incarnation."

 

 

SRI KRISHNA'S REMEMBERING

"MANY LIVES, ARJUNA, YOU AND I HAVE LIVED, I REMEMBER THEM ALL, BUT THOU DOST NOT"

Bhagavad-Gita, iv, 5.

 

 

I THAT AM THAT HE AZ IN SHE THAT IS THEE THAT AM I

THAT THAT THAT

ISISIS

MALE AM I AM MALE

FEMALE AM I AM FEMALE

I THAT AM THAT ALL OF EVERYTHING THAT ALL OF EVERYTHING AM I

 

 

KING JAMES BIBLE

Search ResultsMatthew 27:51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in ... And behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake; and the rocks were rent; ...bible.cc/matthew/27-51.htm

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;

 

 

KING JAMES BIBLE

Mark 15:38 The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to ... And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. American King James Version And the veil of the temple was rent in two from the top ... bible.cc/mark/15-38.htm -

And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.

 


Exodus 26:31 "You shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet material and fine twisted linen; it shall be made with cherubim, the work of a skillful workman.

Matthew 27:54 Now the centurion, and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening, became very frightened and said, "Truly this was the Son of God!"

Mark 15:38 And the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.

Luke 23:45 because the sun was obscured; and the veil of the temple was torn in two.

Luke 23:47 Now when the centurion saw what had happened, he began praising God, saying, "Certainly this man was innocent."

Hebrews 9:3 Behind the second veil there was a tabernacle which is called the Holy of Holies, (NASB ©1995)

 

 

I

ME

REAL

REALITY

REVEALED

THE

TEMPLES OF MAYA OF TEMPLES

SEEN IS LORD YAMA LORD YAMA IS SEEN

THE VEIL OF MAYA IS RENT NOW RENT IS THE VEIL OF MAYA

BEHOLD THE THREADER OF DEATH THE THREADER OF DEATH BEHOLD

ALWAYS BY THEE BY THEE ALWAYS WAITING YES NO YES WAITING ALWAYS THEE BY THEE BY ALWAYS

I AM CONTINUITY OF CONSCIOUSNESS ALWAYS AMIAM ALWAYS CONSCIOUSNESS OF CONTINUITY AM I

 

 

MAGIC AND MYSTERY IN TIBET

Alexandra David - Neel 1965

Page197

Mystic Theories and Spiritual Training

"As for the method which mystics call the 'Short Path', the 'Direct Path,'2 it is considered as most hazardous. It is - according to the masters who teach it - as if instead of following the road which goes round a mountain ascending gradually towards its summit, one attempted to reach it in straight line, climbing perpendicular rocks and crossing chasms on a rope. Only first-rate equilibrists, exceptional athletes, completely free from giddiness, can hope to succeed in such a task. Even the fittest may fear sudden exhaustion or dizziness. And there inevitably follows a dreadful fall in which the too presumptuous alpinist breaks his bones.
By this illustration Tibetan mystics mean a spiritual fall leading to the lowest and worst degree of aberration and perversity to the condition of a demon.
I have heard a learned lama maintain that the bold theories regarding complete intellectual freedom and the enfranchisement from all rules whatever, which are expounded by the most advanced adepts of the 'Short Path', are the faint echo of teachings that existed from time immemorial in Central and nonhern Asia.
The lama was convinced that these doctrines agree completely with the Buddhas highest teaching as it was made evident in various passages of his discourses. However, said the lama, the Buddha was well aware that the majority do better to abide by rules devised to avert the baleful effects of their ignorance and guide them along paths where no disasters are to be feared. For that very reason, the all-Wise Master has established rules for the laity and monks of average intelligence.
The same lama entertained serious doubts as to the Aryan origin of the Buddha. He rather believed that his ancestors belonged to the yellow race and was convinced that his expected successor, the future Buddha Maitreya, would appear in northern Asia.
Where did he get these ideas? I have not been able to find out. Discussion is hardly possible with Oriental mystics. When once they have answered: 'I have seen this in my meditations,' little hope is left to the inquirer of obtaining further explanations."
2. "Technically, in mystic parlance, tsi gchig, lus gchig sang rgyais, 'to attain buddha-hood in one life, one body'. That is to say, in the very life in which one has begun ones spiritual training. Tibetans say also lam chung ('the short road')."

Page 210

There exists an immense literature in India devoted to the explanation of the mystic word aum. The latter has exoteric, esoteric and mystic meanings. It may signify the three persons of the Hindu Trinity: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. It may signify the Brahman, the 'One without a second' of the adwaita philosophy. It stands as a symbol of the Inexpressible Absolute, the last word to be uttered in mysticism, after which there follows only silence. It is, according to Shri Sankarcharya,9 'the support of the meditation', or, as declared in the Mundakopanishad's text itself, 'It is the bow by the means of which the individual self attains the universal self.'10
Again, aum is the creative sound whose vibrations build the worlds. When the mystic is capable of hearing all in one the countless voices, cries, songs, and noises of all beings and things that exist and move, it is the unique sound aum which reaches him. That same aum vibrates also in the utmost depth of his inner self. He who can pronounce it with the right tone is able to work wonders and he who knows how to utter it silently attains supreme emancipation.
Tibetans who have received the word Aum from India, together with the mantras with which it is associated, do not appear to have been acquainted with its many meanings among their southern neighbours, nor do they know the very prominent place it occupies in their religions and philosophies.
Aum is repeated by Lamaists along with other Sanskrit formulas, without having a special imponance by itself, while other mystic syllables, such as hum! and especially phat!, are supposed to possess great power and are much used in magic and mystic rites.
So much for the first word of the formula.
Mani padme are Sanskrit terms that mean jewel in the lotus'. Here we come, it seems, to an immediately intelligible meaning, yet the current interpretation does not take any account of that plain meaning.

9 In his commentary on Mundakopanishad.
10. 'The pranava (that is the name of the sacred syllable aum) is the bow, the atman (the individual self) is the arrow and the Brahman (universal self: the Absolute) is said to be the mark,'
Page 211

Common folk believe that the recitations of Aum mani padme hum! will assure them a happy rebirth in Nub Dewa chen, the Western Paradise of the Great Bliss.
The more 'learned' have been told that the six syllables of the formula are connected with the six classes of sentient beings and are related to one of the mystic colours as follows:
Aum is white and connected with gods (lha).
Ma is blue and connected with non-gods (lhamayin).11
Ni is yellow and connected with men (mi).
Pad is green and connected with animals (tudo).
Me is red and connected with non-men (Yidagl2 or other mi-ma- yin13).
Hum is black and connected with dwellers in purgatories.
There are several opinions regarding the effect of the recitation of these six syllables. Popular tradition declares that those who frequently repeat the formula will be reborn in the Western Paradise of the Great Bliss. Others who deem themselves more enlightened declare that the recita-tion of Aum mani padme hum! may liberate one from a rebirth in any of the six realms.
Aum mani padme hum! is used as a support for a special meditation which may, approximately, be described as follows:
One identifies the six kinds of beings with the six syllables which are pictures in their respective colours, as mentioned above. They form a kind of chain without end that circulates through the body, carried on by the breath entering through one nostril and going out through the other.

Page 212

As the concentration of mind becomes more perfect, one sees mentally the length of the chain increasing. Now when they go out with the expiration, the mystic syllables are carried far away, before being absorbed again with the next inspiration. Yet, the chain is not broken, it rather elongates like a rubber strap and always remains in touch with the man who meditates.
Gradually, also, the shape of the Tibetan letters vanishes and those who 'obtain the fruit' of the practice perceive the six syllables as six realms in which arise, move, enjoy, suffer, and pass away the innumer-able beings, belonging to the six species.
And now it remains for the meditator to realize that the six realms (the whole phenomenal world) are subjective: a mere creation of the mind which images them and into which they sink.
Advanced mystics reach, by the way of this practice, a trance in which the latters of the formula, as well as the beings and their activity, all merge into That which for lack of a better term, Mahayanist Buddhists have called 'Emptiness.'
Then, having realized the 'Void,' they become emancipated from the illusion of the world and, as a consequence, liberated from rebirths which are but the fruit of that creative delusion.
Another of the many interpretations of Aum mani padme hum! ignores the division in six syllables and takes the formula according to its mean- ing: 'a jewel in the lotus.' These words are considered as symbolic.
The simplest interpretation is: In the lotus (which is the world) exists the precious jewel of Buddha's teaching.
Another explanation takes the lotus as the mind. In the depth of it, by introspective meditation, one is able to find the jewel of knowledge. truth, reality, liberation, nirvana, these various terms being different denominations of one same thing.
Now we come to a meaning related to cenain doctrines of the Mahayanist Buddhists.
According to them nirvana, the supreme salvation, is not separated from samsara, the phenomenal world, but the mystic finds the first in the heart of the second, just as the 'jewel' may be found in the 'lotus.' Nirvana, the 'jewel' exists when enlightenment exists. Samsara, the 'lotus,' exists when delusion exists, which veils nirvana, just as the many petals of the 'lotus' conceal the 1ewel' nestling among them.

Page 213

Hum! at the end of the formula, is a mystic expression of wrath used in coercing fierce deities and subduing demons. How has it become affixed to the 'jewel in the lotus' and the Indian Aum? - This again is explained in various ways.
Hum! is a kind of mystic war cry; uttering it, is challenging an enemy. Who is the enemy? Each one imagines him in his own way: either as powerful fiends, or as the trinity of bad propensities that bind us to the round of rebirth, namely lust, hatred and stupidity. More subtle thinkers see him as the 'I.' Hum! is also said to mean the mind devoid of objective content, etc., etc.
Another syllable is added to conclude the repetition of Aum mani padme hum! one hundred and eight times on the beads of a rosary. It is the syllable hri! Some understand it as signifying an inner reality hidden under the appearances, the basic essence of things.
Beside aum mani padme hum hri! other formulas are also repeated as Aum vajra sattva! That is to say, 'Aum most excellent (diamond) being.' It is understood that the excellent One meant is the Buddha. The followers of the Red hat sects often repeat: Aum vajra guru padma siddhi hum! as praise of their founder Padmasambhava. These words mean 'Aum, most excellent powerful guru Padma, miracle worker, hum!'
Amongst longer formulas one of the most popular is that called kyabdo.14 It is Tibetan without admixture of Sanskrit and its significance is plain, yet far from crude. The text runs as follows:

'I take refuge in all holy refuges. Ye fathers and mothers [ancestors] who are wandering in the round of rebirths under the shapes of the six kinds of sentient beings. In order to attain Bud-dhahood, the state devoid of fear and sorrow, let your thoughts be directed towards enlightenment.' "

 

 

AUM MANI PADME HUM

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT TIMES

 

 

AUM ATUM AUM

QUANTUM

 

153 x 12 ISISIS 1836 ISISIS 12 x 153

 

 

JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 314

THE DREAMER

"THE COAT OF MANY COLOURS"

 

 

THE STARGATE CONSPIRACY

Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince

1

999

Page 328

Apocalypse now

"The new belief system wears a coat of many colours"

 

 

A COAT OF MANY COLOURS

Herbert Read 1945

Page 57

"The aim of the superrealists as Max Ernst has recently declared, is not merely to gain access to the unconscious and to paint its contents in a descriptive or realistic way: nor is it even to take various elements from the unconscious and with them construct a separate world of fancy; it is then their aim to break down the barriers both physical and psychical, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the inner and the outer world, and to create a superreality in which real and unreal, meditation and non, conscious and unconscious, meet and mingle and dominate the whole of life. In Bosch's case, a quite similar intention was inspired by medieval theology, and a very literal belief in the reality of the Life Beyond. To a man of his intense powers of visualization, the present life and life to come, Paradise and Hell and the World, were equally real and interpenetrating; they combined, that to say, to form a superreality that was the only reality with which an artist could be concerned"

 

 

THE LAMENT OF THE SISTERS

(Isis and Nepthys over the dead Osiris)

"Beautiful Youth, come to thy exalted house we see thee not.

"Hail, Beautiful Boy, come to thy house, draw nigh after thy separation from us.
"Hail, Beautiful Youth, Pilot of Time, who groweth except at this hour.i
"Holy image of his Father, mysterious essence proceeding from Tem.
"The Lord I How much more wonderful is he than his Father,ii the first-born son of the womb of his Mother.
"Come back to us in thy actual form; we will embrace thee. Depart not from us, thou Beautiful Face, dearly beloved one, the Image of Tem, Master of Love.iii
"Come thou in peace, our Lord, we would see thee.
"Great Mighty One among the Gods, the road which thou travellest cannot be described.iv
"The Babe, the Child at morn and at eve,v except when thou encirclest the heavens and the earth with thy bodily form. vi
"Come, thou Babe, growing young when setting,v our Lord, we would see thee.
"Come in peace, Great Babe of His Father, thou art established in thy house.
"Whilst thou travellest thou art hymned by us,vii and life springeth up for us out of thy nothingness. O our Lord, come in peace, let us see thee.
"Hail, Beautiful Boy, come to thy exalted house; let thy back be to thy house. The Gods are upon their thrones. Hail ! Come in peace, King.
"Babe ! How lovely it is to see thee! Come, come to us, 0 Great One, glorify our love.
"O ye gods who are in Heaven.
O ye gods who are in Earth.
O ye gods who are in the Tuat.
O ye gods who are in the Abyss.
0 ye gods who are in the service of the Deep.viii
We follow the Lord, the Lord of Love!"

The Sisters.
"Isis and Nepthys clearly represent the great duality, positive and negative, male and female, life and death, who are made one by the sovereign force of love"

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

FOREWORD

"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling- though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody- this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past.
That should be no drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by. With this story, moreover, it stands as it does to-day with human beings, not least among them writers of tales: it is far older than its years; its age may not be measured by length of days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned by the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do with the pas-sage of time - in which statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of that riddling element.
 But we would not wilfully obscure a plain matter. The exag-gerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place - or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place - in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more im-mediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again.

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

FOREWORD

"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, ..."

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail-for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no, nor seven months either. Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!
And now we begin"

 

 

I ME I SEE YOU SEE I ME I

I ME I

C U C

 

 

THIS IS THE SCENE OF THE SEEN UNSEEN THE UNSEEN SEEN OF THE SCENE UNSEEN

 

 

BY THE OCEAN OF TIME

CHAPTER SEVEN

Page 541

"CAN one tell - that is to say, narrate - time, time itself', as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: "Time passed, It ran on, the time. flowed on-ward" and so forth - no one in his senses could consider that a narrative. It would be as though one .held a single note or chord fora whole hour, and called it music. For narration resembles music in this, that it fills up the time. It " fills it in " and " breaks it up." so that there's something to it," " something going on" - to quote, with due and mouriiful piety, those casual phrases of our departed Joachim, all echo of which so long ago died away. So long ago, indeed, that we wonder if the reader is clear how long ago it was. For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are in extricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration - like music - even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.
So much is clear. But it is just as clear that we have also a dif-ference to deal with. For the time element in music is single. Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly' enhancing and ennobling what it fills. But a narrative must have two kinds of time: first, its own, like music, actual time, condi- tioning its presentation and course; and second, the time of its con-tent, which is relative, so extremely relative that the imaginary time of the narrative can either coincide nearly or completely with the actual, or musical, time, or can be a world away. A piece of music called a "Five-minute Waltz "lasts five minutes, and this is / Page 542 / its sole relation to the time element. But a narrative which con-cerned itself with the events of five minutes, might, by extraor-dinary conscientiousness in the telling, take up a thousand times five minutes, and even then seem very short, though long in relation to its imaginary time. On the other hand, the contentual time of a story can shrink its actual time out of all measure. We put it in this way on purpose, in order to suggest another element, an illusory, even, to speak plainly, a morbid element, which is quite definitely a factor in the situation. I am speaking of cases where the story practises a hermetical magic, a temporal distortion of perspective reminding one of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life. We have records of opium dreams in which the dreamer, during a brief narcotic sleep, had experiences stretching over a period or ten, thirty, sixty years, or even passing the extreme limit of man's temporal capacity for experience: dreams whose contentual time was enormously greater than their actual or mu-sical time, and in which there obtained an incredible foreshortening of events; the images pressing one upon another with such rapidity that it was as though "somethmg had been taken away, like the - spring from a broken watch" from the brain of the sleeper. Such is the descriftion of a hashish eater.
Thus, or in some such way as in these sinister dreams, can the narrative go to work with time; in some such way can time be dealt with in a tale. And if this be so, then it is clear that time, while- the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. There-fore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea as it just now seemed. We freely admit that, in bring-ing up the question as to whether the time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view.in the present work. And if we touched upon the. further question, whether our readers were clear how .much time had passed since the upnght Joachim, deceased in the mterval, had in-troduced into the conversation the above-quoted phrases about music and time - remarks indicating a certain alchemlstical height-ning of his nature, which, in its goodness and simpliciry, was, of its own unaided power, incapable of any such ideas - we should not have been dismayed to hear that they were not clear. We might even have been gratified, on the plain ground that a thorough-go-ing sympathy with the experiences of our hero is precisely what :" we wish to arouse, and he, Hans Castorp, was himself not clear upon the point in question, no, nor had been for a very long time - a fact that has conditioned his romantic adventures up here, to an / Page 543 / extent which has made of them, in more than one sense, a "time-romance."
How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he "had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long - dismissing Joachim from our calculations - Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking him- self. If they had been put him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known - a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Set-tembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age.
All which may sound preposterous; yet there are conditions under which nothing could keep us from losing account of the passage of time, losing account -even of our own age; lacking, as we do, any trace of an inner time-organ, and being absolutely in- capable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by our-selves, without any outward fixed pomts as guides. There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering be-tween hope and fear, to be some three days, It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made the time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would ap-pear, then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under-rather than over-estimate time.
No doubt Hans Castorp, were he wishful to do so, could with-out a great trouble have reckoned himself into certainty; just as the reader can, in case all this vagueness and involvedness are re-pugnant to his healthy sense. Perhaps our hero himself was not quite comfortable either; though he refused to give himself any trouble to wrestle clear of vagueness and involution and arrive at certainty of how much time had gone over his head since he came up here. His scruple was of the conscience - yet surely it is a want
of conscientiousness most flagrant of all not to pay heed to the time.
We do not know whether we may count it in his favour that /Page 544 / circumstances advantaged his lack of inclination, or perhaps we ought to say his disinclination. When Frau Chauchat came back - under circumstances very different from those Hans Castorp had imagined, but of that in its place - when she came back, it was the Advent season again, and the shortest day of the year; the begin-ning; of winter, astronomically speaking, was at hand. Apart. from arbitrary time-divisions, and with reference to the quantity of snow and cold, it had been winter for God knows how long, in-terrupted, as always all too briefly, by burning hot summer days, with a sky of an exaggerated depth of blueness, well-nigh shading into black; real summer days, such as one often had even in the winter, aside from the snow - and the snow one might also have in the summer! This confusion in the seasons, how often had Hans Castorp discussed it with the departed Joachim! It robbed the year of its articulation, made it tediously brief, or briefly tedious,as one chose to put it; and confirmed another of Joachim's disgusted utter-ances, to the effect that there was no time up here to speak of, either long or short. The great confusion played havoc, moreover, with emotional conceptions, or states of consciousness like "still " and "again "; and this was one of the very most gruesome, bewil-dering, uncanny features of the case. Hans Castorp, on his first day up here, had discovered in himself a hankering to dabble in that uncanny, during the five mighty meals in the gaily stenciled dining- room; when a first faint giddiness, as yet quite blameless, had made itself felt.
Since then, however, the deception upon his senses and his mind had assumed much larger proportions. Time, however weakened the subjective perception of it has become, has objective reality in that it brings things to pass. It is a question for professional think- ers - Hans Castorp, in his youthful arrogance, nad one time been led to consider it - whether the hermetically sealed conserve upon its shelf is outside of time. We know that time does its work, even upon Seven-Sleepers. A physician cites a case of a twelve-year- old-girl, who felf asleep and slept thirteen years; assuredly she did not remain thereby a twelve-year-old girl; but bloomed into ripe womanhood while she slept. How could it be otherwise? The dead man - is dead; he has closed his eyes on time. He has plenty of time, or personally speaking, he is timeless. Which does not prevent his hair and nails from growing, or, all in all- but no, we shall not repeat those free-and-easy expressions used once by Joachim, to which Hans Castorp, newly arrived from the flat-land, had taken exception. Hans Castorp's hair and nails grew too, grew rather fast. He sat very often in the barber's chair m the main street of the / Page 545 / Dorf, wrapped in a white sheet; and the barber, chatting obsequi-ously the while, deftly performed upon the fringes of his hair, growing too long behind his ears. First time; then the barber, per-formed their office upon our hero. When he sat there, or when he stood at the door of his loggia and pared his nails and groomed them, with the accessories from his aainty velvet case, he would suddenly be over-powered by a mixture of terror and eager joy that made him fairly giddy. And this giddiness was in both senses of the word: rendering our hero not only dazed and dizzy, but flighty and light-headed, incapable of distinguishing between "now" and "then, " and prone to mingle these together in a time-less eternity.
As we have repeatedly .said, we wish to make him out neither better nor worse than he was; accordingly we must report that he often tried to atone for his reprehensible indulgence in attacks of mysticism, by virtuously and painstakingly stnving to counteract them. He would sit with his watch open in his hand, his thin gold watch with the engraved. monogram on the lid, looking at the porcelain face with the double row of black and red Arabic fig-ures running round it, the two fine and delicately curved gold hands moving in and out over it, and the little second-hand taking its busy ticking course round its own small circle. Hans Castorp, watching the second-hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, Unheeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came on to again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should it not pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the intervening unmarked strokes showed that the figures and divisons on its path were.simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on. - Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashutte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.
How make plain to the sober intelligence of the flat-land the changes that took place in the inner economy of our young adven-turer? The dizzying problem of identities grew grander in its scale.
If to-day's now - even with decent goodwill-was not easy to distinguish from yesterday's, the day before's or the day before
that's, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused. with the now which: had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be mingled and rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with / Page 546 / it into the always? However one might still differentiate between the ordinary states of consciousness which we attached to the words .. still," .. again," .. next," there was always the temptation to extend the sigificance of such descriptive words as "to-morrow,"yesterday," by which "to-day" holds at bay" the past " and" the future." It would not be hard to imagine the existence of creatures, perhaps upon smaller planets than ours, practis-ing a miniature time-economy, in whose brief span the brisk trip-ping gait of our second-hand would possess the tenacious spatial economy of our hand that marks the hours. And, contrariwise, one can conceive of a world so spacious that its time system too has a majestic stride, and the distinctions between .. still," ., in a little while," " yesterday," .. to-morrow,'? are, in its economy, possessed of hugely extended significance. That, we say, would be not only conceivable, but, viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativity, and in the light of an already-quoted proverb, might be considered legiti- mate, sound, even estimable. Yet what shall one say of a son of earth, and of our time to boot, for whom a day, a week, a month, a semester, ought to play such an important role, and bring so many changes, so much progress in its !:rain, who one day falls into the vicious habit -,- or perhaps we should say, yields sometimes to the desire - to say" yesterday" when he means a year ago, and .. next year " when he means to-morrow? Certainly we must deem him lost and undone, and the object of our just concern.
There is a state, in our human life, there are certain scenic sur-roundings - if one may use that adjective to describe the surround-ings we have in mind - within which such a confusion and obliteration of distances in time and space is in a measure justified, and temporary submersion in them, say for the term of a holiday, not reprehensible. Hans Castorp, for his part, could never without the greatest longing think of a stroll along the ocean's edge. We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader's recol-lections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk - never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished. O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale; we turn toward thee our thoughts, our love, loud and expressly we call on thee, that thou mayst be present in the tale we spin, as in secret thou ever wast and shalt be! - A sing-ing solitude, spanned by a sky of palest grey; full of stinging damp that leaves a salty tang upon the lips. - We walk along the springy floor, strewn with seaweed and tiny mussel-shells. Our ears are wrapped about by the great mild, ample wind, that comes / Page 547 / sweeping untrammelled blandly through space, and gently blunts our senses. We wander - wander - watching the tongues of foam lick upward toward our feet and sink back again. The surf is seething; wave after wave, with high, hollow sound, rears up, re-bounds, and runs with a silken rustle out over the flat strand: here one, there one, and more beyond, out on the bar. The dull; perva-sive, sonorous roar loses our ears against all the sounds of the world. O deep content, O wilful bliss of sheer forgetfulness! Let us shut our eyes, safe in eternity! No - for there in the flaming grey- green waste that stretches Wlth uncanny foreshortenIng to lose it-self in the horizon,. look, there is a sail. There? Where is there? How far, how near? You cannot tell. Dizzyingly it escapes your measurement. In order to know how far that ship is from the shore, you would need to know how much room it occupies, as a body in space.1s it large and far off, or is it small and near? Your eye grows dim with uncertainty, for in yourself you have no sense-organ to help. you judge of time or space. - We Walk, walk. How long, how far? Who knows? Nothing is changed by our pacing, there is the same as here, once on a time the same as now, or then; time is drowning in the measureless monotony of space, motion from point-to point is no motion more, where uniformity rules; and where motion is no more motion, time is no longer time.
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages would have it that time is an illusion; that its flow in sequence and causality is only the result of
a sensory device, and the real existence of things in an abiding pres-ent. Was he walking by the sea, the philosopher to whom this thought first came, walking by the sea, with the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We must repeat that, as for us, we have been speaking only of the lawful licence of a holiday, of fantasies born of leisure, of which the well-conducted mind wearies as quickly as a vigorous man does of lying in the warm sand. To call into question our human means and powers of perception, to ques-tion their validity, would be absurd; dishonourable, arbitrary, if it were done in any other spirit than to set bounds to reason, which
she may not overstep without incurring the reproach of neglecting her own task. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settembrini, who with pedagogic dogmatism characterized metaphysics as the " evil principle," to the young man in whose fate we are in- terested, and whom he had once subtly called "life's delicate child." We shall best honour the memory of one departed, who was dear to us, if we say plainly that the meaning, the end and aim of the critical principle can and may be but one thing: the thought
of duty, the law of life. Yes, law-giving wisdom, in marking off the / Page548 / limits of reason, planted precisely at those limits the banner of life, and proclaimed it man's soldierly duty to serve under that banner. May we set it down on the credit side of Hans Castorp's account, that he had been strengthened in his vicious time-economy, his baleful traffic with eternity, by seeing that all his cousin's zeal, called doggedness by a certain melancholy blusterer, had but the more surely brought him to a fatal end?"

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

MOUNTING MISGIVINGS

Page 147 Quoted in full

"other he mentally summoned up various people, the thought of whom might serve him as some sort of mental support.
 There was the good, the upright Joachim, firm as a rock-yet whose eyes in these past months had come to hold such a tragic Shadow, and who had never used to shrug his shoulders, as he did so often now. Joachim, with the "Blue Peter" in his pocket, as Frau Stohr called the receptacle. When Hans Castorp thought of her hard, crabbed face it made him shiver. Yes, there was Joa-chim - who kept constandy at Hofrat Behrens to let him get away and go down to the longed-for service in the " plain "- the " flat-land," as the healthy, normal world was called up here, with a faint yet perceptible nuance of contempt. Joachim served the cure single-mindedly, to the end that he might arrive sooner at his goal and save some of the time which "those up here " so wantonly flung away; served it unquestioningly for the sake of speedy re-covery - but also, Hans Castorp detected, for the sake of the cure'
itself, which, after all, was a service, like another; and was not duty duty, wherever performed? Joachim invatiably went upstairs after only a quarter-hour in the drawing-rooms; and this military precision of his was a crop to the civilian laxity of his cousin, who would otherwise be likely to loiter unprofitably below, with his eye on the company in the small salon. But Hans Castorp was con-vinced there was another and private reason why Joachim with-drew so early; he had known it since the time he saw his cousin's face take on the mottleled pallor, and his mouth assume the pathetic twist. He perfectly understood. For Marusja was almost always there in the evening -laughter-loving Marusja, with the little ruby on her charming hand, the handkerchief with the orange scent, and the swelling bosom, tainted within - Hans Castorp com-prehended that it. was her presence which drove Joachim away, precisely because it so strongly, so fearfully drew him toward her.
Was Joachim too "immured " - and even worse off than him-self, in that, he had five times a day to sit at the same table with Marusja and her orange-scented handkerchief? However that might be, it was clear that Joachim was preoccupied with his own troubles; the thought of him could afford his cousin no mental support. That he took refuge in daily flight was a credit to him; but that he had to flee was anything but reassuring to Hans Ca-storp, who even began to feel that Joachim's good example of faithful service of the cure and the initiation which he owed to his cousin's experience might have also their bad side.
Hans Castorp had not been up here three weeks. But it seemed longer; and the daily routine which Joachim so piously observed"

 

 

SEVEN LETTERED NAMES

 

 

 

THE SCULPTURE OF VIBRATIONS 1971

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan

1991

THE HEROIC ROUND'

Page 144

THE CROSS OF MATTER IN THE CIRCLE OF SPIRIT

"The horoscope is an ancient, archetypal image - its circle of spirit and cross of matter is an image common to all civilizations. The quartered circle is a symbol that emerges spontaneously from the collective psyche in all cultures and continues to be reflected in modern times in dreams, art and architecture, religious motifs and psychology. The representation of the circle and the square appears to be a source of conflict, but the union of opposites and the integration of the parts into the whole has always been central to philosophical and spiritual quests. When we view the horoscope as an integral unity of opposites, whether that be through ele­ments, qualities, points, houses, quadrants, planets or geomet.ric shapes, we begin to see its potential as a sacred image' for psychological development.
In the alchemical opus the quadratura circuli was one of the / Page 145 / central symbols and this aspect, of the work produced the'lapis. 'Out of man and woman make a round circle and extract the quadrangle from "this and from the quadrangle~the triangle. Make a round circle and you will have the philosophers' stone.'l2 The circle itself is a symbol for psychic wholeness' and the work of individuation, that of becoming whole,rhe opus circulatorium, requires assimilation of all zodiacal stages in their proper order; But this all-important ,quartering of the circle was the secret to manifestation of mind, body and soul.
One way of viewing the birthchart is through the timeless zone of myth and archetype, in which case we see ourselves reflected in all things and all things reflected jn us. In Platonic terms there exist perfect forms in a sacred dimension, and,from these perfect forms tangible forms are created in our dimension of existence. As a map the horoscope employs both specific and real points of'
reference as well as esoteric symbols. Being both circular and quartered, the horoscope represents not only wholeness, perfection and the eternal return but also compartments, imperfections and finiteness. Each point along the arc of the circle represents a
simultaneous point of departure and a point of arrival. The world itself is a sphere and the depiction of the circle represents the,
world soul, the anima mundi, while the horoscopic circle, the zodiac, symbolizes the psyche and the, greater Self of the individual

 

5
ANIMA
-
-
-
5
MUNDI
-
-
-
-
A+N
15
6
6
-
I
9
9
9
-
M+A+M
27
9
9
-
U+N+D
39
12
3
-
I
9
9
9
10
ANIMA MUNDI
99
45
36
1+0
-
9+9
4+5
3+6
1
ANIMA MUNDI
18
9
9
=
=
1+8
-
-
1
ANIMA MUNDI
9
9
9

 

"The angles of the horoscope intersect the eternal round of the zodiac, pointing the way and dividing the path into four cardinal points. The hero stands at the middle of this quartered circle of perfection. At the very centre of this magical circle with its tangible points is the soul of the worldly traveller, the journeyer through life. Fromcwhere does he derive direction? From within and from.
without.
The quaternity;'or the four cardinal points, is directional, and finite, associated with the world of form. It marks off a sacred space within which the individual develops. The horoscope" is a mandala, the Sanskrit word for circle and, the centre of the horoscopic mandala is the person, the radiating house cusps being the extension of the individual from his innermost to his outermost.

Page 146

"Specifically;rhe angles of the horoscope are the primary extensions of the person in his or her outreach and orientation to the environ­ment. Therefore the angles, the cross, within the circle are the conscious realization and the outer manifestation of the inner Se:lf and represent incarnation.
To be incarnate is to be in the flesh, and incarnation requires differentiation and - individuation, which is where the ego becomes an all-important factor. A healthy ego is necessary to cope with the process of individuation; it works to contain the Self while undergoing any personal transformation. By its very existence the cross of matter demands a relationship with the circle of spirit. A spontaneous inundation of archetypal contents from the unconscious into the conscious mind can destroy the integrity of an individual in his attempt to reconcile the im­mediate and incarnate with the timeless and archetypal. The angles of the horoscope are the constant reminder of the participation of the ego in the work of evolving into a whole person.

THE SUN, THE CROSS OF MATTER,
THE HERO AND THE EGO

.
Hero myths emerged from the collective unconscious after the fall of the mairiarchal earth-goddess religions. The hero was born from the womb of the great mother and is identified as symbolic of the birth of a collective ego.
The transition from a matrilineal membership to a patriarchal -society was long and mysterious but effectively transferred,spiri­tual and religious power from a chthonic (earth-based) and lunar­ goddess consciousness to a celestial (sky-dominated) solar-god consciousness. The movement out, up and away from the earth continues to this day. Mircea Eliade says:
The moon confers a religious valorization on cosmic becoming and reconciles man to death. The sun, on the contrary, reveals a different mode of existence. The sun does / Page 147 / not share in becoming; although always in motion, the sun remains unchangeable; its form is always the same. Solar hierophanies give expression to the religious values of - autonomy and power, of sovereignty, of intelligence.13
The solarization of consciousness, the birth of the collective ego and the awareness of singularity, have gradually moved us. from concentration on isolated semi-divine hero figures of a mythical source to our current obsession with the development of per­sonality and personal ego. Individuation, a concept that hopes to unite the ego with the greater Self - connecting both solar and lunar functions - demands that the individual be aware of his 'I am-ness', but that the I-ego be a vehicle for the expression of the greater Self.
The ego is born when a conscious separation of the observer from the observed occurs. An infant only begins to develop an ego when it recognizes its body as a separate entity from its environment, its mother in particular. A culture separated from the earth mother develops an ego when it further differentiates itself as an entity separate from other cultures. An individual continues to develop an ego as he increases his differentiation of self from others. The distinction of self from others is solar consciousness asserting itself over lunar consciousness, bound by Saturn.
That the Moon has become connected to the unconscious and the Sun to the conscious is no mystery. The Sun is the archety­pal hero, rising in the east to dominate the day (consciousness) and setting in the west to battle dragons or monsters by night. The Sun brings to consciousness the light of reason and sharply distinguished clarity, differentiation and logic. This is in direct contrast to the lunar qualities of reflection, integration and cyclic evolution: seeding, gestating, giving birth and dying, only to begin again. Our lunar connections are no less powerful, but they remain subterranean. Today it is our solar development that is emphasized, particularly in modern astrology. Time, the solar measurement upon which the horoscope is based, in con­nection with Place, singles out and identifies the modern hero / Page 148 / with a map of directions.As mentioned, the angles are determined by solar movement and are thus the cardinal points of heroic orientation."

 

4
MIND
40
22
4
4
BODY
46
19
1
4
SOUL
67
13
4
12
-
153
54
9
1+2
  
1+5+3
5+4
-
3
-
9
9
9

 

 

-
MIND BODY SOUL
-
-
-
-
M
13
4
4
-
I
9
9
9
-
N+D
18
9
9
-
B
2
2
2
-
O+D+Y+S
63
18
9
-
O+U
36
9
9
-
L
12
3
3
12
MIND BODY SOUL
153
54
45
1+2
=
1+5+3
5+4
4+5
3
MIND BODY SOUL
9
9
9

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan

1991

THE HEROIC ROUND'

Page 148
"The transit of. the Sun once around the birthchart each year emphasizes the angles and marks a personal seasonal transition. The solar revolution restates the original premise in which the psyche agreed to participate at the time of birth. Because the angles are the cross upon which hangs our ego development, the planet Saturn, when it transits those points challenges the old established form of the ego to find new avenues of expression. Saturn symbolism is synonymous with the images of the cross of the angles in that they both represent the intersection of the imaginal realm with the temporal realm.
The images of Saturn correspond to the images of the cross in that they both represent limits, boundaries, meeting-places, defini­tion, points of incarnation and manifestation. Saturn is the meeting-place of the personal and transpersonal planets, the symbol of embodiment and therefore a point. of reckoning. The angles, too, are points of reckoning, and Saturn's transit in relationship to the angles brings to consciousness the knowledge that we must continually reorient ourselves according to the demands of the world.
In modern times both men and women identify themselves with their egos, resulting. in each individual's need to connect to the world through ego development. The heroism required on the heroic journey involves the development and evolution of the ego in relation to environmental and internal conditions. It seems necessary in our world to have.this fact of the Self made manifest in.the psyche, and evidence suggests that the personal ego develops in accord with changing times and cultural evolution.
As long as the need exists for ego development and heroic differentiation.from the ouroboric one-ness, Saturn will continue to act as the symbolic castrator and the individual will continue to participate in his own ego development as Saturn transits the angles. Saturn gives shape and form to the ego and establishes the manner in which it participates in the whole. As a planet that embodies, separates and differentiates, it is the vehicle by which / Page 149 / we express our ambitions and ego needs; how we effect these ends is completely individual.
The work of the ego in its attempt to battle the shadow or primitive force in the psyche is parallel to hero myths in which the hero embarks on an adventure into the unknown, descends into a mysterious place, overcomes primitive or dangerous forces, then returns with a boon or civilizing agent. In this way the transit of Saturn over the angles (ego embodiment) forces the ego to confront the different stages of personal development in order to effect the civilization process of the consciousness. Saturn is the catalyst for ego development, and it is for the sake of the civilization of both, culture and the individual that the ego fights.
The heroic journey begins at the MC in Saturn's natural house, the tenth, which represents the apex of the solar journey. Like the alchemical opus which begins with the prima materia (lead/ Saturn), the work of the life journey begins with Saturn. The zodiac wheel is called the opus circulatorium, with its natural progression from the Ram (Aries) to the Fishes (Pisces), represent­ing the snake devouring itself and renewing itself eternally.
There is a conflict of direction between that which is happening in actual motion and that which appears to be happening as we view it from earth. The appearance of the Sun ascending in the east, and all the heavens rising is due to the actual motion of the earth turning ('down') to meet the heavens ('rising'). Once the horoscope is fixed, apprehending the heavens in time and space, the transits begin to appear to move in zodiacal order from the west to the east, down and across the ascendant. This is an apparent motion and not one which occurs naturally. Therefore, the transits appear to be an opus contra naturam, about which Johannes Fabricius says:
Since it is repeatedly emphasized that the alchemical work is an opus contra naturam, that is, a way not of small but rather supreme resistance, the work of the alchemical rockbreakers emerges as a powerful symbol for the removal of repression by an ego working its way back into the depths of the unconscious.14 .

What better description of Saturn can be found as it moves from its sovereign place in its natural home at the M C to cross the ascendant, rendering the ego virtually useless in the following stage? Again, the meeting of opposites brings the tension of development.

THE ASCENDANT - DESCENDANT AXIS: THE HORIZON OF AWARENESS

It is at this meeting-place of heaven and earth that the individual is born. The ascendant is descriptive of the quality of the time of birth based on the exact location and time of day. Egyptian myth­ology shows an interesting reversal of our Western concept: the birth of all original beings was the result of the sky goddess, Nut, and the earth god, Geb.15 Hathor was produced on the horizon and all subsequent life was formed by their union. In Greek myth we have the sky god, Ouranos, mating with the earth goddess, Gaia, to produce a series of creatures including the anthro­pomorphic-Titans, last born of which was Kronos/Saturn.
Our own experience of the horizon is both practical and metaphysical. We speak of 'broadening our horizons' and other such metaphors for expansion. The horizon in the horoscope is symbolic of our experience of orientation towards the east, always associated with birth, and towards the ,west, associated with termination. Early man, uncertain as to what happened to the Sun when it set, established rituals around sunrise and sunset. By beating drums, chanting or propitiating the Sun god, he assured himself of participation in the natural world, something that seems primitive to us today. When the Sun finally rose, the ancients assured themselves that had they not urged it on, it may well not have risen. With the Sun having risen, all was well and the daily activities could carry on. Imagine the concern that would arise in the mind of an archaic participator in nature when the Sun approached the western horizon. Yet again another journey would occur through the dark, the unknown, the mysterious, possibly to battles with dragons or other forces. In the horoscope the I C is / Page 151 / this point of ultimate darkness and it is there that the struggle for rebirth takes place. The I C is the turning-point in the heroic journey where one burns off one's mortality.
It is possible to draw analogies between day and night and conscious and unconscious. The upper (diurnal) hemisphere of the horoscope is designated as the conscious, and the lower (nocturnal) hemisphere the unconscious. However, what actually happens at the demarcation? There is no abrupt, noticeable change from consciousness to unconsciousness, though there is one in actuality. This boundary is fuzzy. The process of going to sleep or waking is a good illustration for the horizontal experience. Rather than just lying down and snapping at once into unconsciousness one reviews the events of the day, of one's life possibly, and prepares for a
descent into the unconscious. Some people find they need little-rituals to assist them to sleep, in particular those with overactive or controlling minds. Regardless of the degree of tiredness there is always resistance to sleep, for sleep is death's brother. However, when a certain indefinable point is reached, one welcomes sleep and folds into it. The conscious mind has had ascendancy for a period of time, and wishes to retain it. The process of waking is precisely the opposite: the unconscious mind has had 'control' and is equally unwilling to relinquish it. This threshold struggle is not unlike the normal, everyday process of flow and resistance to anything new in our experience.
When a planet transits the ascendant, metaphorically speaking it brings its daylight, or conscious experience, down into the unconscious for further processing. When that planet is Saturn the transit lasts for about a year, longer if it retrogresses back and forth over the degree rising. The twelfth house is the house ,of the 'collective unconscious'; it is the house where the psyche is most deeply connected to symbolic images and archetypes. The descent of Saturn over the ascendant is preceded by its transit through the twelfth house which results in a slow disintegration of the ego's power over the persona and a battle with the shadow. A death is implied and a struggle ensues. Frequently, the person experiencing this dissolution is quite unaware of the process until Saturn actually transits the ascendant. As a result, Saturn over the / Page 152 / ascendant can be experienced as an extremely dramatic shift from 'who you used to be' to 'who you will be', but with a rather traumatic period of uncertainty while the no longer useful persona is sloughed off.
The liminality, the 'thresholding', that is experienced during this time can be a shock to someone who has strongly identified with, or has been identified with, a particular and definite image. We are frequently carried along by our persona, unaware that it might be in the process of becoming outmoded by developments in the unconscious. Understanding this necessary loss of personal identification greatly reduces stress and allows a more conscious, if ,not a more rapid, transition into the new self-image. The threshold struggle is all about coming to terms with unconscious material in the conscious mind and vice versa. This situation is not without its difficulties, as Von Franz suggests:

This threshold difficulty has also to do with the fact that our consciousness ~is structured so as to represent~. things in a spatial and temporal order that does not exist ,for contents when they appear in the unconscious, wherec,they seem to'be present simultaneously.16

Saturn brings'to the ascendant all the manifest experiences and cohtrol issues that have dominated the last fourteen-year ex­traverted cycle during which the individual learned how to be present and accountable in the conscious world of accomplish­ments, deeds and collective goals. The meeting-place at the horizon symbolizes the threshold of the conscious and the unconscious, but it also encompasses the realms of self and others. The movement to the lower hemisphere after this fourteen-year cycle is symbolic of a descent into oneself, whereas the movement to the upper hemisphere is symbolicof a rise to meet the challenge of others. Saturn moving to the upper hemisphere brings with it the experiences of the introverted stage of the journey, which primarily involved feelings, self-development, inner motivation and personal goals. The fourteen-year cycle of Saturn transiting the lower half of the horoscope focused oh internal development and self­ / Page153 / discovery with all its attendant challenges. As it transits. the
descendant into the seventh house the requirement. is to examine oneself in relation to others in the context either of a specific
relationship or all relationships in general.
The sixth house poses its own disciplines and, hence, .its own addictions. .Its opposite, the twelfth, has been defined as the house .of the psyche, and conversely the sixth is the house of soma, or body. That which exists in the psyche constellates in the soma and the. experiences of the soma are, in turn, registered in the psyche. The entire psychosomatic experience is a sixth-house-twelfth­house affair. When Saturn moves into the seventh house it brings with it.old patterns, body memories and automatic responses that were finally consolidated in the earthy sixth house. Frequently these responses are unconscious and reflexive, having become autonomous, and as a result have become outmoded, often to the surprise of the person experiencing. them. It is not uncommon for the Saturn descendant transit to produce terrific pressure on a relationship because for a long period of time preceding this transit very little attention (in an actively conscious manner) has been paid to it. Suddenly one is expected to 'wake up' and face reality, often alerted by an experience within a close relationship.

THE MC-IC AXIS:
T'HE MERIDIAN OF EXPERIENCE

The axis joining the medium coeli (MC) and imum coeli (IC) divides the. horoscope-cinto eastern and western hemispheres, often called, ,respectively, the oriental and occidental hemispheres. It is on-this axis that we meet the zenith and the nadir of our experi­ences. Since the MC is the point of navigation, or the point of longitudinal reckoning, and its apparent motion is one degree for every four.minutes of time, it is, in fact, the measurement of the predictable travel of the Sun's path along the ecliptic. The founda­tion of the chart is the opposite pole, .the fourth-house cusp. The poles that are the MC and the IC represent respectively that which.is most public and conscious and that which is most secret / Page154 / and unconscious. Goals based on the security of the foundations of the fourth house can be interpreted through the tenth house.
The MC-IC is the parent axis, and the fourth house (IC) refers specifically to the privacy and mystery that surrounds family origins, while the tenth house (MC) is the public, externalized self. The fourth house (IC) is the family lineage, the conditions around the early home environment and one's innermost private concerns, most of which are deeply embedded in the lunar un­conscious. In the horoscope the IC is the point of ultimate dark­ness and it is there that the struggle for rebirth takes place. The I C is the turning-point in the heroic journey where one burns off one's mortality; slays the dragon, wrests the treasure from the goblin, rescues the distressed anima and so on. These actions all symbolize the differentiation between the family and oneself, the acquisition of the personal traits lost in the collective.' The tenth house (MC) is where the inner Self is made manifest and is the most exposed point in the horoscope. Rob Hand suggests that the MC-IC axis has to do with how one travels forwards and back­wards in time, whereas the horizon axis describes how one inter­acts with others.17 I agree, in that the M C is what we aspire to, based on where we have come from (IC). The IC holds the personal treasure and the M C delivers it to the world.
The eastern hemisphere symbolizes the process of self­identification and personal development, whereas the western relates to how one interacts with others and the degree to which dependency on others is an important factor in personal develop­ment.
Joseph Campbell says in his Hero With a Thousand Faces that the initial call to adventure is the call of vocation, and the hero,
. .. ventures forth, from the world of common day ihto a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.18
The vocation is intensely personal and not necessarily what the / Page 155 / family has designed for the individual. Therefore, the call can be a source of anxiety given such an unknown destination. The return from such adventure, occurs only after all the phases of the experi-ence of the round have been completed. For life is discovery not design. In order to heed the call, one must listen to the most intelligent (not the most intellectual) part of one's psyche., This requires courage - the courage of a hero - but the hero's journey is not an, unfamiliar one, nor one., without precedent. The fact that the call is vocational is another of the key indicators that the heroic: journey begins with the tenth house. That it means a departure from the known and the visible to the unknown :lnd,the unseen is also typical of the magisterial placement of the M C in the horoscope and the nocturnal position of the I C. Whethter society approves, the family approves,"or whether there is support during this time of drastic transition is unknown, but individual cases will show some fascinating variations on this.rheme.
That the parents are implicated in this call forth to adventure can also be appreciated if we consider that it might be the World Parents that are luring the hero 'forth from the world of com­monday'. Today, heroism is a personal. experience, dragon-battles and Minotaurs are metaphorical and, of course, the atonement with the parents is unique to the individual doing the atoning. The myths of heroic 'journeys always detail external events, but the stories of modern human journeys do not always conform to the environment as some of those journeys are internal, towards pyschic unity, and thus apparently heroic only to.the hero. Still, it is possible to 'bring the boon to mankind' in the form of personal transformation. Perhaps some do it by breaking a family complex and, as a result, not passing, on unresolved conflicts to their own children; others by taking the .journey to find out better how to heal others through the exploration of the wound one can discover how to heal it. For example, though it is not stated astrologically, the fourth house as a source for a vocational call is discussed in The Drama of the Gifted Child. Alice Miller says that the pattern of the psychology of the healer starts at birth with a remarkable facility to know what is expected of them and then, immediately, to begin fulfilling those expectations. She then says, / Page 156 / 'Who else, without this previous history [of dealing with neurotic family origins] would muster sufficient interest to spend the whole day trying to discover what is happening in the other person's un­conscious?'19
As there is a struggle at the threshold of consciousness on the horizon, there is also a threshold struggle at the poles of the meridian. However, this struggle is between the inner voice and the voice of society, family or education. This struggle, too, can result in a fusion of the conscious and the. unconscious mind, although it has to do with the chains of cultural bias versus the inner urging of the individual's desire for personal fulfilment. The desire to go forth into the unknown is, after all, related to what is known in the first place. As Saturn moves over the M C one is called upon to test one's theoretical view of life; if it is not in accord with what one meets in the reality of life experience, a crisis can occur. If the world-view conforms with the" lifestyle, crisis may not be necessary, but a trial by experience will be. Either way, a new adventure looms.

QUADRANT DIVISIONS

For the purpose of identifying the quadrants to accord with the stages of the heroic journey, I have avoided the conventional numerical order which starts at the ascendant with the first quadrant. For convenience I have called them the MC quadrant (tenth, eleventh and twelfth houses), the ascendant quadrant (the first, second and third houses), the IC quadrant (fourth, fifth and sixth houses) and the descendant quadrant (seventh, eighth and ninth houses). (See fig. 3, p. 164. Figure omitted) This paradigm will apply in both northern and southern hemispheres, thus avoiding the problem of orientation towards the ecliptic.
MC quadrant. The point of origin for the heroic journey, the call to adventure, combines the eastern hemisphere with the upper hemisphere and is the Conscious Self. This quadrant is where one's combined skills are contributed to society and refined to a / Page 157 / point of completion. The combination of self-consciousness and active involvement with the world and society is the initial stage of the call to adventure. That which was fully developed during the Saturn transit through the M C quadrant is left behind at the ascendant.


Ascendant quadrant. The second stage of the heroic journey, the descent into the unknown, is initiated at the ascendant, and the quadrant combines both the unconscious hemisphere and the eastern hemisphere. This is the Unconscious Self. The basic requirements for survival are acquired in this quadrant and actions are primal and instinctive. That which is acquired in the ascendant quadrant is carried over into the IC quadrant for further development.


IC quadrant. This quadrant combines the unconscious hemisphere and the western hemisphere. It is the unconscious preparation for relating to the outer world and involves the development of acquired skills which will enable the returning hero to relate more fully to others. This quadrant is initiated by the atonement phase, where one retrieves the lost or hidden treasure and nurtures it to maturity. The social and personal skills which one develops in this quadrant will be carried forth into the descendant quadrant as 'boons'.

Descendant quadrant. This quadrant is both conscious and other­oriented. It is in this area of the horoscope that one consciously encounters others in a meaningful way and tests acquired skills for their usefulness in society. The alchemical process of transformation that occurs with a meaningful encounter with one's opposite is the foundation for a personal philosophy. The development of a belief system which includes oneself within a social context results in the culmination at the MC of all that one aspires to.

Size of quadrant. The ascendant, unlike the M C, is reckoned according to the latitude of the birth. It 'moves' according to the / Page 158 / latitude of birth north or south of the equator, the only place where the angles are exactly ninety degrees apart. Therefore, the angle between the ascendant and the M C can fluctuate. widely in horoscopes set for mid-to,northern/southern latitudes. Astro* Carto.-Graphy2O maps show this pheoomenon graphically: the ascendant-descendant lines are curved and the MC-IC lines are straight and vertical. This fluctuation of distance between the angles of the M C axis and the ascendant axis is responsible for the differing lengths of time that Saturn (or any transiting planet for, that matter) will spend in a particular quadrant. However, opposite quadrants are always balanced. For example, ihhe call­to-adventure quadrant (the MC quadrant) is unusually large, i.e. comprises more than ninety degrees, then the opposite quadrant, the atonement-and-treasure-quest quadrant (the IC quadrant) will be equal in size. In this particular situation 'size' is really 'duration of time'.
Though the call to adventure begins with Saturn's transit to the M C, its particular phase might last anything from three to ten years, and the atonement-and-treasure-quest phase, beginning at .the I C, would last the same length of time. The other phases, the two 'threshold struggles' at the ascendant and descendant, would divide the remaining space time equally between them. These time-frames have very particular implications for what needs to be focused on in one's heroic journey in life.

4 The Personal Heroic Journey

Thus the hero is the archetypal forerunner of mankind in general.
His fate is the pattern in accordance with which the masses-.of humanity must live, and always have lived, however haltinglyand distantly; and however short of the ideal man they have fallen, the stages of the hero myth have become constituent, elements in the personal development of every individual.
Erich Neumann


Experiencing Boundaries, Definition and Containment


In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Camp bell syn-thesized heroic myths from many cultures into what is now known as the 'monomyth'1 From all cultures emerge tales of a hero and his journey. There is a common thread throughout these myths that links, all mankind to an archetypal experience of life as a cycle of birth; death, resurrection and redemption. Liz Greene says about the heroic quest that: ­
The hero's journey is a map of the development of culture and of the individual's psychic voyage through life. It applies to both men and women, to the primitive tribesman and the sophisticated Western city dweller, to the adult and to the child. It weaves its way through our dreams, our fantasies, our .hopes, our fears, our aspirations, our loves and our ends."

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

Page 160

"The stages of the hero's journey are found in every culture and at every epoch. The surface details may vary, but the skeletal structure remains the same.2
Our modem culture has desacralized these myths, placing them in the realm of fairy tales (which have their own. special place as well) and commonly uses the word myth as a synonym for untruth. The myths as we know them today are a legacy from an oral tradition that emerged from the mythopoeic mind. Regardless of the innumerable transformations and translations that myths have undergone, for reasons ranging from literacy to political ex­pediency, there was a point in time when they were true, when the separation between man and nature was not conscious, and his active participation in rite and ritual was not' a contrived gesture of supplication to a transcendent god. Man and animal were god and god was man and animal.
That is not our time, nor has it been for several thousand years. Astrologyy can reconnect us with that time insofar as we can be in accord with our natural cycles, with our own clock in our own time. Though Campbell himself warns us to . . . 'seek, not interest­ing applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired, past,'3 it is inevitable that we should do this in our attempts to reconnect with that time of participation conscious­ness. Jung says:

If you can put yourself in the mind of the primitive you will at once understand why this is so. He lives in such 'participation mystique' with his world, as Levy-Bruhl calls it, that there is nothing like that absolute distinction between subject and object which exists in our minds. What happens outside also happens in him, and what happens in him also happens outside.4

The concept that 'within is without' is very much a part also of the alchemical opus. For instance, Saturn is not only in the sky as a planet but also in the earth as lead. Saturn not only symbolizes a psychological state but also a structure within the / Page161 / body itself, such as the bones, lower spine and knee-joints and teeth. Furthermore, it is the skin as a 'container' of the body.
Therefore, everything is not only contained but also a container. Everything is both imbued with and surrounded by Saturn. Saturn's participation in transformation is an integral part of a whole process, which would be incomplete without that co­operation.
So, it is easily done, this business of relating modern psy­chology and behaviour to the action of our ancient ancestors and their muthos, particularly through the medium of astro­logical metaphor and symbol. Others before us have done so, having recognized the immutability of the psyche and its racial memory with its archetypal forms.
Contained within the mono myth is a formula that is inherent in all rites of passage - separation, initiation, return. This heroic paradigm may seem a little aggrandized to someone who thinks in terms of food, rent, sex and sleep as the only motivation or meaning in life! Indeed, it is very important for these needs to be met, but to what end? What lies beneath these obvious human needs, what greater mystique are we participating in? In fact, it-is these very fundamental activities of everyday, human life that resonate with the greatest archetypes of all, the greatest of origin myths, of actions that are in imitation of the gods. Mircea Eliade says in The Sacred and the Profane:

Acting as a fully responsible human being, man imitates the paradigmatic gestures of the gods, repeats their actions, whether in the case of a simple physiological function such as eating or of a social, economic, cultural, military, or other activity.5
That we are so connected to the archetypal journey may not come as a surprise. That we can consciously and actively par­ticipate in this journey is the gift of the astrological model. The characteristic phases that I have seen clients experience are:
1. Separation from the known path, either through a per / Page 162 / ceptual shift or an event that thrusts them out of their regular routines.
2. A period of ego loss or identity crisis during which a chaos of polarities and opposites occurs, which in the alchemical process is called massa confusa; then, they seem suspended in liminality, living in the threshold, not having exited from one room completely, and at the same time not yet having entered the next.
3. From that no man's land come many images of what could be possible;
4. Finally, a sorting period during which, from those possible options, the actual alternatives emerge that they may then choose to incorporate into their lives; the once turbulent polarities. re­align.
This particular series of episodes is especially attuned to the effects of major transits and specifically to transits over the angles of .the horoscope, which are the points of orientation. Because Saturn is the planet that gives us definition, from within and from without, its transit is particularly involved with the organizing of inner characteristics and their effectiveness in our world;
The macrocosmic cycle of eternal return - the Greeks called it anakyklosis - which calls up a repetition of quality or feeling­tone, is reflected in microcosmic planetary cycles. However, each planet has a different cycle so it does not return to the same configurations with the others. This leaves much room for cycles within cycles with the result that although things may be similar they are never the same. Within our own lifetime there are returns and cycles, each of which recall a time past and act as a guide for future action.
The cycle that shapes our sense of worth and power is the Saturn cycle. In the twenty-nine-and-a-half-year period that it takes for Saturn to transit the zodiac, it makes every possible aspect to our natal horoscope. Its movement over the angles of the chart trigger off distinct movements away from an established path and towards something new and unknown.
These times of transit are usually fraught with a highly charged / Page 163 / energy and can be troublesome, especially if in some way our past has caught up with us. The intense sense of conservatism and self-preservation that Saturn embodies seems utterly con­tradictory to the urgent change that a contact from Saturn will inevitably demand. When one is pressured by a Saturn transit it is important to recognize that the inner world has already shifted drastically away from the outer: world and that an external realignment is necessary. This is often expressed by a with­drawal from the outer world in order to reassess the inner situ­ation.
Saturn lowers the threshold 'between our conscious hold over the environment and our unconscious mind, and brings about the necessity for unconscious material to surface - to be disgorged, as it were. This lowering of the threshold can appear as symptomatic depression. Naturally depression can be a creative impetus, as we shall see, but it can also herald a deeper conflict. As a result, Saturn contacts have been interpreted as times of introversion and solitude. This solitude is necessary, but it should not be allowed to become chronic. Recognizing the role that the Saturn transit is playing in the larger drama of the life cycle will place this reassess­ment time in perspective which, in turn, will produce a less nega­tive self examination.
The lessons learned from Saturn all seem to be very serious and dry. All heroes enter a wasteland, and endure times of challenge and testing. There are distinct time periods that are critical for action which are followed by experimentation and then main­tenance. If the maintenance period extends beyond its usefulness then another critical period of change-on-demand occurs, and- so on. The archetypal hero's journey with all of its phases and turning-points parallels the Saturn transit as it moves over the angles and travels through the quadrants of the horoscope."

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

Page186
"...Campbell says, 'The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilated passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as,a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save6 The latter stages of this transit propose a new way of 'seeing' life, and.how one can participate in it. They can also be fraught with terror and anxiety, for one's boundaries are dissolv'ing and the identity, as it has been for along time now, is slowly but,.certainly becoming eroded. Saturn, in its dark and most primitiye form, is bound up with the ego and its control mechanisms. A real sense of peripheral invasion occurs ­ something on the horizon beckons, but it cannot be seen. The boundless deep of the unconscious is filled with primordial images that arise spontaneously, both while awake and while asleep. Irnages and sensations creep in, occupying what used to be superfunctional space in the consciousness. Because of this preoccupation with the unconscious mind one can retreat into solitude which, though important on one level, should not be carried into extreme isolation from the people and things that one values. This, of course, means re-evaluating precisely what it is that one does value.
The hero must now join, collectively, with all heroes from all time and, divesting himself of the now useless protective devices, make himself availabbfor more magical tools. In more pragmatic terms, one must allow the contents of the unconscious to rise and to be the guiding factor in the continuing joumey. Dream analysis is Very fruitful during this time, as is any analytic exploration of the symbols that will surface from deep within the psyche. The twelfth-house Saturn transit dissolves all the old boundaries and leaves one vulnerable. That vulnerability, however, is the gift though, like the serpent who sloughs off its old skin, a tender time precedes the renewal
This process entails making a conscious agreement with the ego to participate in the dissolution, letting go of attachments and single-minded focus, It is possible to retain some of the protective coating behind which the change can take place, rather like changing clothes behind a Chinese screen. I call it maturing in private.

Page 187

It is difficult at best to interpret symbolic thought, and for a normally pragmatic individual to experience inexplicable outpour­ings of feelings, images and moods is like being plunged into an abyss. And an abyss it is. All heroes go through this identity loss, or change, in order to accomplish the next task, that of slaying the dragon, confronting the monster, passing through whatever danger may be put in their way.
Our hero, Theseus, and heroines, Demeter and Persephone, undergo metamorphoses, each in their own way and each with separate intent, but both enter a period of darkness and unknown transition. The transformation for Demeter involved a gradual awareness,that things had changed irrevocably. Her loss of identity relative to her previous stature was profound, and when Helios and Hecate apprised her fully of her circumstances she plunged into even deeper mourning. The threshold struggle, the confronta­tion with the unconscious, produced an understandable resistance. She withdrew from the other Olympians and roamed incognito among the mortals, without identity, without power, completely diminished and in a state of highly charged grief and anger.
Theseus' sea journey is the part of a rite of passage that occurs when one is somewhere between the pla:ce of departure and the place of arrival. Having proved himself mid-journey, the rest of the trip was spent mysteriously, presumably in suspension, preparing himself for the ordeal ahead. We often know in our innermost self what lies ahead, but our preparations seem futile, for it is not until the reality of the present actually arrives that we can act on its demands. This final phase of the first stage of the heroic journey is critical because of the temptation to create a fantasy event. Much of the creative aspect of major transformation can be devoured by this desire to imagine what is going to happen when Saturn transits ourascendant. By projecting imaginary possibilities on to the new horizon we can miss the actual opportunities that will be there and, worse, create situations that inhibit the natural evolution of a new persona.
The distillation of personality impurities is one level on which Saturn will function while in the twelfth house. If the psyche has become overburdened and polluted through the ego's attachment / Page188 / to old forms, the soma will register the complaint. Traditionally, the twelfth house rules institutions, be they hospitals, jails, asylums or ideologies. If the psyche ,has been issuing orders which, for some reason have been ignored, the potential for con­finemen this high. One's bodily constitution is at its lowest ebb with this transit, the body being far more susceptible to psychic disturbances. Especially if there are chronic disorders or con­genital conditions, it is time to consider a serious health pro­gramme. Voluntary confinement, retreats, holidays and other spi­ritually' recharging. activities are necessary. Out of. a twenty­nine-year cycle, two and a half years (on, average) spent in spir­itual rehabilitation is not a tall order; though letting go is never easy. Saying 'no' and letting go will bring energy and.. power back into one's system.

THE THRESHOLD STRUGGLE (ASC.)

There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate his power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle; dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dis­memberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers).
Joseph Campbell 7

The descent of Saturn over the ascendant and into the first house can be one of the most devastating times in a person's,life. One often feels that all pretence has been stripped away and one is left with the bare rudiments of an ego and a rough outline of what was once a valid and presentable persona. Of course, the 'opponent' mentioned which can slay the Self' is the shadow. That shadow, however, can just as easily be projected out' into the environment and appear as an actual person seemingly in direct opposition to oneself. The world that the hero enters at this time / Page 189 / is 'strangely intimate' because it is known to the unconscious though only registered in the conscious mind as a vague and shadowy realm.
The individual undergoing this important phase will be in a vulnerable state; the ego is shaky and identity is questionable. The process of dissolution that occuned in the twelfth house becomes apparent as Saturn enters the first. This difficult time is not without its redeeming features, however, as equal time is given to the positive aspects of the transit, the 'helpers:' A helper can take many forms - a therapist, a friend or even an event that indicates new symbols to identify with. The abrupt ripping away of false appearances can also rip away valuable protective devices that one has carefully created and it is im­portant, therefore, not to go 'dragon-slaying' without a helper. Sometimes there are several helpers, occasionally brought over from the upper hemisphere transit and at other times acquired during the descent into the lower hemisphere. One might' have to elicit a helper during the ascendant transit if one is not forth­commg.
The transit of Saturn over the ascendant establishes the phase which ends with entry into the figurative labyrinth at the I C. The more dissonance there has been between the persona and the Self the more drastic are the measures that the unconscious employs to battle the old self-image which will not survive the journey in its old form.
Because the threshold struggle that takes place at this stage of the transit is a descent into the personal, unconscious hemisphere of the horoscope, resistance is often intense at first. The last fourteen years with Saturn above the horizon have been spent developing worldly skills, but now the need is to develop a greater strength based on inner values rather than external measurements. The transition is tiring and people often complain of exhaustion during this initial stage of renewal. The unconscious demands almost equal time, and sleep seems more necessary during the Saturn descent than normal. Behind this need for sleep are dreams. Dreams of death are not uncommon, nor are dreams dark, shadowy figures; dream people often beckon or call one to an un­ / Page 190 / known destination, or help one to cross a river or chasm or to ,walk down a pathway.
The modern hero will lose touch with the old identity and try to force the changes within his or her environment in order to cope with the losses. The fear of obscurity that the old texts deem to be inevitable does, indeed, seem possible. Often the journeyer
seeks out helpers in the form of teachers; an analyst or friend who will provide support during this time of restructuring. Just as frequently the helpers can appear spontaneously and they can arrive in many forms; one has but to recognize these people. As mentioned, the dragon-battle is between the shadow and the Self, but it is not uncommon for helpers to be called upon to aid in
some confrontation with society.
The confusion as to who we really are can leave us available to projections from others during this transit. We are also vulner­able to experiencing rejection from others, or even attack, as a result. Simply stated, the point of these types of event, should they happen, is to indicate to the individual that there is a dissociation between who they really are and who they appear to be.
There is an interesting - pun in the Odyssey on this lack of identity: Odysseus was a hero with a strong ego, whose epithets were, among others, wily, cunning, shining and brilliant. This was not a man who let go easily. On his return from Troy to Ithaca, one of his tests was to encounter and slay the Cyclops Polyphemus, Poseidon's son. While Odysseus is getting the Cyclops drunk, Polyphem us- asks Odysseus his name, for he wants to know who to thank for the wine, and give him a gift. No fool, Odysseus says to the Cyclops, 'My name is Nobody: mother, father, and friends, everyone calls me Nobody.'
Once Odysseus had accomplished the blinding of the Cyclops, and sailed out into the bay, Polyphemus screamed for his neighbouring Cyclopes to help him. They called out to ask who had hurt him, to which the answer came, "Nobody.' Naturally they all assumed that no person had harmed him and that help would therefore have to come from a divine source. .
Odysseus' ego overcame him when his self-pride insisted that he / Page191 / take credit for the blinding of the Cyclops. The hubris of Odysseus in this situation is to claim he actually has an identity, for when one is in the mystical realm, one is meant to be without identity. When he leaves the Cyclops he states his identity as the hero, Odysseus, which enrages Polyphemus' father, Poseidon, who then has it in for him for the rest of his journey.
The hero in transition, in liminality, is an individual without identity, without attachment to ego and former glory - he, is a 'nobody', a non-person. So, Odysseus' lie is actually the truth, and the truth is .,a lie, in that when he says he is Nobody, he and we think he is lying, but when he says '[I am]-Odysseus . . . Laertes' son, who lives in Ithaca!', really he is lying because according to the rules of journeying, and as long as he is on Jhat journey, he is not .really that person at all. His journey is that of a nobody. So there is some danger involved if we adhere to an old identity image while undergoing a major transition.

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

THE PERSONAL HEROIC JOURNEY

THE ATONEMENT (IC)

Page 210

"When he arrives at. the nadir of the mythological round, he un­dergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bridge-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an ex­pansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). Joseph Campbell 9


Just as apotheosis is a transformation from the human to a divine state, so this transit can initiate a person into his own sense of immortality, whether that be through the awareness of ancestral links or through progeny of his own. The old texts called the fourth house the 'house of confinement', referring to a woman's confinement at childbirth, and certainly Saturn here will bring to the fore all the hidden components that lie in the blueprint of the psychic lineage, the fate, of, the family. It is entirely possible for prenatal conditions to surface during this stage of the round. One of my clients who had suffered from acute anxiety attacks since childhood found it effective to enter into a form of therapy called 'rebirthing' where she relived her birth experience and all of its potent dangers: she had almost died at birth.
The fourth-house experience indicates a time for new founda­tions, but in horary astrology the fourth house is 'the end of the matter' and one cannot build a new structure on an old foundation. Because the fourth house is both beginnings and endings one might find that the past has to be rediscovered before the future can unfold.
Frequently this transit precipitates a fascination with 'roots', with family genealogy. Chronic or inherent physiological or psychological patterns emerge through the fourth house. When Saturn transits the lC it becomes apparent that one must come to terms with the family fate, become reconciled to that legacy / Page 211 / and begin to rework the dynamics that have been rumbling underground during the preceding phase. Often, the 'fate' of an individual is really the unresolved conflicts of the family dyna­mic as embedded in the psyche, which then manifest in events or symptoms. .
Here we are at the midnight phase of the journey, faced with the darkest aspects of the psyche and its potentials - the time when the unconscious is at its most active. The events that occur during the fourth-house transit will bring to the threshold of awareness long-forgotten memories, often from childhood, in order to gauge the strength of one's security bases. The kind of resolution that results from this confrontation between the individual and his or her family origins creates a greater sense of inner security. Since the family plays such a major role in our ability to establish. a. secure base of operation for accomplishment, it is essential that an 'atonement' or reconciliation with the parents takes place.
Life is mysterious enough, but the fourth house and all of its intricate involvement with the secrets of the family and its hidden dynamics is the source of the biological and unconscious psychological contract with our life path. 'Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come: an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us, like the substance of a 'dream.'10 The tomb and the womb are inseparable, the archetypal womb is the grave, the womb of Gaia. The fourth house is the as­trologicallocus for the symbols of the tomb, the womb and the Moon, the Moon ruling Cancer, the fourth-house sign. When Saturn is transiting .the fourth house it is in the house of the Moon and will bring forth memories that are from the prenatal and pre-verbal lunar time of life: infancy and the first three years of life.
The most obvious celestial reminder is Luna, the triple god­dess of Artemis, Selene and Hecate. The triple goddess repre­sents the three phases of the Moon: New, Full and Balsamic; the three phases of a woman's menstrual cycle; the three phases of life, 'she is huge and calls us from her womb; she is beautiful / Page 212 /and calls us to her bed; she is old and ugly and calls us to the tomb.'l1 These are the three realms of lunar manifestation: Selene in heaven, Artemis on earth and Hecate in the realm of Hades.
When masculine Saturn is in the feminine house of the Moon, we have a meeting of opposites, an experience that recalls the union of Ouranos and Gaia. For remember that Kronos' parents had a violent opposition, and that he was called in by his mother to act as an intermediary. Having castrated his father to please his mother he was eventually betrayed by her in favour of his wife, Rhea. The type of atonement that Saturn transiting the fourth house induces is not always comfortable, but it will bring the modern hero to an understanding and reconciliation of his role in the family destiny and, ultimately, his own per­sonal destiny.
What we bring from the 'tomb of the womb' into our lives is an intensely complex formation of family patterns which surround
and often obscure the treasure of self-destiny. When Saturn is transiting the fourth house, especially duringrheinitial phase of contact with the I C, the doors to the past swing open and we are faced with sorting out these complex patterns. The process takes many forms but always relates to complex conditions in the family and how these conditions colour one's world-view. It can initiate a time when one begins to differentiate oneself from one's parents, in other words begins to withdraw one's projection of the parent archetype from the biological parent. Ideally, this is a period that begins a process of liberation, but the opposite can occur too, where one calcifies one's identity with the family fate and carries it on. Even in the most sublime family situation, there is still the need for the child to separate himself from the complex and become fully identified as himself. The horoscope is the lens through which one views the world, and a child 'sees' his parents through that lens. In The Astrology of Fate, Liz Green says (em­
phasis mine):

The meridian of the birth chart is a representation of family fate, but it does not really describe what one's parents did to / Page 213 / one in childhood. Rather, it is a portrait of two inner parents, archetypal or mythic in nature, which dominate the psyche of the child and remain as representations of the relationship between man and woman throughout life. These are the inherited complexes, the 'ancestral sins'.12
Although the parents' astrological signatures conform with remarkable regularity with the child's parent-axis theme, it is still through an unconscious collusion on the part of parent and child that the fate of the family is visited upon the child. Each child in a family unit will, of course, manifest different components of the parental theme. It is at this base point of the horoscope, this dark place, that the treasure is guarded by the dragon. The treasure is that spark of individual destiny, the inner glow that provides one's unique essence, and the heroic experience is the retrieval of that essence.
This stage of the heroic journey demands atonement, retrieval of the gold, or treasure, the secret of the elixir. The deeper one goes into the cave, the forest, the wasteland or the labyrinth of one's unconscious, the more perilous is the journey but the more precious is the treasure. The monster must be faced and slain. Having slain the Minotaur, Theseus was recalled to meet his helper, Ariadne,and escape with her. One problem that arose for him was the realization that if Ariadne could betray her father to help him, then it might be possible for her, in turn, to betray him. That factor played a role in one variant of the myth, in which he leaves Ariadne behind on Naxos when he sails for home. This is a family in conflict. He leaves behind the taint that might have destroyed his 'boon'. He does not realize, - however, what lies ahead in his return phase, of which more later.
These experiences of going into the pit, the depth, the dark and the nadir all relate to finding the treasure of individuality, the gold within. Everyone, no matter whether his family con­ditioning was dramatic or conservative, has this challenge thrust upon him - find your gold, your treasure, your own personal destiny. Even those individuals who have had relatively benign / Page 214 / family histories and well-supported childhoods have dragons to slay, and because their childhood training did not include dodging mines or detonating bombs, theirs is a particular challenge..."

Page 214

"...The challenge that arises in a situation like this is subtle. Because such individuals lack specific traumas to pin their pschic struggles on, they will often experience a vague form of guilt or feelingcof ingratitude towards their parents, recognizinig at the same time that their parents are not responsible for their feelings of longing or dissatisfaction.
'Where, then, does one begin to look whether or not the inherent, archhetypal, divine discontent has been exacerbated by child­hood trauma, the Self always seeks to find its greatest potential and fullest expression. whether or not. this search is conscious or unconscious, the Self as an organic whole 'knows' that it must never, by its very limitations and dimensions, be completely fulfilled. The heroic journey is a path unique to the hero, and part of the challenge is to find the treasure. That treasure is necessarily buried deep within the psyche and as an archetypal experience, needs to be hunted and retrieved,"

 

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 465 / 466

"They talked of "humanity," of nobility - but it was / the spirit alone that distinguished man, as a creature largely divorced from nature, largely opposed to her in feeling, from all other forms of organic life. In man's spirit, then, resided his true nobility and his merit - in his state of disease, as it were; in a word, the more ailing he was, by so much was he the more man. The genius of disease was more human than the genius of health. How, then, could one who posed as the. friend of man shut his eyes to these fundamental truths concerning man's humanIty? Herr Settembrini had progress ever on his lips: was he aware that all progress, in so far as there was such a thing, was due to illness, and to illness alone? In other words, to genius, which was the same thing? Had not the normal, since time was, lived on the achievements of the abnormal? Men consciously and voluntarily descended into disease and madness, in search of knowledge which, acquired by fanaticism, would lead back to health; after the possession and use of it had ceased to be conditioned by that heroic and abnormal act of sacrifice. That was the true death on the cross, the true Atonement."

AT

ONE

MENT

 

4
MIND
40
22
4
4
BODY
46
19
1
4
SOUL
67
13
4
12
-
153
54
9
1+2
  
1+5+3
5+4
-
3
-
9
9
9

 

 

-
MIND BODY SOUL
-
-
-
-
M
13
4
4
-
I
9
9
9
-
N+D
18
9
9
-
B
2
2
2
-
O+D+Y+S
63
18
9
-
O+U
36
9
9
-
L
12
3
3
12
MIND BODY SOUL
153
54
45
1+2
=
1+5+3
5+4
4+5
3
MIND BODY SOUL
9
9
9

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

THE PERSONAL HEROIC JOURNEY

THE ATONEMENT (IC)

Page 210

"When he arrives at. the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again - if the powers have remained unfriendly to him - his theft of the boon he came to gain (bridge-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an ex­pansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom)." Joseph Campbell 9

 

14
PHARAOH+PYRAMID
153
81
9
11
SOKAR+OSIRIS
153
54
9
11
ZARATHUSTRA
153
45
9
12
QUETZALCOATL
153
45
9
15
EHYEH+ASHER+EHYEH
153
90
9
15
AUM+MANI+PADME+HUM
153
63
9
10
IPSISSIMUS
153
45
9
10
SIXTYTHREE
153
54
9
14
ALBERT+EINSTEIN
153
63
9
13
ATOMIC+NUMBERS
153
54
9
10
PUREST+LOVE
153
45
9

 

 

153 x 12 = 1836

EIGHTEENTHIRTYSIX = 99 9+9 = 181+8 = 9

 

8
EIGHTEEN
73
46
1
9
THIRTYSIX
152
53
8
17
-
225
99
9

 

 

JUST SIX NUMBERS

Martin Rees

1

OUR COSMIC HABITAT I PLANETS STARS AND LIFE

Page 24


"A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' "

Page 24 /25 '
" A manifestly artificial signal-even if it were as boring as lists of prime numbers, or the digits of 'pi' - would imply that ntelli-gence' wasn't unique to the Earth and had evolved elsewhere. The nearest potential sites are so far away that signals would take many years in transit. For this reason alone, transmission would be primarily one-way.
There would be time to send a measured response, but no scope for quick repartee! any remote beings who could communicate with us would have some concepts of mathematics and logic that paralleled our own. And they would also share a knowledge of the basic particles and forces that govern our universe. Their habitat may be very different (and the biosphere even more different) from ours here on Earth; but they, and their planet, would be made of atoms just like those on Earth. For them, as for us, the most important particles would be protons and electrons: one electron orbiting a proton makes a hydrogen atom, and electric currents and radio transmitters involve streams of electrons. A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' able and motivated to transmit radio signals. All the basic forces and natural laws would be the same. Indeed, this uniformity - without which our universe would be a far more baffling place - seems to extend to the remotest galaxies that astronomers can study.
 Later chapters in this book will, however, speculate about other 'universes', forever beyond range of our telescopes, where different laws may prevail.)
Clearly, alien beings wouldn't use metres, kilograms or seconds. But we could exchange information about the ratios of two masses (such as thc ratio of proton and electron masses) or of two lengths, which are 'pure numbers' that don't depend on what units are used: the statement that one rod is ten times as long as another is true (or false) whether we measure lengths/ in feet or metres or some alien units"

"A proton is 1,836 times heavier than an electron, and the number 1,836 would have the same connotations to any 'intelligence' "

 

 

HARMONIC 288
Bruce Cathie
1977
EIGHT

 THE MEASURE OF LIGHT : I

Page 95
"The search for this particular value was a lengthy one and the clue that led me finally to a possible solution was a study of the construction of the Grand Gallery. The height of the Gallery was the first indication that it was not just an elaborate access passage. Previous measurements made by scientific investigators pointed to some interesting possibilities. "
Page 95
"The value that I calculated for length was extremely close to that of the one published in Davidson and Aldersmith's book, their value being 1836 inches,"

Page 95/97                                                                                                                                                        
"A search of my physics books revealed that 1836 was the closest approximation the scientists have calculated to the mass / ratio of the positive hydrogen ion, i.e. the proton, to the electron."



THE GREAT PYRAMID

ITS

DIVINE MESSAGE

D.Davidson and H. Alderson

Page 279

"The resulting length for the Grand Gallery roof is 1836 p', an important Pyramid dimension dealt with later"

 


 THE TUTANKHAMUN PROPHECIES

Maurice Cotterell 2,000

Page194

Anderson's Constitutions of the Freemasons (In3) comments:
", . . the Tillest structures of Tyre and Sidon could not be compared with the Etemal God's T emple at Jerusalem. , ,
  there were employed 3,600 Princes, or Master Masons', to conduct the work according to Solomon's directions,
 with 80000 hewers of stone in the mountains ('Fellow Craftsmen')and 70000 labourers in all 153600 besides       
the levy under Adoniram to work In the mountains of Lebanon by turns with the Sidonians, viz 30,000 being in all 183,600.

Page 190

"The holy number of sun-worshippers is 9, the highest number that can be reached before becoming one (10) with the creator. This is why Tutankhamun was entombed in nine layers of coffin. This is why the pyramid skirts of the two statues, guarding the entrance to the Burial Chamber, were triangular (base 3), when the all-seeing eye-skirt of Mereruka contained a pyramid skirt with a base of four sides. The message concealed here is that the 3 should be squared, which equals 9. Freemasons" for reasons we shall see, are said to be 'on the square'."

 

 

THE BIOLOGY OF DEATH

Lyall Watson 1974

Page 49

"AS long ago as 1836, in a Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, this was said: Individuals who are apparently destroyed in a sudden manner, by certain wounds, diseases , or even decapitation are not really dead, but are only in conditions incompatible with the persistence of life."


THE JUPITER EFFECT
John Gribbin and Stephen Plagemann

l977

Page 122

: "Seventeen 'major historical earthquakes' are referred to in the report all of which occurred since 1836

 

 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI

Paramahansa Yogananda

1946

Book cover comments

"I am grateful to you for granting me some insight into this fascinating world." - Thomas Mann"

"As an eye witness recountal of the extraordinary lives and powers of modern Hindu saints, the book has importance both timely and timeless." - W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Orientalist

Page 275

"In the gigantic concepts of Einstein, the velocity of light - 1863 miles per second - dominates the whole theory of relativity"

 

1863 - 1836

 

 

GODS OF THE DAWN

THE MESSAGE OF THE PYRAMIDS

AND

THE TRUE STARGATE MYSTERY

Peter Lemesurier 1997

Page 118

"With the entry into the Grand Gallery, all kinds of extraordinary things now start to happen"
                                         while the 1836P" long roof (-code equivalent: 153 x 12)

 

 

THE NEW VIEW OVER ATLANTIS

John Michell 1983

Page160

"MERCURY, known to the Greeks as HERMES and to the Egyptians as THOTH,

was the deity of speech and communication, in which aspect he was the patron saint of travellers, of roads and paths and the pillars marking their course"

"MERCURY

was also god of revelation and of  the'hermetic mysteries which were held within a dark, buried chamber, similar to the kings / Page 161 / chamber buried deep within the masonry of the GREAT PYRAMID. The use of the Pyramid's inner chambers for rituals of initiation and rebirth is implied in Pyramid legend, in the impressions of modern mystics, and in the traditional dedication of the Pyramid to the principle of MERCURY.
On page 124 are displayed the magic squares relating to the various planets. These figures were highly regarded by the mathematicians of antiquity, who took them as paradigms of universal laws. Every ritual centre or temple was laid out according to one of the geometrical designs which are inherent in the structure of magic squares. Thus the ancient world was laid out to a cosmological pattern within which smaller patterns were formed, all radiating from certain points on the earth's surface, the natural centres of terrestrial current. Each of these centres, and each individual group and cluster of groups, was known by an astrological symbol and related to a magic square, expressing the influence to which it was found most susceptible...."

"...The association of the Pyramid with the magic square of Mercury links it also to the number 2080, which is the sum of all numbers from 1 to 64 and thus the sum of all the numbers within Mercury's magic square. 2080 is also the number of (Greek word omitted) the first-born, an epithet of Christ. {Revelation, i, 5), and the same number is prodqced by the Greek phrase which describes the 'fire' which Prometheus, a type of Mercury, stole from the gods - the 'artificers' fire' (Greek word omitted 2080). The combination of light (Greek word omitted) and fire (Greek word omitted) also gives 2080. This
 number and 1080 appear to have similar meanings, 1080 representing Mercury in the character of the earth spirit (Greek word omitted = 1080)..."

 

 

SATURN IN TRANSIT

BOUNDARIES OF MIND BODY AND SOUL

Erin Sullivan 1991

THE EVOLUTION OF AN ARCHETYPE

THE MASTER OF TIME

Page 26

"Before time was the unknown, and the unknown is a fearful thing. At some point it became essential in the evolution of human awareness to apprehend and to define the passage of time. All the mysteries of life involve this phenomenon as everything must have a beginning, a middle and an end.
In the beginning the fluidity of time was .expressed through the great oceanic god. Ouroboros, who is variously depicted as a circular river encompassing the earth, as a snake eating its own tail and as Oceanus the great source of all life which summnds all life. This definition of time is infinite, all-enveloping and eternal. The Greek Aion is a personified 'life fluid' that contains us and is contained within us.
The world soul, the all-embracing never-ending quality of time is made certain in the depiction of the zodiac, one of the earliest forms of demarcating time, and it, too, is Ouroboros and Oceanus and the Snake circling the known earth and eternally returning to renew itself. This reassuring infinity soothed the minds of the ancients, for it is in the womb of infinite time itself that we are assured of the immortality of the soul.
The obsession with marking time increased with the develop­ment of culture and marvellous measuring-devices were invented and employed. The deities of measured time are. the gods of the Sun, the goddesses of the Moon and Kronos himself. They symbo­lize respectively the solar division of diurnal and nocturnal time, the eternal return of lunar cyclic time and the terminus, the end of time. It is this terminus that is presided over by Saturn as the Grim Reaper, the god of corporeal death, and he becomes the personification of our worldly journey with all its cycles and phases. Saturn's depiction with the sickle, handed to him by his mother and first used to terminate the procreativity of Ouranos, is the personification of the cut-off point, when our 'time is up'.
The Greeks were aware of quality of time and had terms for such numinous experiences as were intrinsic within certain events.

Page 27
Far example, Nike (Victory) was a personified image af a numinous moment in time when a game ar battle is won, describing not the winning, not the mament itself, but the quality of the time. Or Kairos, a winged god sametimes depicted with wheels an his feet, representing that magical momen of perfection when time and circumstance conspire to make the quality af that time correct and momentous. Or the feminine Moira, the 'allotment' af time, the portion or degree that we carry as aur fate. We might also. think of the gaddess Nemesis, representative af that moment in time when retribution is achieved. Astrologically, we have Heimarmene, the quality af astrological time or our haroscopic fate. This is a thread woven throughout the horoscope, permeating and infusing the essence af aur own time within it - we cannot define it, we can only live it.
A Saturn transit evokes an acute awareness af the passage af time, and the Saturn cycle is descriptive af the natural progressian of time and personal develapment; and time itself is often the only cansolation we have in a moment of crisis, when we know that 'this two shall pass'. Saturn has been equated with chronological time, histary and the past. We can easily see our lives as a series.
of small aeons, little lifetimes within the great lifetime, and it is Saturn who. marks off these stages, clarifies and separates them from what we once were and who we cantinue to become. But what is the quality af Saturnian time?
Saturn represents time in sequence and duratian; as Kronos his realm was finite, whereas his parents' dominion extended infinitely back into. the past, and his san Zeus' extends infinitely farward. Saturnian time is bracketed by the infinite in either directian. His rulership af the Golden Age was called 'timeless', but the terminatian af it brought about the seasons and measurements af celestial motion.
This finiteness implies anather Saturnian experience which manifests as an enclosed period of time within which subjectively numinous experiences accur. Saturn transits are aften accompanied by a feeling of being apprehended in time, of being stuck or immobilized. This sensation frequently precedes a major breakthrough or transformation and is often accompanied by / Page 28 /
synchronicities. When time seems suspended, or enclosed episodes occur which have extraordinary meaning to an individual, it is
possible that the psychic 'stillness' engendered by Saturn allows inner experiences to build up a psychic charge which is then expelled into the environment. The subjective experience then becomes objective with a rapid sequence of events all coinciding with a profound inner awareness. These acausal events (those with no apparent connecting principle, yet redolent with meaning and implication) tend to cluster around an individual who is in a state of highly charged suspension and on the threshold of change. It is as if a connecting link is formed between subject and object, mind and matter, body and soul, whch confirms the intercon­nectedness between an individual's Self and the cosmos.
We have seen that Saturn acts as two things: first, as a barrier between the conscious and the unconscious, and secondly, as a bridge between those two states. The transit of Saturn provokes the tension between the two, one of which will eventually pre­dominate, but acceptance of the situation produces the luxury of choosing a new direction. All the determinism that Saturn brings, those moments that are absolute, lead ultimately to a choice of some kind - one might not choose one's circumstances but can choose what one does with them. That apparent paradox, fate and free will, is inherent in Saturn. When opposites unite, a still­ness prevails and a subsequent reordering occurs. Transformation, in Saturn's case, does not mean transcending, it means incorporating. So, Saturnian choice means working reality. The word choice, when held upside down and read in a mirror, holds a surprise. Try it.

CHOICE

The experience of Saturn as we perceive it today contains all the complexities of every thought-form humanity has projected upon it, and. we therefore personally encounter it in a myriad of ways. He might emerge as anyone of the images which have inspired and depressed some of the greatest minds, but he will emerge. Because the way in which we use the impressions that arise with Saturn's transit will be individual and unique, there is no adequate / Page 29 / interpretation of a Saturn transit, only a perception, a hint of what might be.
Saturn brings us all of his archetypal images - he has done so through all time, and continues to do so as we evolve within our own time. Saturn in transit brings to bear upon our consciousness the concept of our own worth, value and essence within the quality of that time. It offers perimeters within which to generate, develop and unfold. Saturn is the boundary of the mind, body and soul."

 

 

4
MIND
40
22
4
4
BODY
46
19
1
4
SOUL
67
13
4
12
-
153
54
9
1+2
  
1+5+3
5+4
-
3
-
9
9
9

 

 

-
MIND BODY SOUL
-
-
-
-
M
13
4
4
-
I
9
9
9
-
N+D
18
9
9
-
B
2
2
2
-
O+D+Y+S
63
18
9
-
O+U
36
9
9
-
L
12
3
3
12
MIND BODY SOUL
153
54
45
1+2
=
1+5+3
5+4
4+5
3
MIND BODY SOUL
9
9
9

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

FOREWORD

"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, not on his own account, for in him the reader will make acquaintance with a simple-minded though pleasing young man, but for the sake of the story itself, which seems to us highly worth telling- though it must needs be borne in mind, in Hans Castorp's behalf, that it is his story, and not every story happens to everybody- this story, we say, belongs to the long ago; is already, so to speak, covered with historic mould, and unquestionably to be presented in the tense best suited to a narrative out of the depth of the past.
That should be no drawback to a story, but rather the reverse. Since histories must be in the past, then the more past the better, it would seem, for them in their character as histories, and for him, the teller of them, rounding wizard of times gone by. With this story, moreover, it stands as it does to-day with human beings, not least among them writers of tales: it is far older than its years; its age may not be measured by length of days, nor the weight of time on its head reckoned by the rising or setting of suns. In a word, the degree of its antiquity has noways to do with the pas-sage of time - in which statement the author intentionally touches upon the strange and questionable double nature of that riddling element.
But we would not wilfully obscure a plain matter. The exag-gerated pastness of our narrative is due to its taking place before the epoch when a certain crisis shattered its way through life and consciousness and left a deep chasm behind. It takes place - or, rather, deliberately to avoid the present tense, it took place, and had taken place - in the long ago, in the old days, the days of the world before the Great War, in the beginning of which so much began that has scarcely yet left off beginning. Yes, it took place before that; yet not so long before. Is not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer, the more legendary, the more im-mediately before the present it falls? More than that, our story has, of its own nature, something of the legend about it now and again.

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail-for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, in-clining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no, nor seven months either. Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!
And now we begin"

 

BY THE OCEAN OF TIME

CHAPTER SEVEN

Page 541

"CAN one tell - that is to say, narrate - time, time itself', as such, for its own sake? That would surely be an absurd undertaking. A story which read: "Time passed, It ran on, the time. flowed on-ward" and so forth - no one in his senses could consider that a narrative. It would be as though one .held a single note or chord fora whole hour, and called it music. For narration resembles music in this, that it fills up the time. It " fills it in " and " breaks it up." so that there's something to it," " something going on" - to quote, with due and mouriiful piety, those casual phrases of our departed Joachim, all echo of which so long ago died away. So long ago, indeed, that we wonder if the reader is clear how long ago it was. For time is the medium of narration, as it is the medium of life. Both are in extricably bound up with it, as inextricably as are bodies in space. Similarly, time is the medium of music; music divides, measures, articulates time, and can shorten it, yet enhance its value, both at once. Thus music and narration are alike, in that they can only present themselves as a flowing, as a succession in time, as one thing after another; and both differ from the plastic arts, which are complete in the present, and unrelated to time save as all bodies are, whereas narration - like music - even if it should try to be completely present at any given moment, would need time to do it in.
So much is clear. But it is just as clear that we have also a dif-ference to deal with. For the time element in music is single. Into a section of mortal time music pours itself, thereby inexpressibly' enhancing and ennobling what it fills. But a narrative must have two kinds of time: first, its own, like music, actual time, condi- tioning its presentation and course; and second, the time of its con-tent, which is relative, so extremely relative that the imaginary time of the narrative can either coincide nearly or completely with the actual, or musical, time, or can be a world away. A piece of music called a "Five-minute Waltz "lasts five minutes, and this is / Page 542 / its sole relation to the time element. But a narrative which con-cerned itself with the events of five minutes, might, by extraor-dinary conscientiousness in the telling, take up a thousand times five minutes, and even then seem very short, though long in relation to its imaginary time. On the other hand, the contentual time of a story can shrink its actual time out of all measure. We put it in this way on purpose, in order to suggest another element, an illusory, even, to speak plainly, a morbid element, which is quite definitely a factor in the situation. I am speaking of cases where the story practises a hermetical magic, a temporal distortion of perspective reminding one of certain abnormal and transcendental experiences in actual life. We have records of opium dreams in which the dreamer, during a brief narcotic sleep, had experiences stretching over a period or ten, thirty, sixty years, or even passing the extreme limit of man's temporal capacity for experience: dreams whose contentual time was enormously greater than their actual or mu-sical time, and in which there obtained an incredible foreshortening of events; the images pressing one upon another with such rapidity that it was as though "somethmg had been taken away, like the - spring from a broken watch" from the brain of the sleeper. Such is the descriftion of a hashish eater.
Thus, or in some such way as in these sinister dreams, can the narrative go to work with time; in some such way can time be dealt with in a tale. And if this be so, then it is clear that time, while- the medium of the narrative, can also become its subject. There-fore, if it is too much to say that one can tell a tale of time, it is none the less true that a desire to tell a tale about time is not such an absurd idea as it just now seemed. We freely admit that, in bring-ing up the question as to whether the time can be narrated or not, we have done so only to confess that we had something like that in view.in the present work. And if we touched upon the. further question, whether our readers were clear how .much time had passed since the upnght Joachim, deceased in the mterval, had in-troduced into the conversation the above-quoted phrases about music and time - remarks indicating a certain alchemlstical height-ning of his nature, which, in its goodness and simpliciry, was, of its own unaided power, incapable of any such ideas - we should not have been dismayed to hear that they were not clear. We might even have been gratified, on the plain ground that a thorough-go-ing sympathy with the experiences of our hero is precisely what :" we wish to arouse, and he, Hans Castorp, was himself not clear upon the point in question, no, nor had been for a very long time - a fact that has conditioned his romantic adventures up here, to an / Page 543 / extent which has made of them, in more than one sense, a "time-romance."
How long Joachim had lived here with his cousin, up to the time of his fateful departure, or taken all in all; what had been the date of his going, how long he "had been gone, when he had come back; how long Hans Castorp himself had been up here when his cousin returned and then bade time farewell; how long - dismissing Joachim from our calculations - Frau Chauchat had been absent; how long, since what date, she had been back again (for she did come back); how much mortal time Hans Castorp himself had spent in House Berghof by the time she returned; no one asked him all these questions, and he probably shrank from asking him- self. If they had been put him, he would have tapped his forehead with the tips of his fingers, and most certainly not have known - a phenomenon as disquieting as his incapacity to answer Herr Set-tembrini, that long-ago first evening, when the latter had asked him his age.
All which may sound preposterous; yet there are conditions under which nothing could keep us from losing account of the passage of time, losing account -even of our own age; lacking, as we do, any trace of an inner time-organ, and being absolutely in- capable of fixing it even with an approach to accuracy by our-selves, without any outward fixed pomts as guides. There is a case of a party of miners, buried and shut off from every possibility of knowing the passage of day or night, who told their rescuers that they estimated the time they had spent in darkness, flickering be-tween hope and fear, to be some three days, It had actually been ten. Their high state of suspense might, one would think, have made the time seem longer to them than it actually was, whereas it shrank to less than a third of its objective length. It would ap-pear, then, that under conditions of bewilderment man is likely to under-rather than over-estimate time.
No doubt Hans Castorp, were he wishful to do so, could with-out a great trouble have reckoned himself into certainty; just as the reader can, in case all this vagueness and involvedness are re-pugnant to his healthy sense. Perhaps our hero himself was not quite comfortable either; though he refused to give himself any trouble to wrestle clear of vagueness and involution and arrive at certainty of how much time had gone over his head since he came up here. His scruple was of the conscience - yet surely it is a want
of conscientiousness most flagrant of all not to pay heed to the time.
We do not know whether we may count it in his favour that /Page 544 / circumstances advantaged his lack of inclination, or perhaps we ought to say his disinclination. When Frau Chauchat came back - under circumstances very different from those Hans Castorp had imagined, but of that in its place - when she came back, it was the Advent season again, and the shortest day of the year; the begin-ning; of winter, astronomically speaking, was at hand. Apart. from arbitrary time-divisions, and with reference to the quantity of snow and cold, it had been winter for God knows how long, in-terrupted, as always all too briefly, by burning hot summer days, with a sky of an exaggerated depth of blueness, well-nigh shading into black; real summer days, such as one often had even in the winter, aside from the snow - and the snow one might also have in the summer! This confusion in the seasons, how often had Hans Castorp discussed it with the departed Joachim! It robbed the year of its articulation, made it tediously brief, or briefly tedious,as one chose to put it; and confirmed another of Joachim's disgusted utter-ances, to the effect that there was no time up here to speak of, either long or short. The great confusion played havoc, moreover, with emotional conceptions, or states of consciousness like "still " and "again "; and this was one of the very most gruesome, bewil-dering, uncanny features of the case. Hans Castorp, on his first day up here, had discovered in himself a hankering to dabble in that uncanny, during the five mighty meals in the gaily stenciled dining- room; when a first faint giddiness, as yet quite blameless, had made itself felt.
Since then, however, the deception upon his senses and his mind had assumed much larger proportions. Time, however weakened the subjective perception of it has become, has objective reality in that it brings things to pass. It is a question for professional think- ers - Hans Castorp, in his youthful arrogance, nad one time been led to consider it - whether the hermetically sealed conserve upon its shelf is outside of time. We know that time does its work, even upon Seven-Sleepers. A physician cites a case of a twelve-year- old-girl, who felf asleep and slept thirteen years; assuredly she did not remain thereby a twelve-year-old girl; but bloomed into ripe womanhood while she slept. How could it be otherwise? The dead man - is dead; he has closed his eyes on time. He has plenty of time, or personally speaking, he is timeless. Which does not prevent his hair and nails from growing, or, all in all- but no, we shall not repeat those free-and-easy expressions used once by Joachim, to which Hans Castorp, newly arrived from the flat-land, had taken exception. Hans Castorp's hair and nails grew too, grew rather fast. He sat very often in the barber's chair m the main street of the / Page 545 / Dorf, wrapped in a white sheet; and the barber, chatting obsequi-ously the while, deftly performed upon the fringes of his hair, growing too long behind his ears. First time; then the barber, per-formed their office upon our hero. When he sat there, or when he stood at the door of his loggia and pared his nails and groomed them, with the accessories from his aainty velvet case, he would suddenly be over-powered by a mixture of terror and eager joy that made him fairly giddy. And this giddiness was in both senses of the word: rendering our hero not only dazed and dizzy, but flighty and light-headed, incapable of distinguishing between "now" and "then, " and prone to mingle these together in a time-less eternity.
As we have repeatedly .said, we wish to make him out neither better nor worse than he was; accordingly we must report that he often tried to atone for his reprehensible indulgence in attacks of mysticism, by virtuously and painstakingly stnving to counteract them. He would sit with his watch open in his hand, his thin gold watch with the engraved. monogram on the lid, looking at the porcelain face with the double row of black and red Arabic fig-ures running round it, the two fine and delicately curved gold hands moving in and out over it, and the little second-hand taking its busy ticking course round its own small circle. Hans Castorp, watching the second-hand, essayed to hold time by the tail, to cling to and prolong the passing moments. The little hand tripped on its way, Unheeding the figures it reached, passed over, left behind, left far behind, approached, and came on to again. It had no feeling for time limits, divisions, or measurements of time. Should it not pause on the sixty, or give some small sign that this was the end of one thing and the beginning of the next? But the way it passed over the intervening unmarked strokes showed that the figures and divisons on its path were.simply beneath it, that it moved on, and on. - Hans Castorp shoved his product of the Glashutte works back in his waistcoat pocket, and left time to take care of itself.
How make plain to the sober intelligence of the flat-land the changes that took place in the inner economy of our young adven-turer? The dizzying problem of identities grew grander in its scale.
If to-day's now - even with decent goodwill-was not easy to distinguish from yesterday's, the day before's or the day before
that's, which were all as like each other as the same number of peas, was it not also capable of being confused. with the now which: had been in force a month or a year ago, was it not also likely to be mingled and rolled round in the course of that other, to blend with / Page 546 / it into the always? However one might still differentiate between the ordinary states of consciousness which we attached to the words .. still," .. again," .. next," there was always the temptation to extend the sigificance of such descriptive words as "to-morrow,"yesterday," by which "to-day" holds at bay" the past " and" the future." It would not be hard to imagine the exist-ence of creatures, perhaps upon smaller planets than ours, practis-ing a miniature time-economy, in whose brief span the brisk trip-ping gait of our second-hand would possess the tenacious spatial economy of our hand that marks the hours. And, contrariwise, one can conceive of a world so spacious that its time system too has a majestic stride, and the distinctions between .. still," ., in a little while," " yesterday," .. to-morrow,'? are, in its economy, possessed of hugely extended significance. That, we say, would be not only conceivable, but, viewed in the spirit of a tolerant relativity, and in the light of an already-quoted proverb, might be considered legiti- mate, sound, even estimable. Yet what shall one say of a son of earth, and of our time to boot, for whom a day, a week, a month, a semester, ought to play such an important role, and bring so many changes, so much progress in its !:rain, who one day falls into the vicious habit -,- or perhaps we should say, yields sometimes to the desire - to say" yesterday" when he means a year ago, and .. next year " when he means to-morrow? Certainly we must deem him lost and undone, and the object of our just concern.
There is a state, in our human life, there are certain scenic sur-roundings - if one may use that adjective to describe the surround-ings we have in mind - within which such a confusion and obliteration of distances in time and space is in a measure justified, and temporary submersion in them, say for the term of a holiday, not reprehensible. Hans Castorp, for his part, could never without the greatest longing think of a stroll along the ocean's edge. We know how he loved to have the snowy wastes remind him of his native landscape of broad ocean dunes; we hope the reader's recol-lections will bear us out when we speak of the joys of that straying. You walk, and walk - never will you come home at the right time, for you are of time, and time is vanished. O ocean, far from thee we sit and spin our tale; we turn toward thee our thoughts, our love, loud and expressly we call on thee, that thou mayst be present in the tale we spin, as in secret thou ever wast and shalt be! - A sing-ing solitude, spanned by a sky of palest grey; full of stinging damp that leaves a salty tang upon the lips. - We walk along the springy floor, strewn with seaweed and tiny mussel-shells. Our ears are wrapped about by the great mild, ample wind, that comes / Page 547 / sweeping untrammelled blandly through space, and gently blunts our senses. We wander - wander - watching the tongues of foam lick upward toward our feet and sink back again. The surf is seething; wave after wave, with high, hollow sound, rears up, re-bounds, and runs with a silken rustle out over the flat strand: here one, there one, and more beyond, out on the bar. The dull; perva-sive, sonorous roar loses our ears against all the sounds of the world. O deep content, O wilful bliss of sheer forgetfulness! Let us shut our eyes, safe in eternity! No - for there in the flaming grey- green waste that stretches Wlth uncanny foreshortenIng to lose it-self in the horizon,. look, there is a sail. There? Where is there? How far, how near? You cannot tell. Dizzyingly it escapes your measurement. In order to know how far that ship is from the shore, you would need to know how much room it occupies, as a body in space.1s it large and far off, or is it small and near? Your eye grows dim with uncertainty, for in yourself you have no sense-organ to help. you judge of time or space. - We Walk, walk. How long, how far? Who knows? Nothing is changed by our pacing, there is the same as here, once on a time the same as now, or then; time is drowning in the measureless monotony of space, motion from point-to point is no motion more, where uniformity rules; and where motion is no more motion, time is no longer time.
The schoolmen of the Middle Ages would have it that time is an illusion; that its flow in sequence and causality is only the result of
a sensory device, and the real existence of things in an abiding pres-ent. Was he walking by the sea, the philosopher to whom this thought first came, walking by the sea, with the faint bitterness of eternity upon his lips? We must repeat that, as for us, we have been speaking only of the lawful licence of a holiday, of fantasies born of leisure, of which the well-conducted mind wearies as quickly as a vigorous man does of lying in the warm sand. To call into question our human means and powers of perception, to ques-tion their validity, would be absurd; dishonourable, arbitrary, if it were done in any other spirit than to set bounds to reason, which
she may not overstep without incurring the reproach of neglecting her own task. We can only be grateful to a man like Herr Settem- brini, who with pedagogic dogmatism characterized metaphysics as the " evil principle," to the young man in whose fate we are in- terested, and whom he had once subtly called "life's delicate child." We shall best honour the memory of one departed, who was dear to us, if we say plainly that the meaning, the end and aim of the critical principle can and may be but one thing: the thought
of duty, the law of life. Yes, law-giving wisdom, in marking off the / Page548 / limits of reason, planted precisely at those limits the banner of life, and proclaimed it man's soldierly duty to serve under that banner. May we set it down on the credit side of Hans Castorp's account, that he had been strengthened in his vicious time-economy, his baleful traffic with eternity, by seeing that all his cousin's zeal, called doggedness by a certain melancholy blusterer, had but the more surely brought him to a fatal end?"

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

MOUNTING MISGIVINGS

Page 147 Quoted in full

"other he mentally summoned up various people, the thought of whom might serve him as some sort of mental support.
 There was the good, the upright Joachim, firm as a rock-yet whose eyes in these past months had come to hold such a tragic Shadow, and who had never used to shrug his shoulders, as he did so often now. Joachim, with the "Blue Peter" in his pocket, as Frau Stohr called the receptacle. When Hans Castorp thought of her hard, crabbed face it made him shiver. Yes, there was Joa-chim - who kept constandy at Hofrat Behrens to let him get away and go down to the longed-for service in the " plain "- the " flat-land," as the healthy, normal world was called up here, with a faint yet perceptible nuance of contempt. Joachim served the cure single-mindedly, to the end that he might arrive sooner at his goal and save some of the time which "those up here " so wantonly flung away; served it unquestioningly for the sake of speedy re-covery - but also, Hans Castorp detected, for the sake of the cure'
itself, which, after all, was a service, like another; and was not duty duty, wherever performed? Joachim invatiably went upstairs after only a quarter-hour in the drawing-rooms; and this military precision of his was a crop to the civilian laxity of his cousin, who would otherwise be likely to loiter unprofitably below, with his eye on the company in the small salon. But Hans Castorp was con-vinced there was another and private reason why Joachim with-drew so early; he had known it since the time he saw his cousin's face take on the mottleled pallor, and his mouth assume the pathetic twist. He perfectly understood. For Marusja was almost always there in the evening -laughter-loving Marusja, with the little ruby on her charming hand, the handkerchief with the orange scent, and the swelling bosom, tainted within - Hans Castorp com-prehended that it. was her presence which drove Joachim away, precisely because it so strongly, so fearfully drew him toward her.
Was Joachim too "immured " - and even worse off than him-self, in that, he had five times a day to sit at the same table with Marusja and her orange-scented handkerchief? However that might be, it was clear that Joachim was preoccupied with his own troubles; the thought of him could afford his cousin no mental support. That he took refuge in daily flight was a credit to him; but that he had to flee was anything but reassuring to Hans Ca-storp, who even began to feel that Joachim's good example of faithful service of the cure and the initiation which he owed to his cousin's experience might have also their bad side.
Hans Castorp had not been up here three weeks. But it seemed longer; and the daily routine which Joachim so piously observed"

 

BEHRENS
7

occurs

x
1
=

7
--

7
CASTORP
7

occurs

x

6

=

42

4+2

6
JOACHIM
7

occurs

x

11
=

77

7+7

5
MARUSJA
7

occurs

x

3
=

21

2+1

3
-
28
-
-
21
-
147
-
21
-
2+8
-
-
2+1
-
1+4+7
-
2+1
-
10
-
-
3
-
12
-
3
-
1+0
-
-
-
-
1+2
-
-
-
1
-
-
3
-
3
-
3

 

Page 147 containing seven lettered names of characters

Page 147 Penguin edition 1979 contains 43 lines

Joachim x 10

Joachim's x1

 

7
 BEHRENS
71
35
8
7
 CASTORP
92
29
2
7
 JOACHIM
59
32
5
7
 MARUSJA
83
20
2
28
-
305
116
17
2+8
-
3+0+5
1+1+6
1+7
10
-
8
8
8
1+0
-
-
-
-
1
-
8
8
8

 

305 + 1 = 306

JOACHIM'S

APOSTROPHE'S

?

 
THIRTYFOUR
6
THIRTY
100
37
1
4
FOUR
60
24
6
10
THIRTYFOUR
160
61
9
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
-
1
THIRTYFOUR
7
7
7

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
2
TH
28
10
1
1
I
9
9
9
1
R
18
9
9
2
TY
45
9
9
1
F
6
6
6
2
OU
36
24
6
1
R
18
9
9
10
THIRTY FOUR
160
61
43
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
 4+3
1
THIRTY FOUR
7
7
7

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
2
TH
28
10
1
1
IR
27
18
9
2
TY
45
9
9
1
F
6
6
6
2
OUR
54
18
9
10
THIRTY FOUR
160
61
34
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
3+4
1
THIRTY FOUR
7
7
7

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
2
TH
28
10
1
1
IR
27
18
9
2
TY
45
9
9
1
F
6
6
6
2
OUR
54
18
9
10
THIRTY FOUR
160
61
34
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
3+4
1
THIRTY FOUR
7
7
7

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1824-1955

Page 10

Number 34

"ON their right as they entered, between the main door and the inner one, was the porter's lodge. An official of the French type, in the grey livery of the man at the station, was sitting at the tele­phone, reading the newspaper. He came out and led them through the well-lighted halls, on the left of which lay the reception-rooms. Hans Castorp peered in as he passed, but they were empty. Where, then, were the guests, he asked, and his cousin answered: " In the rest-cure. I had leave tonight to go out and meet you. Otherwise I am always up in my balcony, after supper."
Hans Castorp came near bursting out again. " What! You lie out on your balcony at night, in the damp? " he asked, his voice shak­ing.
" Yes, that is the rule. From eight to ten. But come and see your room now, and get a wash."
They entered the lift - it was an electric one, worked by the Frenchman. As they went up, Hans Castorp wiped. his eyes.
" I'm perfectly worn out with laughing, he said, and breathed through his mouth. "You've told me such a lot of crazy stuff ­
that about the psycho-analysis was the last straw. I suppose I am a bit relaxed from the journey. And my feet are cold - are yours? But my face bums so, it is really unpleasant. Do we eat now? I feel hungry. Is the food decent up here?"
They went noiselessly along the coco matting of the narrow corridor, which was lighted by electric lights in white glass shades set in the ceiling. The walls gleamed with hard white eriamel paint.
They had a glimpse of a nursing sister in a white cap, and eye­glasses on a cord that ran behind her ear. She had the look of a Protestant sister - that is to say, one working without a real vo­cation and burdened with restlessness and ennui. As they went along the corridor, Hans Castorp saw, beside two of the white­enamelled, numbered doors, cenain curious, swollen-looking, balloon-shaped vessels with short necks. He did not think, at the moment, to ask what they were.
" Here you are," said Joachim. " I am next you on the right. The other side you have a Russian couple, rather loud and offensive, but it couldn't be helped. Well, how do you like it? "
There were two doors, an outer and an inner, with clothes­hooks in the space between. Joachim had turned on the ceiling light, and jn its vibrating brilliance the room looked restful and cheery, with practical wliite furniture, whte washable walls, clean / Page 11 / linoleum, and white linen curtains gaily embroidered in modem taste. The door stood open; one saw the lights of the valley and heard distant dance-music. The good Joachim had put a vase of flowers on the chest of drawers - a few bluebells and some yarrow, which he had found himself among the second crop of grass on the slopes.
"Awfully decent of you, "said Hans Castorp. "What a nice room! I can spend a couple of weeks here with pleasure."

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

Page 10

Chapter 1

"Number 34"

"But come and see your room now"

"What a nice room! I can spend a couple of weeks here with pleasure."

Page 663

"Lie down here in the sand! How cool as death it is, / Page 664 / how soft as silk, as flour! It flows in a colourless, thin stream from thy hand and makes a dainty mound beside thee. Dost thou recognize it, this tiny flowing? It is the soundless, tiny stream through the hour glass, that solemn, fragile toy that adorns the hermit's hut. An open book a skull, and in its slender frame the double glass, holding a little sand, taken from eternity, to prolong here, as time, its troubling, solemn mysterious essence. . ."

"For the moment, how-ever, and before Holger withdrew to the tranquillity of his hasten-ing while, it would be better, and certainly most amiable of him, if he would consent to answer a few practical questions. They scarcely as yet knew what, but would he at least be in principle inclined to do so, in his great amiability?

The answer was yes. But now they discovered a great perplexity - what should they ask? It was as in the fairy story, when the fairy or elf grants one question, and there is danger of letting the precious advantage slip through the fingers. There was much in the world, much of the future, that seemed worth knowing, yet it was difficult to choose. At length, as no one else seemed able to sttle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.

Very well, since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated, then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer which none of them succeeded in fathoming, it made the word, or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room, that was to say, through number thirty-four.What was the sense of that."

NUMBER THIRTY- FOUR

"WHAT WAS THE SENSE OF THAT"

?

 
THIRTYFOUR
6
THIRTY
100
37
1
4
FOUR
60
24
6
10
THIRTYFOUR
160
61
9
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
-
1
THIRTYFOUR
7
7
7

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
2
TH
28
10
1
1
I
9
9
9
1
R
18
9
9
2
TY
45
9
9
1
F
6
6
6
2
OU
36
24
6
1
R
18
9
9
10
THIRTY FOUR
160
61
43
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
 4+3
1
THIRTY FOUR
7
7
7

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
2
TH
28
10
1
1
IR
27
18
9
2
TY
45
9
9
1
F
6
6
6
2
OUR
54
18
9
10
THIRTY FOUR
160
61
34
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
3+4
1
THIRTY FOUR
7
7
7

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
2
TH
28
10
1
1
IR
27
18
9
2
TY
45
9
9
1
F
6
6
6
2
OUR
54
18
9
10
THIRTY FOUR
160
61
34
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
3+4
1
THIRTY FOUR
7
7
7

 

 

3
THE
33
15
6
5
WHITE
65
29
2
7
RABBITZ
78
33
6
15
First Total
221
77
14
1+5
Add to Reduce
2+2+1
7+7
1+4
6
Second Total
5
14
5
-
Reduce to Deduce
-
1+4
-
6
Essence of Number
5
5
5

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 711

"These were the moments when the "Seven-Sleeper," not knowing what had happened, was slowly stirring himself in the grass, before he sat up, rubbed his eyes - yes, let us carry the figure to the end, in order to do justice to the movement of our hero's mind: he drew up his legs, stood up, looked about him. He saw himself released, freed from enchantment -not of his own motion; he was fain to confess, but by the operation of exterior powers' of whose activities his own liberation was a minor incident Indeed! Yet though his tiny destiny fainted to nothing in the face of the general, was there not some hint of a personal mercy and grace for him, a manifestation of divine goodness and justice? Would Life receive again her erring and " delicate " child-not by a cheap and easy slipping back to her arms, but sternly, solemnly, penentially - perhaps not even among the living, but only with three salvoes fired over the grave of him a sinner? Thus might he return. He sank on his knees, raising face and hands to a heaven that howsoever dark and sulphurous was no longer the gloomy grotto of his state of sin."

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

FOREWORD

"THE STORY of Hans Castorp, which we would here set forth, ..."

We shall tell it at length, thoroughly, in detail-for when did a narrative seem too long or too short by reason of the actual time or space it took up? We do not fear being called meticulous, in-clining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Not all in a minute, then, will the narrator be finished with the story of our Hans. The seven days of a week will not suffice, no, nor seven months either. Best not too soon make too plain how much mortal time must pass over his head while he sits spun round in his spell. Heaven forbid it should be seven years!
And now we begin"

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1824-1955

HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE

Page 659

" It was learned, funher,. that from her childhood up Ellen had had visions, though at widely separated intervals of time; visions, visible and invisible. What sort of thing were they, now - in­visible visions? Well, for example: when she was a girl of sixteen, she had been sitting one day alone in the living-room of her par­ents' house, sewing at a round table, with her father's dog Freia lying near her on the carpet..The table was covered with a Turk­ish shawl, of the kind old women wear three-cornered across their shoulders. It covered the table diagonally, with the corners some­what hanging over. Suddenly Ellen had seen the corner nearest her roll slowly up. Soundlessly, carefully, and evenly it turned itself up, a good distance toward the centre of the table, so that the resultant roll was rather long; and while this was happening, the dog Freia started up wildly, bracing her forefeet, the hair rising on her body. She had stood on her hind legs, then run howliog into the next room and taken refuge under a sofa. For a whole year thereafter she could not be persuaded to set foot in the living-room.
Was it Holger, Friiulein Kleefeld asked, who had rolled up the cloth? Little Brand did not know. And what had she thought about the affair? But since it was absolutely impossible to think anything about it, little Elly had thought nothing at all. Had she told her parents? No. That was odd. Though so sure she had thought nothing about it, Elly had had a distinct impression, in this and similar cases, that she must keep it to herself, make a profound and shamefaced secret of it. Had she taken it much to heart? No, not particularly. What was there about the roiling up of a cloth to take to hean? But other things she had - for ex­ample, the following:
A year before, in her parent's house at Odense, she had risen, as was her custom, in the cool of the early morning and left her room on the ground-floor, to go up to the breakfast-room, in order to brew the moming coffee before her parents rose. She had almost reached the landing, where the stairs turned, when she saw standing there close by the steps her elder sister Sophie, who had married and gone to Amenca to live. There she was, her physical presence, in a white gown, with, curiously enough, a garland of moist water-lilies on her head, her hands folded against one shoulder, and nodded to her sister. Ellen, rooted to the spot, half joyful, half terrified, cried out: "Oh, Sophie, is that you? " Sophie had nodded once again, and dissolved. She became gradually transparent, soon she was only visible as an ascending current of warm air, then not visible at all. so that Ellen's / Page 660 / path was clear. Later, it transpired that Sister Sophie had died of heat trouble in New Jersey, at that very hour.
Hans Castorp, when Fraulein Kleefeld related this to him, ex­pressed the view that there was some sort of sense in it: the appari­tion here, the death there - after all, they did hang together. And he consented to be present at a spiritualistic sitting, a table-tipping, glass-moving game which they had determined to undertake with Ellen Brand, behind Dr. Krokowski's back, and in defiance of his jealous prohibition.
A small and select group assembled for the purpose, their theatre being Fraulein Kleefeld's room. Besides the hostess, Fraulein Brand, and Hans Castorp, there were only Frau Stohr, Fraulein Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel, and Dr. Ting-Fu. In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the appartus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium­sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wineglass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink. Friiulein Kleefeld served tea, which was gracefully received, as Frau Stohr and Fraulein Levi, despite the harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of c..old feet and palpitations. Cheered by the tea, they took their places about the table, in the rosy twilight dispensed by the pink-shaded table­lamp, as Friiulein Kleefeld, in concession to the mood of the gath­ering, had put out the ceiling light; and each of them laid a finger of his right hand lightly on the foot of the wineglass. This was the prescribed technique. They waited for the glass to move.
That should happen with ease. The top of the table was smooth, the rim of the grass well ground, the pressure of the tremulous fingers, howe!ver lightly laid on, certainly unequal, some of it being exerted vertically, some rather sidewise, and probably in sufficient strength to cause the glass finally to move from its position in the centre of the table. On the periphery of its field it would come in contact with the marked counters; and if the letters on these, when put together, made words that conveyed any sort of sense, the resultant phenomenon would be complex and contaminate, a mixed product of conscious, half -conscious, and unconscious elements; the actual desire and pressure of some, to whom the wish was father to the act, whether or not they were aware of what they did; and the secret acquiescence of some dark stratum in the soul of the generality, a common if subterranean effort toward seemingly strange experiences, in which the sup / Page 661 / pressed self of the individual was more or less involved, most strongly, of course, that of little Elly. This they all knew be­forehand - Hans Castorp even blurted out something of the sort, after his fashion, as they sat and waited. The ladies' palpitation and cold extremities, the forced hilarity of the men, arose from their knowledge that they were come together in the night to embark on an unclean traffic with their own natures, a fearsome prying into unfamiliar regions of themselves, and that they were awaiting the appearance of those illuso.ry or half-realities which we call magic. It was almost entirely for form's sake, and came about quite conventionally, that they asked the sp irits of the departed to speak to them through the movement 0 the glass. Herr Albin offered to be spokesman and deal with such spirits as manifested themselves - he had already had a little experience at seances.
Twenty minutes or more went by. The whisperings had run dry, the first tension relaxed. They supported their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was al­most dropping off. Ellen Brand rested her finger lightly on the glass and directed her pure, childlike gaze away into the rosy light from the table-lamp.
Suddenly the glass tipped, knocked, and ran away from under their hands. They had difficulty in keeping their fingers on it. It pushed over to the very edge of the table, ran along it for a space, then slanted back nearly to the middle; tapped again, and remained quiet.
They were all Startled; favourably, yet with some alarm. Frau Stohr whimpered that she would like to stop, but they told her she should have thought of that before, she must just keep quiet now. Things seemed in train. They stipulated that, in order to answer yes or 00, the glass need not ron to the letters, but might give one or two knocks instead.
" Is there an Intelligence present? " Herr Albin asked, severely directing his gaze over their heads into vacancy. Ater some hesitation, the glass tipped and said yes.
" What is your name? " Herr Albin asked, almost gruffly, and emphasized his energetic speech by shaking his head.
The glass pushed off. It ran with resolution from one point te another, executing a zigzag by returning each time a little dis­tance toward the centre of the table. It visited H, O, and L, then seemed exhausted; but pulled itself together again and sought out the G, and E, and the R. Just as they thought. It was Holger in person, the spirit Holger, who understood such matters as the / Page 661 / pinch of salt and that, but knew better than to mix into lessons at school. He was there, floating in the air, above the heads of the little circle. What should they do with him? A certain diffidence possessed them; they took counsel behind their hands, what they were to ask him. Herr Albin decided to question him about his position and occupation in life, and did so, as before, severely, with frowning brows; as though he were a cross-examining counsel.
The glass was silent awhile. Then it staggered over to the P, zigzagged and returned to O. Great suspense. Dr. Ting-Fu giggled and said Holger must be a poet. Frnu Stohr began to laugh hysterically; which the glass appeared to resent, for after indi­cating the E it stuck and went no further. However, it seemed fairly clear that Dr. Ting-Fu was right.
What the deuce, so Holger was a poet? The glass revived, and superfluously, in apparent pridefulness, rapped yes. A lyric poet, Fraulein Kleefeld asked? She said ly-ric, as Hans Castorp involuntarily noted. Holger was disinclined to specify. He gave no new answer, merely spelled out again, this time quickly and unhesitatingly, the word poet, adding the T he had left off before.
Good, then, a poet. The constraint increased. It was a con­straint that in realIty had to do with manifestations on the part of uncharted regions of their own inner, their subjective selves, but which, because of the illusory, half-actual conditions of these manifestations, referred itself to the objective and external. Did Holger feel at home, and content, in his present state? Dreamily, the glass spelled out the word tranquil. Ah, tranquil It was not a word one would have hit upon oneself, but after the glass spelled it out, they found it well chosen and probable. And how long had Holger been in ,this tranquil state? The answer to this was again something one would never have thought of, and dreamily answered; it was "A hastening while." Very good. As a piece of ventriloquistic poesy from the Beyond, Hans Castorp, in particular, found it capital. A " hastening while" was the time-element Holger lived in: and of course he had to answer as it were in parables, having very likely forgotten how to use earthly terminofogy and standards of exact measurement. Fraulein Levi confessed her curiosity to know how he looked, or had looked, more or less. Had he been a handsome youth? Here Albin said she might ask him herself, he found the request beneath his dignity. So she asked if the spirit had fair hair.
"Beautiful, brown, brown curls," the glass responded, deliberately spelling out the word brown twice. There was much merri­ / Page 663 / ment over this. The ladies said they were in love with him. They kissed their hands at the ceiling. Dr. Ting-Fu, giggling, said Mister Holger must be rather vain.
Ah, what a fury the glass fell into! It ran like mad about the table, quite at random, rocked with rage, fell over and rolled into Frau Stohr's lap, who stretched out her anns and looked down at it pallid with fear. They apologetically conveyed it back to its station, and rebuked the Chinaman. How had he dared to say such a thing - did he see what his indiscretion had led to? Suppose Holger was up and off in his wrath, and refused to say another word!
They addressed themselves to the glass with the extreme of courtesy. WouId Holger not make up some poetry for them? He had said he was a poet, before he went to hover in the hastening while. Ab, how they all yearned to hear him versify! They would love it so!
And 10, the good glass yielded and said yes! Truly there was something placable and good-humoured about the way it tapped. And then Holger the spirit began to poetize, and kept it up, copi­ously, circumstantially, without pausing for thought, for dear knows how long. It seemed impossible to stop him. And what a surprising poem it was, this ventriloquistic effort, delivered to the admiration of the circle - stuff of magic, and shoreless as the sea of which it largely dealt. Sea-wrack in heaps and bands along the narrow strand of the broad-flung bay; an islanded coast, girt by steep, cllify dunes. Ab, see the dim green distance faint and die into eternity, while beneath broad veils of mist in dull cannine and milky radiance the sununer sun delays to sink! No word can utter how and when the watery mirror turned from silver into untold changeful colour-play, to bright or pale, to spreading, opaline and moonstone gleams - or how, mysteriously as it came, the voice­less magic died away. The sea slumbered. Yet the last traces of the sunset linger above and beyond. Until deep in the night it has not
grown dark: a ghostly twilight reigns in the pine forests on the downs, bleaching the sand until it looks like snow- A simulated winter forest all in silence, save where an owl wings rustling flight. Let us stray here at this hour - so soft the sand beneath our tread, so sublime, so mild the night! Far beneath us the sea respires slowly, and murmurs a long whispering in its dream. Does it crave thee to see it again? Step forth to the sallow, glacierlike cliffs of the dunes, and climb quite up into the softness, that runs coolly into thy shoes. The land falls harsh and bushy steeply down to the pebbly shore, and still the last {>arting remnants of the day haunt the edge of the vanishing sky. LIe down here in the sand! How cool as death it is, / Page 664 / how soft as silk, as flour! It flows in a colourless, thin stream from thy hand and makes a dainty little mound beside thee. Dost thou recognize it, this tiny flowing? It is the soundless, tiny stream through the hour-glass, that solemn, fragile toy that adorns the hermit's hut. An open book, a skull, and in its slender frame the double glass, holding a little sand, taken from eternity, to prolong here, as time, its troubling, solemn, mysterious essence. . . .
Thus Holger the spirit and his lyric improvisation, ranging with weird flights of thought from the familiar sea-shore to the cell of a hermit and the tools of his mystic contemplation. And there waf more; more, human and divine, involved in daring and dreamlike terminology - over which the members of the little circle puzzled endlessly as they spelled it out; scarcely finding time for hurried though raptUrous applause, so swiftly did the glass zigzag back and forth, so swiftly the words roll on and on. There was no distant prospect of a period, even at the end of an hour. The glass improvised inexhaustibly of the pangs of birth and the first kiss of lovers; the crown of sorrows, the fatherly goodness of God; plunged into the mysteries of creation, lost itself in other times and lands, in interstellar space; even mentioned the Chaldeans and the zodiac; and would "most, certainly have gone on all night, if the conspirators had not finally taken their fingers from the glass, and expressing their gratitude to Holger, told him that must suffice them for the time, it had been wonderful beyond their wildest dreams, it was an everlasting pity there had been no one at hand to take it down, for now it must inevitably be forgotten, yes, alas, they had already forgotten most of it, thanks to its quality, which made it hard to retain, as dreams are. Next time they must appoint an amanuensis to take it down, and see how it would look m black and white, and read connectedly. For the moment, however, and before Holger withdrew to the tranquillity of his hastening while, it would be better, and certainly most amiable of him, if he would consent to answer a few practical questions. They scarcely as yet knew what, but would he at least be in principle inclined to do so, in his great amiability?
The answer was yes. But now they discovered a great perplexity - what should they ask? It was as in the fairy-story, when the fairy or elf grants one question, and there is danger of letting the precious advantage slip through the fingers. There was much in the world, much of the future, that seemed worth knowing, yet it was so difficult to choose. At length, as no one else seemed able to settle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.
Very well, since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated, then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded In fathoming, it made the word, or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. The whole seemed to be a direction to go slanting through Hans Castorp's room, that was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that? As they sat puzzling and shaking their heads, suddenly there came the heavy thump of a fist on the door."

 

 
THIRTYFOUR
6
THIRTY
100
37
1
4
FOUR
60
24
6
10
THIRTYFOUR
160
61
9
1+0
-
1+6+0
6+1
-
1
THIRTYFOUR
7
7
7

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1824-1955

Page 649

The invisible character sang:

"Now the parting hour has come

I must leave my loved home"

and turned under these circumstances to God, imploring Him to take under His special care and protection his beloved sister. He was going to the wars: the rhythmm changed, grew brisk and lively, dull care and sorrow might go hang! He the invisible singer, longed to be in the field, to stand in the thickest of the fray, where danger was hottest, and fling upon the foe - gallang, God fearing, altogether French, But if, he sang, God should call him to Himself, then would He look down protectingly / Page 650 / on "thee" - meaning the singer's sister, 'as Hans Castorp was perfectly aware, yet the word thrilled him to the depths, and his emotion prolonged itself as the hero sang, to a mighty choral accompaniment:

"O Lord of heaven, hear my prayer!
Guard Marguerite within Thy shelt'rIng care!"

There the record ceased. We have dwelt upon it because oF Hans' Castorp's especial penchant; but also because it played a certain role on a later and most strange occasion. And now we come back to the fifth and last piece in his group of high favourites: this time not French, but something especially ,and exemplarily German; not opera either, but a lied, one of those which are folk-song and masterpiece together, and from the combination receive their peculiar stamp as spiritual epitomes. Why should we beat about the bush? It was Schubert's "Linden-tree," it was none other than the old, old favourite, "Am Brunnen vor demTore."

It was sung to piano ,accompaniment by a tenor voice; and to. the singer was a lad of parts and discernment, who knew how to render with great skill, fine musical feeling and finesse inrecitative his simple yet consummate theme. We all know that the noble lied sounds rather differently when' given as a concert-number from its rendition in the childish or the popular mouth. In its to simplified form. the melody is sung straight through; whereas in the original art-song, the key changes to minor in the second of the eight-line stanzas, changes back again with beautiful effect to major in the fifth line; is dramatically resolved in the following "bitter blasts" and "facing the tempest"; and returns again only with the last four lines of the third stanza, which are repeated to finish out the melody. The truly compelling turn in the melody occurs three times, in its modulated second half, the third of time in the repetition of the last half-strophe" Ay, onward, ever onward." The enchanting turn, which we would not touch too nearly in bold words, comes on the phrases "Upon its branches fair " A message in my ear," "Yet ever in my breast"; and each time the tenor rendered them, in his clear, warm voice, with his excellent breathing-technique, with the suggestion of a. sob, and so much sensitive, beauty-loving intelligence, the listener felt his heart gripped in undreamed-of fashion with an effect the singer knew how to heighten by head-tones of extraordinary ardour on the lines" I found my solace there," and " For rest and Peace are here," In the repetition of the last line;. "Here shouldst thou find / Page 651 / thy rest," he sang the " shouldst thou" the first time yearningly, at full strength, but the second in the tenderest flute-tones. So much for the song, and the rendering of it. For the earlier selections, we may flatter ourselves, perhaps, that we have been ble to communicate to the reader some understanding, more or less precise, of Hans Castorp's intimate emotional participation in the chosen numbers of his nightly programme. But to make clear what this last one, the old "Linden-tree," meant to him, is truly, a ticklish endeavour; requiring great delicacy of emphasis if more harm than good is not to come of the undertaking.

Let us put it thus: a conception which is of the spirit, and therefore significant, is so because it reaches beyond itself to become the expession and exponent of a larger conception, a whole world of feeling and sentiment, which, whether more or less completely, is mirrored in the first, and in this wise, accordingly, the degree of its significance measured. Further, the love felt for such a creation is in itself "significant": betraying something of the person who cherishes it, characterizing his relation to that broader world the conception bodies forth - which, consciously or unconsciously, he loves along with and in the thing itself.

May we take it that our simple hero, after so many years of hermetic-pedagogic discipline, of ascent from one stage of being to another has now reached a point where .he is conscious of the" meaningfulness" of his love and the object of it? We assert, we record, that he has. To him the song meant a whole world, a world which he must have loved, else he could not have so desperately loved that which it represented and symbolized to him. We know what we are saymg when we add - perhaps rather darkly - that he might have had a different fate if his temperament had been less accessible to the charms of the sphere of feeling, the general attitude of mind, which the lied so profoundly, so mystically epitomized. The truth was that his very destiny had been marked by stages, adventures, insights, and these flung up in his mind, suitable themes for his "stock-taking" activities, and these, in their turn, ripened him into an intuitional critic of this sphere, of this its absolutely exquisite image, and his love of it. To the point even that he was quite capable of bringing up all three as objects of his conscientious scruples!

Only one totally ignorant of the tender 'passion will suppose that such scruples .can detract from the object of love. On the contrary, they but give it spice. It is they which lend love the spur of passion, so that one might almost,define passion as misgiving / Page 653 / love. But wherein lay Hans Castorp's conscientious and stock-taking misgiving; as to the ultimate propriety of his love for the enchanting lied and the world whose image it was? What was the world behind the song, which the motions of his conscience made to seem a world of forbidden love?

It was death;

What utter and explicit madness! That glorious song! An in­disputable masterpiece, sprung' froni the profoundest and holiest depths of racial feeling; a precious possession, the archetype of the genuine; embodied loveliness. What vile detraction!

Yes. Ah, yes! All very line. Thus must every upright man speak.
But for all that, behind this so lovely and pleasant artistic production stood - death. It had with death cenain relations, which one might love, yet not without consciously, and in a " stock-taking" sense, acknowledging a certain illicIt element in one's love. Perhaps in its original form it was not sympathy with death; perhaps it was something very much of the people and racy of life; but spiritual sympathy with it was none the less sympathy with death. At first blush proper and pious enough, indisputably. But the issues of it were sinister.

What was all this he was thinking? He would not have listened to it from one of you. Sinister issues. Fantastical, dark-corner, misanthropic, torture-ehamber thoughts, Spanish black and the ruff, lust not love - and these the issues of pure-eyed loveliness!

Unquestioning confidence, Hans Castorp knew, he had never placed in Herr Settembrini. But he remembered now an admonition the enlightened mentor had given him. in past time, at the beginning of his hermetic career; on the subject of "spiritual backsliding" to darker ages. Perhaps it would be well to make cautious application of that wisdom to the present case. It was the backslidmg which Herr Settembrini had characterized as "dis­ease"; the e:pitome itself, the spiritual phase to which one back­slid - that too would appeal to his pedagogic mind as "diseased".? And even so? Hans Castorp's loved nostalgic lay, and the sphere of feeling to which it belonged-morbid? Nothing of the sort. They were the sanest, the homeliest in the world. And yet - This was a fruit, sound and splendid enough for the instant or so, yet extraordinarily prone to decay; the purest refreshment of the spirit, if enjoyed at the right moment, but the next, capable of spreading decay and corruption among men. It was the fruit of life, conceived of death, pregnant of dissolution; it was a miracle of the soul, perhaps the highest, in the eye and sealed with the blessing of consienceless beauty; but on cogent grounds. re- / Page 653 / garded with mistrust by the eye of shrewd geniality dutifully "taking stock" in its love of the organic; it was a subject for self-conquest at the definite behest of conscience.

Yes, self-conquest - that might well be the essence of triumph over this love, this soul-enchantment that.bore such sinister fruit! Hans Castorp's thoughts, or rather his prophetic half-thoughts soared high, as he sat there in night and silence before his truncated sarcophagus of music. They soared higher than his understanding, they were alchemistically enhanced. Ah, what power had this soul-enchantment! We were all its sons, and could achieve mighty things on earth, in so far as we served it. One need have no more genius, only .. much more. talent, than the author of the "Lindenbawn," to be such an artist of soul-enchantment as should give to the song a giant volume by which it should subjugate the world. Kingdoms might be founded upon it, earthly, all-too­earthly kingdoms, solid, "progressive," not at all nostalgic - in which the song degenerated to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity. But its faithful son might still be he who consumed his life in self-conquest; and died, on his lips the new word of love which as yet he knew not how to speak. Ah, it was worth dying for, the enchanted lied! But he who died for it, died indeed no longer for it; was a hero only because he died for the new, the new word of love and the future that whispered in his heart.
These, then, were Hans Castorp's favourite records.

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1824-1955

HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE


EDHIN KROKOWSKI'S lectures had in the swift passage of the years taken an unexpected turn. His researches, which dealt. with psycho-analysis and the dream-life of humanity, had always had a subterranean, not to say catacombish character; but now, by a transition so gradual that one scarcely marked it, they had passed over to the frankly supernatural, and his fortnightly lectures in the dining-room - the prime attraction. of the house, the pride of the prospectus, delivered in a drawling, foreign voice, in frock­coat and sandals from behind a little covered table, to the rapt and motionless Berghof audience - these lectures no longer treated of the disguised activities of love and the retransformation of the illness into the conscious emotion. They had gone on to the extraordinary phenomena of hypnotism and somnambulism, telepathy, "dreaming true," and second sight; the marvels of hysteria, the expounding of which widened the philosophic horizon to such an extent that suddenly before the listener's eyes would glitter / Page/ 654 / darkly puzzles'like that of the relation of matter to the psychic yes, even the puzzle of life itself, which, it appeared, was easier to approach by uncanny, even morbid paths than by the way of health.

We say this because we consider it our duty to confound those flippant 'spirits who declared that Dr. Krokowski had resorted to mystification for the sake of redeeming his lectures from hopeless monotony; in other words, with purely emotional ends in view. Thus spoke the slanderous tongues which are everywhere to be found: True, the gentlemen at the Monday lectures flicked their ears harder than ever to make them hear; Fraulein Levi looked, if possible; even more like a wax figure wound up by machinery. But these effects were as legitimate as the train of thought pursued by the mind of the learned gentleman, and for that he might claim 'that it was not only consistent but even inevitable. The field of his study had always been those wide,.dark tracts of the human soul, which one had been used to call the subconsciousness, though they might perhaps better be called the superconsciousness, since from them sometimes emanates a knowingness beyond anything of which the conscious intelligence is capable, and giving rise to the hypothesis that there may subsist connexions and associations between the lowest and least illumined regions of the individual soul and a wholly knowing All-soul. The province of the subsconscious, "occult" in the proper sense of ,the word, very soon shows itself to be occult in the narrower sense as well, and forms one of the sources whence flow the phenomena we have agreed thus to characterize. But that is not all. Whoever recognizes a symptom of organic disease as an effect of the conscious soul-life of forbidden and hystericized emotions, recoguizes the creative force of the psychical within the. material - a force which one is inclined to claim as a second source of magic phenomena. Idealist of the pathological, not to say pathological idealist, he sees himself at the point of departure of certain trains of thought which will shortly issue in the problem of existence, that is to say in the problem of the relation between spirit and matter. The materialist, son of a philosophy of sheer animal vigour, can never be dissuaded from explaining spirit as a mere phosphorescent product,of matter; whereas the idealist, proceeding from the principle of. creative hysteria, is inclined; and very readily resolved, to· answer the question of primacy in the exactly opposite sense. Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg - a strife which assumes its, extraordinary complexity from the fact / Page 655 / that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen to that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg.

Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg

Causality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A question related to this argument is which came first, the chicken or the egg?

 

CHICKENS OR EGGS EGGS OR CHICKEN FIRST YOU SEE IT THEN YOU DONT

 

Page 654 Take it all in all, there is here nothing less than the old strife over which was first, the chicken or the egg - a strife which assumes its, extraordinary complexity from the fact / Page 655 / that no egg is thinkable except one laid by a hen, and no hen to that has not crept out of a previously postulated egg.

Well then, it was such matters as these that Dr. Krokowski discussed in his lectures. He came upon them organically, logically, legitimately - that fact cannot be over-emphasized. We will even add that he had already begun to treat of them before the arrival of Ellen Brand upon the scene of action, and the progress of matters into the empirical and experimental stage.

Who was Ellen Brand? We had almost forgotten that our readers do not know her, so familiar to us is the name. Who was she? Hardly anybody, at first glance. A sweet young thing of nineteen years, a flaxen-haired Dane, not from Copenhagen but from Odense-on-Funen, where her father had a butter business. She herself had been in commercial life for a couple of years or so; with a - sleeve-protector on her writing-arm she had sat over heavy books, perched on a revolving stool in a provincial branch of a city bank-and developed temperature. It was a trifling case, probably more suspected than real, though Elly was indeed fragile, fragile and obviously chlorotic - distinctly sympathetic too, giving one a yearning to lay one's hand upon the flaxen head- as the Hofrat regularly did, when he spoke to her in the dining-room. A northern freshness emanated from her, a chaste and glassy, maidenly chaste atmosphere surrounded her, she was entirely lovable, with a pure, open look from childlike blue eyes, and a pointed, fine, High-German speech, slightly broken, with small, typical mispronunciations. About her features there was nothing unusual. Her chin was too short. She sat at table with the Kleefeld, who mothered her.

Now this little Fraulein Brand, this little Elly, this friendly­natured little Danish bicycle-rider and stoop-shouldered young counter-jumper, had things about her, of which no one could have dreamed, at first sight of her transparent small personality, but which began to discover themselves after a few weeks; and these it became Dr. Krokowski's affair to lay bare in all their extraordinariness.

The leamed, man received his first hint in the course of a general evening conversation. Various guessing games were being played; hidden objects found by the aid of strains from the piano, which swelled higher when one approached the right spot, and died away when the seeker strayed on a false scent. Then one person went outside and waited while it was decided what task he should perform; as, exchanging the rings of two selected persons; inviting someone to dance by making three bows before her; taking a / Page 656 / designated book from the shelves. and presenting it to this or that person - and more of the same kind. It is worthy of remark such games had not been the practice among the Berghof guests. Who had introduced them was not afterwards easy to decide; it had not been Elly Brand, yet they had begun since her arrival.

The participants were nearly all old friends of ours, among them Hans Castorp. They showed themselves apt in greater or less degree - some of them were entirely incapa.ble. But Elly Brands talent was soon seen to be surpassmg, stnking, unseemly. Her power of finding hidden articles was passed over with applause and admiring laughter. But when it came to a concerted seies of actions they were struck dumb. She did whatever they covenanted she should do, did it directly she entered the room; with a gentle smile, without hesitation, without the help of music. She fetched a pinch of salt from the dining-room, sprinkled it over Lawyer Paravant's head; took him by the hand, led him to the piano and played the beginning of a nursery ditty with his forefinger; then brought him back to his seat, curtseyed, fetched a footstool and finally seated herself at his feet, all of that being precisely what they had cudgelled their brains to set her for a task.

She had been listening.

She reddened. With a sense of relief at her embarrassment they began in chorus to chide her; but she assured them she had not blushed in that serise. She had not listened, not outside, not at the door, truly, truly she had not!

Not outside, not at the door?

"Oh, no" - she begged their pardon. She had listened after she came back, in the room, she could not help it.

How not help it?

Something whispered to her, she said; It whispered and told her what to do, softly, but quite clearly and distinctly.

Obviously that was an admission. In a certain sense she was aware, she had confessed, that she had cheated. She should have said beforehand that she was no good to play such a game, if she had the advantage of being whispered - to. A competition loses all sense if one of the competitors has unnatural advantages over the others. In a sporting sense, she was straightway disqualified­disqualified in a way that made chills run up. and down their backs. With one voice they called on Dr. Krokowski, they ran to fetch him, and he came. He was immediately at home in the situation, and stood there; sturdy, heartily smiling,. in his very essence inviting confidence. Breathless they told him they had / Page 657 / Something quite Abnormal for him, an omniscient; a girl with voices. Yes, yes? Only let them be calm, they should see. This was his native heath, quagmirish and uncertain footing enough for the rest of them, yet he moved upon it with assured tread. He asked questions, and they told him. Ah, there she was - come, my child, is it true, what they are telling me? And he laid his hand on her head, as scarcely anyone could resist doing. Here was much ground for interest, none at all for consternation. He plunged the gaze of his brown, exotic eyes deep into Ellen Brands blue ones, and ran his hand down over her shoulder and arm, stroking her gently. She returned his gaze with increasing submission, her head inclined slowly toward her shoulder and breast. Her eyes were actually beginning to glaze, when the master made a careless outward motion with his hand before her face. Immediately there­after he expressed his opinion that everything was in perfect order, and sent the overwrought company off to the evening cure, with the exception of Elly Brand, with whom he said he wished to have a little chat.

A little chat. Quite so. But nobody felt easy at the word, it was just the sort of word Krokowski the merry comrade used by preference, and it gave them cold shivers. Hans Castorp, as he sought his tardy, reclining-chair, remembered the feeling with which he had seen Elly's illicit achievements and heard her shame­faced explanation. as though the ground were shifting under his feet, and giving him a slightly qualmish feeling, a mild seasickness. He had never been in an earthquake; but he said to himself that one must experience a like sensation of unequivocal alarm. But he had also felt great curiosity at these fateful gifts of Ellen Brand; combined, it is true, with the knowledge that, their field was with difficulty accessible to the spirit, and the doubt as to whether it was not barren, or even sinful, so far as he was concerned -all which did not prevent his feeling from being what in fact it actually, was, curiosity. Like everybody else, Hans Castorp had, ,at his time of life, heard this and that about the mysteries of nature, or the supernatural. We. have mentioned the clairvoyante great-aunt, of whom a melancholy tradition had come down. But, the world of the supernatural, though theoretically and objectively he had recognized its existence, had never come close to him, he had never had any practical experience of it. And his aversion from it, a matter of taste, an aesthetic revulsion, a re­action of human pride -'if we may use such large words in connexion with our modest hero - was almost as great as his curiousity. He felt beforehand, quite clearly, that such experiences, / Page 658 / whatever the course of them, could never be anything but in bad taste, unintelligible and humanly valueless. And yet he was on fire to go through them. He was aware that his alternative of "barren" or else "sinful," bad enough in itself, was in reality not an alternative at all, since the two ideas fell together, and calling a thing spiritually unavailable was only an a-moral way of of expressing its forbidden character. But the "placet experiri" planted in Hans Castorp's mind by one who would surely and resoundingly have reprobated any experimentation at all in this field, was planted firmly enough. By little and little his morality and his curiosity approached and overlapped, or had probably always done so; the pure curiosity of inquiring youth on its travels, which had already brought him pretty close to the forbidden field, what time he tasted the mystery of personality, and for which he had claimed the justification that it too was almost military in character, in that it did not weakly avoid the forbidden, when it presented itself. Hans Castorp came to the final resolve not to avoid; but to stand his ground if it came to more developments in the case of Ellen Brand.

Dr. Krokowski had issued a strict prohibition against any further experimentation on the part of the laity upon Fraulein Brand's mysterious gifts. he had pre-empted the child for his scientific use, held sittings with her in his scientific oubliette, hypnotized her, it was reported, in an effort to arouse and discipline her slumbering potentialities, to make researches into her previous psychic life. Hermine Kleefeld, who mothered and patronized the child, tried to do the same; and under the seal of secrecy a certain number of facts were ascertained, which under the same seal she spread throughout the house, even unto the porter's lodge. She learned , for example, that he who - or that which whispered the answers, into the little one's ear at games was called Holger. This Holger was the departed and etherealized spirit of a young man, the familiar, something like the guardian angel, of little Elly. So it was he who had told all that about a pinch of salt and the tune played with Lawyer Paravant's finger? Yes those spirit lips, so close to her ear that they were like a caress, and tickled a little, making her smile, had whispered her what to do. It must have been very nice when she was in school and had not prepared her lesson to have him tell her the answers. Upon this point Elly was silent. Later she said she thought he would not have been allowed. It would have been forbidden to him to mix in such serious matters - and moreover, he would probably not have known the answers himself.

Page 659

It was learned, further, that from her childhood up Ellen had had visions, though at widely separated intervals of time; visions, visible and invisible. What sort of thing were they, now - in­visible visions? Well, for example: when she was a girl of sixteen, she had been sitting one day alone in the living-room of her parents' house, sewing at a round table, with her father's dog Freia lying near her on the carpet..The table was covered with a Turkish shawl, of the kind old women wear three-cornered across their shoulders. It covered the table diagonally, with the corners some­what hanging over. Suddenly Ellen had seen the corner nearest her roll slowly up. Soundlessly, carefully, and evenly it turned itself up, a good distance toward the centre of the table, so that the resultant roll was rather long; and while this was happening, the dog Freia started up wildly, bracing her forefeet, the hair rising on her body. She had stood on her hind legs, then run howliog into the next room and taken refuge under a sofa. For a whole year thereafter she could not be persuaded to set foot in the living-room.
Was it Holger, Fraulein Kleefeld asked, who had rolled up the cloth? Little Brand did not know. And what had she thought about the affair? But since it was absolutely impossible to think anything about it, little Elly had thought nothing at all. Had she told her parents? No. That was odd. Though so sure she had thought nothing about it, Elly had had a distinct impression, in this and similar cases, that she must keep it to herself, make a profound and shamefaced secret of it. Had she taken it much to heart? No, not particularly. What was there about the roiling up of a cloth to take to heart? But other things she had - for example, the following:
A year before, in her parent's house at Odense, she had risen, as was her custom, in the cool of the early morning and left her room on the ground-floor, to go up to the breakfast-room, in order to brew the moming coffee before her parents rose. She had almost reached the landing, where the stairs turned, when she saw standing there close by the steps her elder sister Sophie, who had married and gone to Amenca to live. There she was, her physical presence, in a white gown, with, curiously enough, a garland of moist water-lilies on her head, her hands folded against one shoulder, and nodded to her sister. Ellen, rooted to the spot, half joyful, half terrified, cried out: "Oh, Sophie, is that you? " Sophie had nodded once again, and dissolved. She became gradually transparent, soon she was only visible as an ascending current of warm air, then not visible at all. so that Ellen's / Page 660 / path was clear. Later, it transpired that Sister Sophie had died of heart trouble in New Jersey, at that very hour.

Hans Castorp, when Fraulein Kleefeld related this to him, expressed the view that there was some sort of sense in it: the apparition here, the death there - after all, they did hang together. And he consented to be present at a spiritualistic sitting, a table-tipping, glass-moving game which they had determined to undertake with Ellen Brand, behind Dr. Krokowski's back, and in defiance of his jealous prohibition.

A small and select group assembled for the purpose, their theatre being Fraulein Kleefeld's room. Besides the hostess, Fraulein Brand, and Hans Castorp, there were only Frau Stohr, Fraulein Levi, Herr Albin, the Czech Wenzel, and Dr. Ting-Fu. In the evening, on the stroke of ten, they gathered privily, and in whispers mustered the apparatus Hermine had provided, consisting of a medium­sized round table without a cloth, placed in the centre of the room, with a wineglass upside-down upon it, the foot in the air. Round the edge of the table, at regular intervals, were placed twenty-six little bone counters, each with a letter of the alphabet written on it in pen and ink. Fraulein Kleefeld served tea, which was gracefully received, as Frau Stohr and Fraulein Levi, despite the harmlessness of the undertaking, complained of cold feet and palpitations. Cheered by the tea, they took their places about the table, in the rosy twilight dispensed by the pink-shaded table­lamp, as Fraulein Kleefeld, in concession to the mood of the gathering, had put out the ceiling light; and each of them laid a finger of his right hand lightly on the foot of the wineglass. This was the prescribed technique. They waited for the glass to move.
That should happen with ease. The top of the table was smooth, the rim of the grass well ground, the pressure of the tremulous fingers, howe!ver lightly laid on, certainly unequal, some of it being exerted vertically, some rather sidewise, and probably in sufficient strength to cause the glass finally to move from its position in the centre of the table. On the periphery of its field it would come in contact with the marked counters; and if the letters on these, when put together, made words that conveyed any sort of sense, the resultant phenomenon would be complex and contaminate, a mixed product of conscious, half-conscious, and unconscious elements; the actual desire and pressure of some, to whom the wish was father to the act, whether or not they were aware of what they did; and the secret acquiescence of some dark stratum in the soul of the generality, a common if subterranean effort toward seemingly strange experiences, in which the sup / Page 661 / pressed self of the individual was more or less involved, most strongly, of course, that of little Elly. This they all knew be­forehand - Hans Castorp even blurted out something of the sort, after his fashion, as they sat and waited. The ladies' palpitation and cold extremities, the forced hilarity of the men, arose from their knowledge that they were come together in the night to embark on an unclean traffic with their own natures, a fearsome prying into unfamiliar regions of themselves, and that they were awaiting the appearance of those illusory or half-realities which we call magic. It was almost entirely for form's sake, and came about quite conventionally, that they asked the spirits of the departed to speak to them through the movement of the glass. Herr Albin offered to be spokesman and deal with such spirits as manifested themselves - he had already had a little experience at seances.
Twenty minutes or more went by. The whisperings had run dry, the first tension relaxed. They supported their right arms at the elbow with their left hands. The Czech Wenzel was al­most dropping off. Ellen Brand rested her finger lightly on the glass and directed her pure, childlike gaze away into the rosy light from the table-lamp.
Suddenly the glass tipped, knocked, and ran away from under their hands. They had difficulty in keeping their fingers on it. It pushed over to the very edge of the table, ran along it for a space, then slanted back nearly to the middle; tapped again, and remained quiet.
They were all Startled; favourably, yet with some alarm. Frau Stohr whimpered that she would like to stop, but they told her she should have thought of that before, she must just keep quiet now. Things seemed in train. They stipulated that, in order to answer yes or no, the glass need not run to the letters, but might give one or two knocks instead.
" Is there an Intelligence present? " Herr Albin asked, severely directing his gaze over their heads into vacancy. After some hesitation, the glass tipped and said yes.
" What is your name? " Herr Albin asked, almost gruffly, and emphasized his energetic speech by shaking his head.
The glass pushed off. It ran with resolution from one point te another, executing a zigzag by returning each time a little distance toward the centre of the table. It visited H, O, and L, then seemed exhausted; but pulled itself together again and sought out the G, and E, and the R. Just as they thought. It was Holger in person, the spirit Holger, who understood such matters as the / Page 662 / pinch of salt and that, but knew better than to mix into lessons at school. He was there, floating in the air, above the heads of the little circle. What should they do with him? A certain diffidence possessed them; they took counsel behind their hands, what they were to ask him. Herr Albin decided to question him about his position and occupation in life, and did so, as before, severely, with frowning brows; as though he were a cross-examining counsel.
The glass was silent awhile. Then it staggered over to the P, zigzagged and returned to O. Great suspense. Dr. Ting-Fu giggled and said Holger must be a poet. Frnu Stohr began to laugh hysterically; which the glass appeared to resent, for after indi­cating the E it stuck and went no further. However, it seemed fairly clear that Dr. Ting-Fu was right.
What the deuce, so Holger was a poet? The glass revived, and superfluously, in apparent pridefulness, rapped yes. A lyric poet, Fraulein Kleefeld asked? She said lyric, as Hans Castorp involuntarily noted. Holger was disinclined to specify. He gave no new answer, merely spelled out again, this time quickly and unhesitatingly, the word poet, adding the T he had left off before.
Good, then, a poet. The constraint increased. It was a con­straint that in realIty had to do with manifestations on the part of uncharted regions of their own inner, their subjective selves, but which, because of the illusory, half-actual conditions of these manifestations, referred itself to the objective and external. Did Holger feel at home, and content, in his present state? Dreamily, the glass spelled out the word tranquil. Ah, tranquil It was not a word one would have hit upon oneself, but after the glass spelled it out, they found it well chosen and probable. And how long had Holger been in ,this tranquil state? The answer to this was again something one would never have thought of, and dreamily answered; it was "A hastening while." Very good. As a piece of ventriloquistic poesy from the Beyond, Hans Castorp, in particular, found it capital. A " hastening while" was the time-element Holger lived in: and of course he had to answer as it were in parables, having very likely forgotten how to use earthly terminofogy and standards of exact measurement. Fraulein Levi confessed her curiosity to know how he looked, or had looked, more or less. Had he been a handsome youth? Here Albin said she might ask him herself, he found the request beneath his dignity. So she asked if the spirit had fair hair.
"Beautiful, brown, brown curls," the glass responded, deliberately spelling out the word brown twice. There was much merri­ / Page 663 / ment over this. The ladies said they were in love with him. They kissed their hands at the ceiling. Dr. Ting-Fu, giggling, said Mister Holger must be rather vain.
Ah, what a fury the glass fell into! It ran like mad about the table, quite at random, rocked with rage, fell over and rolled into Frau Stohr's lap, who stretched out her anns and looked down at it pallid with fear. They apologetically conveyed it back to its station, and rebuked the Chinaman. How had he dared to say such a thing - did he see what his indiscretion had led to? Suppose Holger was up and off in his wrath, and refused to say another word!
They addressed themselves to the glass with the extreme of courtesy. WouId Holger not make up some poetry for them? He had said he was a poet, before he went to hover in the hastening while. Ah, how they all yearned to hear him versify! They would love it so!
And lo, the good glass yielded and said yes! Truly there was something placable and good-humoured about the way it tapped. And then Holger the spirit began to poetize, and kept it up, copiously, circumstantially, without pausing for thought, for dear knows how long. It seemed impossible to stop him. And what a surprising poem it was, this ventriloquistic effort, delivered to the admiration of the circle - stuff of magic, and shoreless as the sea of which it largely dealt. Sea-wrack in heaps and bands along the narrow strand of the broad-flung bay; an islanded coast, girt by steep, cllify dunes. Ah, see the dim green distance faint and die into eternity, while beneath broad veils of mist in dull cannine and milky radiance the sununer sun delays to sink! No word can utter how and when the watery mirror turned from silver into untold changeful colour-play, to bright or pale, to spreading, opaline and moonstone gleams - or how, mysteriously as it came, the voice­less magic died away. The sea slumbered. Yet the last traces of the sunset linger above and beyond. Until deep in the night it has not
grown dark: a ghostly twilight reigns in the pine forests on the downs, bleaching the sand until it looks like snow- A simulated winter forest all in silence, save where an owl wings rustling flight. Let us stray here at this hour - so soft the sand beneath our tread, so sublime, so mild the night! Far beneath us the sea respires slowly, and murmurs a long whispering in its dream. Does it crave thee to see it again? Step forth to the sallow, glacierlike cliffs of the dunes, and climb quite up into the softness, that runs coolly into thy shoes. The land falls harsh and bushy steeply down to the pebbly shore, and still the last parting remnants of the day haunt the edge of the vanishing sky. Lie down here in the sand! How cool as death it is, / Page 664 / how soft as silk, as flour! It flows in a colourless, thin stream from thy hand and makes a dainty little mound beside thee. Dost thou recognize it, this tiny flowing? It is the soundless, tiny stream through the hour-glass, that solemn, fragile toy that adorns the hermit's hut. An open book, a skull, and in its slender frame the double glass, holding a little sand, taken from eternity, to prolong here, as time, its troubling, solemn, mysterious essence. . . .
Thus Holger the spirit and his lyric improvisation, ranging with weird flights of thought from the familiar sea-shore to the cell of a hermit and the tools of his mystic contemplation. And there waf more; more, human and divine, involved in daring and dreamlike terminology - over which the members of the little circle puzzled endlessly as they spelled it out; scarcely finding time for hurried though raptUrous applause, so swiftly did the glass zigzag back and forth, so swiftly the words roll on and on. There was no distant prospect of a period, even at the end of an hour. The glass improvised inexhaustibly of the pangs of birth and the first kiss of lovers; the crown of sorrows, the fatherly goodness of God; plunged into the mysteries of creation, lost itself in other times and lands, in interstellar space; even mentioned the Chaldeans and the zodiac; and would "most, certainly have gone on all night, if the conspirators had not finally taken their fingers from the glass, and expressing their gratitude to Holger, told him that must suffice them for the time, it had been wonderful beyond their wildest dreams, it was an everlasting pity there had been no one at hand to take it down, for now it must inevitably be forgotten, yes, alas, they had already forgotten most of it, thanks to its quality, which made it hard to retain, as dreams are. Next time they must appoint an amanuensis to take it down, and see how it would look m black and white, and read connectedly. For the moment, however, and before Holger withdrew to the tranquillity of his hastening while, it would be better, and certainly most amiable of him, if he would consent to answer a few practical questions. They scarcely as yet knew what, but would he at least be in principle inclined to do so, in his great amiability?
The answer was yes. But now they discovered a great perplexity - what should they ask? It was as in the fairy-story, when the fairy or elf grants one question, and there is danger of letting the precious advantage slip through the fingers. There was much in the world, much of the future, that seemed worth knowing, yet it was so difficult to choose. At length, as no one else seemed able to settle, Hans Castorp, with his finger on the glass, supporting his cheek on his fist, said he would like to know what was to be / Page 665 / the actual length of his stay up here, instead of the three weeks originally fixed.
Very well, since they thought of nothing better, let the spirit out of the fullness of his knowledge answer this chance query. The glass hesitated, then pushed off. It spelled out something very queer, which none of them succeeded In fathoming, it made the word, or the syllable Go, and then the word Slanting and then something about Hans Castorp's room. The whole seemed to be a direction to go slanting through Hans Castorp's room, that was to say, through number thirty-four. What was the sense of that? As they sat puzzling and shaking their heads, suddenly there came the heavy thump of a fist on the door.
They all jumped. Was it a surprise? Was Dr. Krokowski standing without, come to break up the forbidden session? They looked up guiltily, expecting the betrayed one to enter. But then came a crashing knock on the middle of the table, asif to testify that the first knock too had come from the inside and not the outside of the room.
They accused Herr Albin of perpetrating this rather contemptible jest, but he denied it on his honour; and even without his word they all felt fairly certain no one of their circle was guilty. Was it Holger, then? They looked at Elly, suddenly struck by her silence. She was leaning back in her chair, with drooping wrists and finger-tips poised on the table-edge, her head bent on one shoulder, her eyebrows raised, her little mouth drawn down so that it looked even smaller. with a tiny smile that had something both silly and sly about it, and gazing into space with vacant, childlike blue eyes. They called to her, but she gave no sign of consciousness. And suddenly the night-table light went out.
Went out? Frau Stohr, beside herself, made great outcry, for she had heard the switch turned. The light, then, had not gone out, but been put out, by a hand - a hand which one characterized afar off in calling it a "strange" hand. Was it Holger's? Up to then he had been so mild, so tractable, so poetic - but now he seemed to degenerate into clownish practical jokes. Who knew that a hand which could so roundly thump doors and tables, and knavishly turn off lights, might not next catch hold of'someone's throat? They called for matches, for pocket torches. Fraulein Levi shrieked out that someone had pulled her front hair. Frau Stohr made no bones Of calling aloud on God in her ,distress: "O Lord. forgive me this once! " she moaned, and whimpered for mercy instead of justice. well knowing she had tempted hell. It was Dr. Ting-Fu who hit on the sound idea of turning on the ceiling light; / Page 666 / the room was brilliantly illuminated straightway. They now es­tablished that the lamp on. the night-table had not gone out by chance, but been turned off, and only needed to have the switch turneded back in order to bum again. But while this was happening, Hans Castorp made on his own account a most singular discovery, ·which ·might be regarded as a personal attention on the part of the dark powers here manifesting themselves with such childish perversity. A light. object lay in his lap; he .discovered it to be the"souvenir" which had once so surpnsed his uncle when he lifted It from his nephew's. table: the glass diapositive of Claudia Chauchat's x-ray portrait. Quite uncontestably he, Hans Castorp,.had not carried it into the room.

He put it into his pocket, unobservably. The others were busied about Ellen Brand, who remained sitting in her place in the same state, staring vacantly, with that curious simpering expression. Herr Albin blew in her face and imitated the upward sweeping motion of Dr. Krokowski, upon which she roused, and incontinently wept a little. They caressed and comforted her, kissed her on the forehead and sent her to bed. Fraulein Levi said she was willing to sleep with Frau Stohr, for that abject creature confessed she was too frightened to go to bed alone. Hans Castorp, with his, retrieved property in his breast pocket, had no objection to finishing off the evening with a cognac in Herr Albin's room. He had discovered, in fact, that this sort of thing affected neither the heart nor the spirits So much as the nerves of the stomach - a retroactive effect, like seasickness, which sometimes troubles the traveller with qualms hours after he has set foot on shore.

His curiosity was for the was for the time quenched. Holger's poem had not oeen so bad; but the antlclpated futility and vulgarity of the scene as a whole had been so unmistakable that he felt quite willing to let it go at these few vagrant sparks of hell-fire. Herr Settembrini, to whom he related his experiences, strengthened this conviction with all his force. "That," he cried out, "was all that was lacking. Oh, misery, misery! " And cursorily dismissed little Elly as a thorough-paced impostor.

His pupil said neither yea nor nay to that. He shrugged his Shoulders, and expressed the view that we did not seem to be altogether sure what constituted actuality, nor yet, in consequence, what imposture. Perhaps the boundary line was not constant. Perhaps there were transitional stages between. the two, grades of actuality within nature; nature being as she was, mute, not susceptihle of valuation, and thus defying distinctions which in any case, it seemed to him, had a strongly moralizing flavour. What / Page 667 / did Herr Settembrini think about delusions which were a mixture of actuality and dream, perhaps less strange in nature than to our crude, everyday processes of thought? The mystery of life was literally bottomless. What wonder, then, if sometimes illusions arose - and so on and so forth, in our hero's genial, confiding, loose and flowing style.

Herr Settembrini duly gave him a dressing-down, and did produce a temporary reaction of the conscience, even something like a promise to steer clear in the future of such abominations. "Have respect," he adjured him, " for your humanity, Engineer! Confide in your God-given power of clear thought, and hold in abhorrence these luxations of the brain, these miasmas of the spirit! Delusions? The mystery of life? Caro mio! When the moral courage to make decisions and distinctions between reality and deception degenerates to that point, then there is an end of life, of judgment, of the creative deed: the process of decay sets in, moral scepsis, and does its deadly work." Man, he went on to say, was the measure of things. His right to recognize and to distinguish between good and evil, reality and counterfeit, was indefeasible; woe to them who dared to lead him astray in his belief in this creative right. Better for them that a millstone be hanged about their necks and that they be drowned in the depth of the sea.

Hans Castorp nodded assent - and in fact did for a while .keep aloof from all such undertakings. He heard that Dr. Krokowski. had begun holding seances with Ellen Brand in his subterranean cabinet, to which certain chosen ones of the guests were invited. But he nonchalantly put aside the invitation to join them - naturally not without hearing from them and from Krokowski himself something about the success they were having. It appeared that there had been wild and arbitrary exhibitions of power, like those in Fraulein Kleefeld's room: knockings on walls and table, the turning off of the lamp, and these as well as further manifestations were .being systematically produced and investigated, with every possible safeguardmg of their genuineness, after Comrade Krokowskihad practised the approved technique and put little Elly into her. hypnotic sleep. They had discovered that the process was facilitated by music; and on these evenings the gramo­phone was pre-empted by the circle and carried down into the basement. But the Czech Wenzel who operated it there was a not unmusical man, and would surely not injure or misuse the instrument; Hans Castorp might hand it over without misgiving. He even chose a suitable album of records, containing light music-, dances, smaIl overtures and suchlike tunable trifles. Little Elly / Page 668 / made no demands on a higher art, and they served the purpose admirably.

To their accompaniment, Hans Castorp learned, a handkerchief had been lifted from the floor, of its own motion, or, rather, that of the ."hidden hand" in its folds. The doctor's waste-paper­basket: had risen to the ceiling; the pendulum of a clock been afternately stopped and set going again" without anyone touching it," a table-bell " taken" and rung.- these and a good many other turbid and meaningless phenomena. The learned master of ceremonies was in the happy position of being able to characterize them by a Greek word, very scientific and impressive. They were, so he. explained in his lectures. and in private conversations, "telekinetic' phenomena, cases of movement from a distance; he associated them with a class of manifestations which were scientifically known as materializations, and toward which his plans and attempts with Elly Brand were directed.

He talked to them about biopsychical projections of subconscious complexes into the objective; about transactions of which the medial constitution, the somnambulic state, was to be regarded as the source; and which one might speak of as objectivated dream­concepts, in so far as they confirmed an ideoplastic property of nature; a power, which under certain conditions appertained to thought, of drawing substance to itself, and clothing itself in temporary reality. This substance streamed out from the body of the medium, and developed extraneously into biological, living end­organs, these being .the agencies which had performed the extraordinary though meaningless feats they witnessed in Dr. Krokowski's laboratory. Under some conditions these agencies might be seen or touched, the limbs left their impression in wax or plaster. But some.­times the matter did not rest with such corporealization. Under certain conditions, human heads, faces, full-length phantoms manifested themselves before the eyes of the experimenters, even within certain limits entered into contact with them. And here Dr. Krokowski's doctrine began, as it were, to squint; to look two ways at once. It took on a shifting and fluctuating character, like the method .of treatment he had adopted in his exposition of the nature of love. It was no longer plain-sailing, scientific treatment of the - objectively mirrored subjective content of the medium and her passive auxiliaries. It was a mixing in the game, at least sometimes, lit least half and half, of entities from without and beyond. It dealt - at least possibly, if not quite adinittedly - with the non-vital, with existences that took advantage of a ticklish, mysteriously and momentarily favouring chance to return to substantiality and show / Page 669 / themselves to their summoners.., in brief, with the spiritualistic invocation of the departed.

Such manifestations it was that Comrade Krokowski, with the assistance of his followers, was latterly striving to produce; sturdily, with his ingratiating smile, challenging their cordial confidence, thoroughly at home; for his own person, in this questionable morass of the subhuman, and a born leader for the timid and compunctious in the regions where they now moved. He had laid himself out to develop and discipline the extraordinary powers of Ellen Brand and, from what Hans Castorp could hear, fortune smiled upon his efforts. Some of the party had felt the touch of materialized hands. Lawyer Paravant had received out of transcendency a sounding slap on the cheek, and had countered with scientific alacrity, yes, had even eagerly turned the other cheek, heedless of his quality as gentleman, jurist, and one-time member of a duelling corps, all of which would have constrained him to quite a different line of conduct had the blow been of terrestrial origin. A. K. Ferge, that good-natured martyr, to whom all " high­brow" thought was foreign, had one evening held such a spirit hand in his own, and established by sense of touch that it was whole and well shaped. His clasp had been heart-felt to the limits of respect; but it had in some indescribable fashion escaped him. A considerable period elapsed, some two months and a half of bi­weekly sittings, before a hand of other-worldly origin, a young man's hand, it seemed, came .fingering over the table, in the red glow of the paper-shaded lamp, and, plain to the eyes of all the circle, left its imprint in an earthenware basin full of flour. And eight days later a troop of Krokowski's workers, Herr Albin, Frau Stohr, the Magnuses, burst in upon Hans Castorp where he sat dozing toward midnight in the biting cold of his balcony, and with every mark of distracted and feverish delight, their words tumbling over one another, announced that they had seen Elly's Holger - he had showed his head over the shoulder of the little medium, and had in truth "beautiful brown, brown curls." He had smiled with such unforgettable, gentle melancholy as he vanished!

Hans Castorp found this lofty melancholy scarcely consonant with Holger's other pranks, his impish and simple-minded tricks, the anything but gently melancholy slap he had given Lawyer Paravant and the latter had pocketed up. It was apparent that one must not demand consistency of conduct. Perhaps they were dealing with a temperament like that of the little hunch-backed man in the nursery song, with his pathetic wickedness and his' craving for intercession. Holger's admirers had no -thought for all this / Page 670 / What they were determined to do was to persuade Hans Castorp rescind his decree; positively, now that everything was so brilliantly in train, he must be present at the next seance. Elly, it seemed, in her trance had promised to materialize the spirit of any departed person the circle chose.

Any departed person they chose? Hans Castorp still showed reluctance. But that it might be any person they chose occupied his mind to such an extent that in the next three days he came to a different conclusion. Strictly speaking it was not three days, but as many minutes, which brought about the change. One evening, in a solitary hour in the music-room, he played again the record that bore the imprint of Valentine's personality, to him so profoundly moving. He sat there listening to the soldierly prayer of the hero departing for the field of honour:

"If God should summon me away,

Thee I would watch and guard -alway,

O Marguerite! " -

and, as ever, Hans Castorp was filled by emotion at the sound, an emotion which this time circumstances magnified and as it were ndensed into a longing; he thought: "Barren and sinful or no, it. would be a marvellous thing, a darling adventure! And he, as I know him, if he had anything to do with it, would not mind." He recalled that composed and liberal" Certainly, of course," he had heard in the darkness of the x-ray laboratory, when he asked Joahim if he might commit certain optical indiscretions.

The next morning he announced his willingness to take part in the evening seance; and half an hour after dinner joined the group of familiars of tl1e uncanny, who, unconcernedly chatting, took their way down to the basement; They were all old inhabitants, the-oldest of the old, or at least of long standing in the group, like the Czech Wenzel and Dr. Ting-Fu; Ferge and Wehsal, Lawyer Paravant, the ladies KIeefeld and Levi, and, in addition, those persons who had come to his balcony to announce to him the apparition of Holger's head, and of course the medium, Elly Brand.

That child of thee north was already in the doctor's charge when Hans Castorp passed through the door with the visiting-card: the doctor, in his black tunic, his arm laid fatherly across her shoulder, stood at the foot of the stair leading from the basement floor and welcomed the guests, and she with him. Everybody greeted everybody else, with surprising hilarility and expansiveness -It seemed to be the common aim to keep the meeting pitched in a key free from all solemnity or constraint. They- talked in loud, cheery voices, / Page 671 / "poked each other in the ribs, showed everyway how perfectly at ease they felt. Dr. Krokowski's yellow teeth kept gleaming in his beard with every hearty, confidence-inviting sinile; he repeated his "Wel - come" to each arrival, with special fervour in Hans Castorp's case - who, for his .part, said nothing at all, and whose manner was hesitating. "Courage, comrade," Krokowski's energetic and hospitable nod seemed to be saying, as he gave the young man's hand an almost violent squeeze. No need here to hang the head, here is no cant nor sanctimoniousness, nothing but the blithe and manly spirit of disinterested research. But Hans Castorp felt none the better for all this pantomime. He summed up the resolve formed by the memories of the x ray cabinet; but the train of thought hardly fitted with his present frame; father he was reminded of the peculiar and unforgettable mixture of feelings ­ nervousness, pridefulness, curiosity, disgust, and awe - with which, years ago, he had gone with some fellow students, a little tipsy, to a brothel in Sankt-Pauli.

As everyone was now present, Dr. Krokowski selected two controls - they were, for the evening, Frau Magnus and the ivory Levi - to preside over the physical examination of the medium, and they withdtew to the next room. Hans Castorp and the re­maining nine persons awaited in the consulting-room the issue of the austerely scientific procedure - which was invariably without any result whatever. The room was familiar to him from the hours he had spent here, behind Joachim's back, in conversation with the psycho-analyst. It had a writing-desk, an arm-chair and an easy­chair for patients on the left, the window side; a library of reference-books on shelves to right and left of the side door, and in the' further right-hand corner a chaise-longue, covered with oilcloth, separated by a folding screen from the desk and chairs. The doctor's glass instrument-case also stood in that corner, in another was a bust of Hippocrates, while an engraving of Rembrandt's " Anatomy Lesson" hung above the gas fire-place on the right side wall. It was an ordinary consulting-room, like thousands more; but with certain temporary special arrangements. The round mahogany table whose place was in the centre of the room, beneath the electric chandelier, upon the red carpet that covered most of the floor, had been pushed forward against the left-hand wall, be­neath the plaster bust; while a smaller table, covered with a cloth and bearing a red-shaped lamp, had been set obliquely near the gas fire, which was lighted and giving out a dry heat. Another electric bulb, covered with "red and further with a black gauze veil, hung above the table. On this table stood certain notorious objects: two / Page 672 / table-bells, of different patterns, one to shake and one to press, the plate with flour, and the paper-basket. Some dozen chairs of different shapes and sizes surrounded the table in a half-circle, one end of which was formed by the foot of the chaise-longue, the other ending near the centre of the room, beneath the ceiling light. Here, in the neighbourhood of the last chair, and about half-way to the door, stood the gramophone; the album of light trifles lay on a chair next it. Such were the arrangements. The red lamps were yet lighted, the ceiling light was shedding an effulgence as of common day, for the window, above the narrow end of the writing-desk, was shrouded in a dark covering, with its open-work cream-coloured blind hanging down in front of it.

After ten minutes the doctor returned with the three ladies. Elly's outer appearance had changed: she was not wearing her ordinary clothes, but a night-gownlike garment of white crepe, girdled about the waist by a cord, leaving her slender arms bare. Her maidenly breasts showed themselves soft and unconfined beneath this garment, it appeared she wore little else.

They all hailed her gaily. "Hullo, Elly!, How lovely she looks again! A perfect fairy! Very pretty, my angel! " She smiled at their compliineilts to her attire, probably well knowing it became her. "Preliminary' control negative," Krokowski announced. "Let's get to work, then, comrades," he said. Hans Castorp, consious of being disagreeably affected by the doctor's manner of address, was about to follow the example. of the others, who, shouting, chattering, slapping each other on the shoulders, were settling themselves'in the circle of chairs, when the doctor addressed him personally.

"My friend," said he, "you are a guest, perhaps a novice, in our midst, and therefore I should like, this evening, to pay you special honour. I confide to you the control of the medium. Our practice is as follows." He ushered the young man toward the end of the circle next the chaise-longue and the screen, where Elly was seated on. an ordinary cane chair, with her face turned rather toward the entrance door than to the centre of the room. He himself sat down close in front of her in another such chair, and clasped her hands, at the same time holding both her knees fiirmly between his own. "Like'that," he, said. and gave his place to Hans Castorp, who assumed the same position. "You'll grant that the arrest is complete. But we shall give you assistance too. Fraulem KIeefeld, may I implore you to lend us your aid?" And the lady. thus courteousfy and exotically entreated came and sat down. clasping Elly's fragile wrists, one in each hand.

Page 673

Unavoidable, that Hans Castorp should look into'the face of the young prodigy, fixed as it was so immediately before his own. Their eyes met - but Elly's slipped aside and gazed with natural self-consciousness in her lap. She was smiling a little affectedly, with her lips slightly pursed, and her head on one side, as she had at the wineglass seance. And Hans Castorp was reminded, as he saw her, of something else: the look on Karen Karstedt's face, a smile just like that, when she stood with Joachim and himself and regarded the unmade grave in the Dorf graveyard.

The circle had sat down. They were thirteen persons; not counting the Czech Wenzel, whose function it was to serve Polyhymnia, and who accordingly, after putting his instrument in readiness, squatted with his guitar at the back of the circle. Dr. Krokowski sat beneath the chandelier, at the other end of the row, after he had turned on both red lamps with a single switch, and turned off the centre light. A darkness, gently aglow, layover the room, the corners and distances were obscured. Only the surface of the little table and its immediate vicinity were illumined by a pale rosy light. During the next few minutes one scarcely saw one's neighbours; then their eyes slowly accustomed themselves to the darkness and made the best use of the light they had - which was slightly reinforced by the small dancing flames from the chimney piece.

The doctor devoted a few words to this matter of the lighting, and excused its lacks from the scientific point of view. They must take care not to interpret it in the sense of deliberate mystification and scene-setting. With the best will in the world they could not, unfortunately, have 'more light for the present. The nature of the powers they were to study would not permit of their being developed with white light, it was not possible thus to produce the desired conditions. This was a fixed postulate, with which they must for the present reckon. Hans Castorp, for his part, was quite satisfied. He liked the darkness, it mitigated the queerness of the situation. And in its justification he recalled the darkness of the x-ray room, and how they had collected themselves, and "washed their"eyes" in it, before they" "saw."
The medium, Dr. Krokowski went on, obviously addressing his words to Hans Castorp in particular, no longer needed to be put in the trance by the physician. She fell into it herself, as the control would see, and once she had done so, it would be her guardian spirit Holger, who spoke with her voice, to whom, and not to her, they should address themselves. Further, it was an error, which might result in failure, to suppose that one must bend mind or will / Page 674 / upon the expected phenomena. On the contrary, a slightly diffused attention, with conversation, was recommended. And Hans Castorp was cautioned, whatever else he did, not to lose control of the medium's extremities. '

We will now form the chain," finished Dr. Krokowski; and they did so, laughing when they could not find each other's hands in the dark. Dr. Ting-Fu, sitting next Hermine Kleefeld, laid his right hand on her shoulder and reached his left to Herr Wehsal, who came next. Beyond him were Herr and Frau Magnus, then K. Ferge; who, if Hans Castorp mistook not, held the hand of the ivory Levi on his right - and so on. "Music!" the doctor commanded, and behind him his neighbour the Czech set the instrument in motion and placed the needle, on the disk. "Talk!" Krokowski bade them, and as the first bars of an overture by Millocker were heard, they obediently bestirred themselves to make conversation, about nothing at all: the winter snow-fall, the last course at dinner, a newly arrived patient, a departure, "wild" or otherwise - artificially sustained, half drowned by the music, and lapsing now and again. So some minutes passed.

The record had not run out before Elly shuddered violently. trembling ran through her, she sighed, the upper part of her bo dy sank forward so that her forehead rested against Hans Castorp's, and her arms, together with those of her guardians, began: make extraordinary pumping motions to and fro.

"Trance," announced the Kleefeld. The music stopped, so also conversation. In the abrupt silence they heard the baritone drawl of the doctor. "Is Holger present? "

Elly shivered again. She swayed in her chair. Then Hans Castorp felt her press his two hands with a quick, firm pressure.

"She pressed my hands," he informed them.

"He," the doctor corrected him. "He pressed your hands. He is present. Wel-come, Holger," he went on with unction." Wel-come, friend and fellow comrade, heartily, heartily wel-come. And remember, when you were last with us," he went on, and Hans Castorp remarked that he did not use the form of address common to the civilized West - "you promised to make visible to our mortal eyes some dear departed, whether brother soul or sister soul, whose name should be given to you by our circle. Are you willing? Do you feel yourself able to perform what you promised? "

Again Elly shivered. She sighed and shivered as the answer came. Slowly she carried her hands and those of her guardians to her fore- / Page 675 / head, where she let them rest. Then close to Hans Castorp's ear she whispered: "Yes."

The warm breath immediately at his ear caused·in our friend that phenomenon of the epidermis popularly called goose-flesh, the nature of which the Hofrat had once explained to him. We mention this in order to make a distinction between the psychical and ·the purely physical. There could scarcely be talk of fear, for our hero was in fact thinking: "Well, she is certainly biting off more than she can chew!" But then he was straightway seized with a mingling of sympathy and consternation springing from the confusing and illusory circumstance that a blood-young creature, whose hands he held in his, had just breathed a yes into his ear.

"He said yes," he reported, and felt embarrassed.

"Very well, then, Holger," spoke Dr. Krokowski. "We shall take you at your word. We are confident you will do your part. The name of the dear departed shall shortly be communicated to you. Comrades," he turned to the gathering, " out with it, now! Who has a wish? Whom shall our friend Holger show us? "

A silence followed: Each waited for the other to speak. Individually they had probably all questioned themselves, in these last few days; they knew whither their thoughts tended. But the calling back of the dead, or the desirability of calling them back, was a ticklish matter, after all. At bottom, and boldly confessed, the desire does not exist; it is a misapprehension precisely as impossible as the thing itself, as we should soon see if nature once let it happen. What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

This was what they were all obscurely feeling; and since it was here simply a question not of an actual return, but merely a theatrical staging of one, in which they should only see the departed, no more, the thing seemed humanly unthinkable; they were afraid to look into the face of him or her of whom they thought, and each one would willingly have resigned his right of choice to the next. Hans Castorp too, though there was echoing in his ears that large-hearted "Of course, of course" out of the past, held back, and at the last moment was rather inclined to pass the choice on. But the pause was too long; he turned his head toward their leader, and said; in a husky voice: "I should like to see my departed cousin, Joachim Ziemssen."

That was a relief to them all. Of those present, all excepting Dr. Ting-Fu, Wenzel, and the medium had known the person asked / Page 676 / for. The others, Ferge, Wehsal, Herr Albin, Paravant, Herr and Frau Magnus, Frau Stohr, Fraulein Levi, and the Kleefeld, loudly announced their satisfaction with the choice. Krokowski himself nodded well pleased, though his relations with Joachim had always been rather cool, owing to the latter's reluctance in the matter of psycho-analysis.

" Very good indeed," said the doctor. "Holger, did you hear? The person named was a stranger to you in life. Do you know him in the Beyond, and are you prepared to lead him hither?

Immnse suspense. The sleeper swayed, sighed, and shuddered. he seemed to be seeking, to be struggling; fallihg this way and that, whispering now to Hans Castorp, now to the Kleefeld, something they could not catch. At last he received from her hands the pressure that meant yes. He announced himself to have done so. and-

"Very well;-then," cried Dr. Krokowski. "To work, Holger Music," he cried. "Conversation! "and he repeated the injunction that no fixing of the attention, no strained anticipation was in place, only an unforced and hovering expectancy.

And now followed the most extraordinary hours of our hero's young life. Yes, though his later fate is unclear, though at a certain moment in his destiny he will vanish from our eyes, we may assume them to have been the most extraordinary he ever spent.

They were hours - more than two of them, to be explicit, counting in a brief intermission in the efforts on Holger's part which now began, or rather, on the girl Elly's - of work so hard and so prolonged that they were all toward the end inclined to be faint­hearted and despair of any result; out of pure pity, too, tempted to resign an attempt which seemed pitilessly hard, and beyond the delicate strength of her upon whom it was laid. We men, if we do not shirk our humanity, are familiar with an hour of life when we know this almost intolerable pity, which, absurdly enough no one else,can feel, this rebellious "Enough, no more! ' which is wrung from us, though it is not enough, and cannot or will not be enough. until it comes somehow or other to its appointed end. The reader knows we, speak of our husband- and fatherhood, of the act of birth, which Elly's wrestling did so unmistakably resemble that even he must recognize it who had never passed through this experience, even ouryoung Hans Castorp; who, not having shirked life, now came to know, in such a guise, this act, so full of organic mysticism. In what a guise! To what an end! Under what circumstances! One could not regard as anything less than scandalous the sights and sounds in this red-lighted lying-in chamber, the / Page 677 / maidenly form of the pregnant one, bare-armed, in flowing night­robe; and then by contrast the ceaseless and senseless gramophone music, the forced conversation which the circle kept up at command, the cries of encouragement they ever and anon directed at the struggling one: "Hullo, Holger! Courage, man! It's coming, just keep it up, let it come, that's the way!" Nor do we except the person and situation of the "husband" - if we may regard in that light our young friend, who had indeed formed such a wish­sitting there, with the knees of the little "mother" between his own, holding in his her hands, which were as wet as once little Leila's, so that he had constantly to be renewing his hold, not to let them slip.

For the gas fire in the rear of the circle radiated great heat. Mystical, consecrate? Ah, no, it was all rather noisy and vulgar, there in the red glow, to which they had now so accustomed their eyes that they could see the whole room' fairly well. The music and shouting were so like the revivalistic methods of the Salvation Army, they even made Hans Castorp think of the comparison, albeit he had never attended at a celebration by these cheerful zealots. It was in no eerie or ghostly sense that the scene affected the sympathetic one as mystic or mysterious, as conducing to solemnity; it was rather natural, organic - by virtue of the intimate association we have already referred to. Elly's exertions came in waves, after periods of rest, during which she hung sidewise from her chair in a totally relaxed and inaccessible condition, described by Dr. Krokowski as "deep trance." From this she would start up with a moan, throw herself about, strain and wrestle with her captors, whisper feverish, disconnected words, seem to be trying, with sidewise, jerking movements, to expel something; she would gnash her teeth, once even fastened them in Hans Castorp's sleeve.

This had gone on for more than an hour when the leader found it to the interest of all concerned to grant a brief intermission. The Czech Wenzel, who had introduced an enlivening variation by closing the gramophone. and striking up very expertly on his guitar, laid that instrument aside. They all drew a long breath and broke the circle. Dr. Krokowski strode over to the wall and switched on the ceiling lamp; the light flashed up glaringly, making them all blink. Elly, bent forward, her face almost in her lap, slumbered. She was busy too, absorbed in the oddest activity, with which the others appeared familiar, but which Hans Castorp watched. with attentive wonder. For some minutes together she moved the hollow of her hand to and fro in the region of her hips: / Page 678 / carried the hand away from her body and then with scooping, raking motion drew It towards her, as though gathering something and pulling it in. Then, with a series of starts, she came to herself, blinked in her turn at the light with sleep-stiffened eyes and smiled.

She smiled affectedly, rather remotely. In truth, their solicitude· seemed wasted; she did not appear exhausted by her efforts. Perhaps she retained no memory of them. She sat down in the chair reserved for patients, by the writing-desk near the window, between the desk and the screen about the chaise-longue; gave the chair a turn so that she could support her elbow on the desk and look into the room; and remained thus, receiving their sympathetic glances and encouraging nods, silent during the whole intermission, which lasted fifteen minutes.

It was a beneficent pause, relaxed, and filled with peaceful satisfaction in respect of work already accomplished. The lids of cigarette-cases snapped, the men smoked comfortably, and standing.in groups discussed the prospects of the seance. They were far from despairing or anticipating a negative result to their efforts. Signs enough were present to prove such doubting uncalled for. Those sitting near the doctor, at the far-end of the row, agreed that they had several times felt, quite unmistakably, that current of cool air which regularly whenever manifestations. were under way streamed in a definite direction from the person of the medium. Others had seen light-phenomena, white spots, moving conglobations of forces showing themselves at intervals against the screen. In short, no faint-heartedness! No looking backward now they had put their hands to the plough: Holger had given his word they had no call to doubt that he would keep it.

Dr. Krokowski signed for the resumption of the sitting. He led Elly back to her martyrdom and seated her, stroking her hair. The others closed the circle. All went as before. Hans Castorp suggested that he be released from his post of first control, but Dr. Krokowski refused. He said he laid great stress on excluding, by immediate contact, every possibility of misleading manipulation on the part of the medium. So Hans Castorp took lip again his strange position vis-a.-vis to Elly; the white light gave place to rosy twilight, the music began again, the pumping motions; this time it was Hans Castorp who announced 'trance." The scandalous lying-in proceeded.

With what distressful difficulty! It seemed unwilling to take its course - how could it? Madness! What maternity was this, what delivery, of what should she be delivered? " Help, help,". the child / Page 679 / moaned, and her spasms seemed about to pass over into that dangerous and unavailing stage obstetricians call eclampsia. She called at intervals on the doctor, that he should put his hands on' her. He did so, speaking to her encouragingly. The magnetic effect, if such it was, strengthened her to further efforts.

Thus passed the second hour, while the guitar was strummed or the gramophone gave out the contents of the album of light music into the twilight to which they had again accustomed their vision. Then came an episode, introduced by Hans Castorp. He supplied a stimulus by expressing an idea, a wish; a wish he had cherished from the beginning, and might perhaps have profitably expressed before now. Elly was lying with her face on their joined hands, in "deep trance." Herr Wenzel was just changing or reversing the record when our friend summoned his resolution and said he had a suggestion to make, of no great importance, yet perhaps - possibly - of some avail. He had - that is, the house possessed among its volumes of records - a. certain song, from Gounod's Faust, Valentine's Prayer, baritone with orchestral accompaniment, very appealing. He, the speaker, thought they might try the record.

"Why that particular one? " the doctor asked out of the darkness.

"A question of mood. Matter of feeling," the young man responded. The mood of the piece in question was peculiar to itself, quite special- he suggested they should try it. Just possible, not out of the question, that its mood and atmosphere might shorten their labours.

"Is the record here? " the doctor inquired.

No, but Hans Castorp could fetch it at once.

"What are you thinking of? " Krokowski promptly repelled the idea. What? Hans Castorp thought he might go and come again and take up his business where he had left it off? There spoke the voice of utter inexperience. Oh, no, it was impossible. It would upset everything, they would have to begin all over. Scientific exactitude forbade them to think of any such arbitrary going in and out. The door was locked. He, the doctor, had the key in his pocket. In short, if the record was not now in the room -

He was still talking when the Czech threw in, from the gramophone: "The record is here."

" Here? " Hans Castorp asked.

"Yes, here it is, Faust, Valentine's Prayer." It had been stuck by mistake in the album of light music, not in the green album of arias, where it belonged; quite by chance - or mismanagement / Page 680 / or carelessness, in any case luckily - it had partaken of the general topsyturvyness, and here it was, needing only to be put on.

"What had Hans Castorp to say to that? Nothing. It was the doctor who remarked: "So much the better," and some of the others chimed in. The needle scraped, the lid was put down. The male voice began to choral accompaniment: "Now the parting hour has come."

"No one spoke. They listened: Elly, as the music resumed, renewed her efforts. She started up convulsively, pumped, carried the slippery hands to her brow. The record went on, came to the middle part, with skipping rhythm, the part about war and danger, gallant, god-fearing, French. After that the finale, in full volume, the orchestrally supported refrain of the beginning.

"O Lord of heaven, hear me pray. . . ."

Hans Castorp had work with Elly. She raised herself, drew in a straggling breath, sighed a long, long, outward sigh, sank down illlc1 was still. He bent over her in concern, and as he did so, he heard Frau Stohr say; in a high, whining pipe: "Ziemssen! "

He did not look up. A bitter taste came in his mouth. He heard another voice, a deep, cold voice, saying: "I've seen him a long time."

The record had run off, with a. last accord of horns. But no one stopped the machine. The needle went on scratching in the silence, as the disk whirred round. Then Hans Castorp raised his head, and his eyes went, without searching, the right way.

"There was one more person in the room than before. There in the background, where the red rays lost themselves in gloom, so that the eye scarcely reached thither, between writing-desk and screen, in the doctor's consulting-chair, where in the intermission Elly had been sitting, Joachim sat. It was the Joachim of the last days, with hollow, shadowy cheeks, warrior's beard and full, curling lips. He sat leaning back, one leg crossed over the other.

On his wasted face, shaded though it was by his head-covering, was plainly seen the stamp of suffering, the expression of gravity mid austerity which had beautified it. Two folds stood on his brow, between the eyes, that lay deep in their bony cavities; but there was no change in the mildness of. the great dark orbs, whose quiet, friendly gaze sought out Hans Castorp, and him alone. That ancient grievance of the outstanding ears was still to be seen under the head-covering, his extraordinary head-covering, which they could not make out. Cousin Joachim was not in mufti. His sabre seemed to be leaning against his leg, he held the handle, one thought to distinguish something like a pistol-case in his belt. "But that was / Page 681 / no proper uniform he wore. No colour, no decorations; it had a collar like a litewka jacket, and side pockets. Somewhere low down on the breast was a cross. His feet looked large, his legs very thin, they seemed to be bound or wound as for the business of sport more than war. And what was it, this headgear? It seemed as though Joachim had turned an army cook-pot upside-down on his head, and fastened it under his chin with a band. Yet it looked quite properly warlike, like an old-fashioned foot-soldier, perhaps.

Hans Castorp felt Ellen Brand's breath on his hands. And near him the Kleefeld's rapid breathing. Other sound there was none, save the continued scraping of the needle on the run-down, rotating record, which nobody stopped. He looked at none of his company, would hear or see nothing of them; but across the hands and head on his knee leaned far forward and stared through the red darkness at the guest in the chair. It seemed one moment as though his stomach would turn over within him. His throat contracted and a four- or fivefold sob went through and through him. "Forgive me! " he whispered; then his eyes overflowed, he saw no more.

He heard breathless voices: "Speak to him! "he heard Dr. Krokowski's baritone voice summon him, formally, cheerily, and repeat the request. Instead of complying, he drew his hands away from beneath Elly's face, and stood up.

Again Dr. Krokowski called upon his name, this time in monitory tones. But in two strides Hans Castorp was at the step by.the entrance door and with one quick movement turned on the white light.

Fraulein Brand had collapsed. She was twitching convulsively in the Kleefeld's arms. The chair over there was empty.

Hans Castorp went up to the protesting Krokowski, close up to him. He tried to speak, but no words came. He put out his hand, with a brusque, imperative gesture. Receiving the key, he .nodded several times, threateningly, close into the other's face;
turned, and went out of-the room.

 

ELLY BRAND

 

Daily Mail

Monday, March 22, 2010

Mail Foreign Service

Girl, 4 dies in car horror on holiday beach

"She was beautiful, a princess': Ellie Bland

Page 28

A BRITISH girl of four was killed by a car as she walked along a popular U.S. beach with her family.
Ellie Bland was holding her great uncle's hand when she stepped into a car lane that runs along Daytona Beach, on Florida's east coast.
Although police said the vehicle was driving within the 10mph speed limit, she was sent flying.

Horrified witnesses screamed as the car halted. But before they could reach Ellie, the driver, Barbara Worley, 66, panicked and hit the accelerator, surging forward and hitting the girl - killing her instantly.

Ellie's parents, who were at home in Nottingham, learned of their daughter's death by phone. It is thought they flew out to Florida yesterday.
Enlarge Investigation: Florida Highway Patrol said Worley could face charges

Relatives said that her great uncle, John Langlands, 53, and his wife Karen, 44, had brought up Ellie and her five-year-old sister, believed to be called Kacey, since they were babies.

Ellie had survived serious health problems including a heart murmur and a digestive tract condition.

Last year she nearly died after contracting swine flu. The family regularly took holidays in Daytona Beach, where it is thought they had a holiday home.
The recent trip, with a group of friends from Britain, was Ellie's sixth. The Langlands had planned to take her to Disney's Magic Kingdom yesterday to dress up as the star of the film the Princess and the Frog.
Ellie was with her sister at the time of the tragedy and an older child, who has not been named.
Mrs Langlands said of the crash: 'It just took her. It's not real. You just bring them to the beach for the day. . . I can't believe it.'
Mr Langlands told police the car came 'barrelling down' on them and clipped Ellie. He broke down as he added: 'She was beautiful, a princess.'
Daytona Beach is one of the few beaches in America where cars are permitted to drive, because of its hard, compacted sand.

There are clearly marked lanes monitored by police, but officials said the high tide may have brought pedestrians and cars closer together than usual. It was also one of the first warm Saturdays of the year, meaning the beach was packed.
Last night, Ellie's family in Nottingham spoke of their grief.
A woman relative, who did not want to be named, said: 'Karen will be completely devastated.

'She can't have kids herself so she lived for Ellie - she took her all around the world.'
Worley, a U.S. tourist from Georgia, sat weeping in her car after the accident. She was not speeding or under the influence of alcohol, police said.
She is likely to a face only a minor traffic infringement charge rather than the more serious one of vehicular manslaughter, which could have led to a 15-year jail term.
A police spokesman said: 'We are still conducting our investigation, but everything points to a very tragic accident.
'Witnesses have said the girl ran into the traffic lane. She could have been distracted by the sight of the waves and sea.'

 

 

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Pictured: British girl, 4, killed by car on Florida beach while walking hand-in-hand with uncle 'after driver panicked'

By Mail Foreign Service
Last updated at 10:23 AM on 22nd March 2010

Comments (81) Add to My Stories
A four-year-old British girl was killed by a car as she walked along a popular U.S. beach with her family.
Ellie Bland was holding her great uncle's hand when she stepped into a car lane that runs along Daytona Beach, on Florida's east coast.
Although police said the vehicle was driving within the 10mph speed limit, she was sent flying.

Victim:Ellie Bland was killed by a car as she walked along Daytona beach with her great uncle
Shattered: Barbara Worley sits in her Lincoln Town Car moments after the accident on Saturday afternoon

Horrified witnesses screamed as the car halted. But before they could reach Ellie, the driver, Barbara Worley, 66, panicked and hit the accelerator, surging over the little girl - killing her instantly.

Florida Highway Patrol said an investigation had been launched and that charges were pending for Worley, from Elberton, Georgia.

Ellie's parents, who were at home in Nottingham, learned of their daughter's death by phone. It is thought they flew out to Florida yesterday.
Enlarge Investigation: Florida Highway Patrol said Worley could face charges

Relatives said that her great uncle, John Langlands, 53, and his wife Karen, 44, had brought up Ellie and her five-year-old sister, believed to be called Kacey, since they were babies.

Ellie had survived serious health problems including a heart murmur and a digestive tract condition.

Last year she nearly died after contracting swine flu. The family regularly took holidays in Daytona Beach, where it is thought they had a holiday home.
The recent trip, with a group of friends from Britain, was Ellie's sixth.

The Langlands had planned to take her to Disney's Magic Kingdom yesterday to dress up as the star of the film the Princess and the Frog.
Ellie was with her sister at the time of the tragedy and an older child, who has not been named.
Mrs Langlands said of the crash: 'It just took her. It's not real. You just bring them to the beach for the day. . . I can't believe it.'
Mr Langlands told police the car came 'barrelling down' on them and clipped Ellie. He broke down as he added: 'She was beautiful, a princess.'
Daytona Beach is one of the few beaches in America where cars are permitted to drive, because of its hard, compacted sand.

There are clearly marked lanes monitored by police, but officials said the high tide may have brought pedestrians and cars closer together than usual. It was also one of the first warm Saturdays of the year, meaning the beach was packed.
Last night, Ellie's family in Nottingham spoke of their grief.
A woman relative, who did not want to be named, said: 'Karen will be completely devastated.
Daytona Beach is on the east coast of Florida

Daytona Beach is one of few coastal resorts in the US where cars are permitted to drive on the sand
'She can't have kids herself so she lived for Ellie - she took her all around the world.'
Worley, a U.S. tourist from Georgia, sat weeping in her car after the accident. She was not speeding or under the influence of alcohol, police said.
She is likely to a face only a minor traffic infringement charge rather than the more serious one of vehicular manslaughter, which could have led to a 15-year jail term.
A police spokesman said: 'We are still conducting our investigation, but everything points to a very tragic accident.
'Witnesses have said the girl ran into the traffic lane. She could have been distracted by the sight of the waves and sea.'

Print this article Read later Email to a friend Share this article: Digg it Del.icio.us Reddit Newsvine Nowpublic StumbleUpon Facebook MySpace Fark Comments (81)Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why not debate this issue live on our message boards.
The comments below have been moderated in advance.

Newest Oldest Best rated Worst rated View all The reason vehicles are allowed on the sand in Daytona Beach is, like most of the beaches on the U.S. Atlantic coast, frigging hotels dot every last bit of open space. The only other way to get to the beach is to pay a parking fee to a hotel to use a parking lot (car park), or fight with someone to get a parking space at one of the few free city mantained lots. In many Atlantic coastal cities, there are so many hotels you can't even SEE the beach. The alternative is to find a beach that is in the jurisdiction of the National Park Service, such as Pea Island National Bird Sanctuary in the Outer Banks. No frigging hotels allowed!
- haywoodzarathustra, Fat City, Atlantis, 22/3/2010 13:14

Click to rate Rating 48 Report abuse

I was so sad when reading this. I have a 4 year old daughter and I can only imagine the family's grief and great sadness. I am heartbroken. My deepest sympathy goes out to the family.
- Mrs. Badcrumble, Columbus, OH, 22/3/2010 13:10

Click to rate Rating 69 Report abuse

This is so sad and horrible for all involved, and I include the driver in this.
We can just blame her, or blame those who did not keep Ellie's hand in theirs and keep her out of the car lane--or we can just see the truth. Accident, all it is, and unfortunately those involved will blame themselves enough for all of us.
Have mercy on them.
Humans make mistakes, that's all.

Mr. Ellis in Southhampton (22/3/2010 08:46), thank you and bless you for such a reasonable comment.

- Linda, Farmington, USA, 22/3/2010 12:51

Click to rate Rating 79 Report abuse

RIP Ellie For Gods sake take an Engish course,Or shut up.
- P.Widdowson, loule portugal, 22/3/2010 12:48

Click to rate Rating 49 Report abuse

We went to Daytona when my son was small and when I saw the traffic on the beach, I was terrified. It seemed to me to be so easy for an excited child to run towards the sea and be hit by a car. Paranoia, maybe, but it looked to me like an accident waiting to happen. It was impossible to settle and enjoy a holiday there, so we packed up and went back to the Florida Keys.
- Pato, Hale, Chesh., 22/3/2010 12:15

Click to rate Rating 40 Report abuse

For everyone slamming American drivers and those of us fortunate enough to live in Daytona Beach, a little history. Cars have been on our beach since the early 1900s when racing began in Daytona (Daytona International Speedway, anyone?). The original race track was the beach, because of its hard packed sand. As a teenager, one of the best things in life was to cruise the beach with your friends. The speed limit is 10 miles per hour, strictly enforced. Until the overcrowding of our beloved beach, it was extremely rare for a sun bather to get run over by a car. The last accident of the sort was 22 years ago, when another child darted out into the traffic lanes. Our beach is 23 miles long, there is driving on only a small portion of that, most of the beach has sand that is too soft for cars. People are free to go there to play where there are no cars allowed. In the core tourist area driving has been banned for the last ten years, again people are free to go there. RIP dear Ellie.
- Dynah Moe Humm, Daytona Beach, Florida USA, 22/3/2010 12:15

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1259623/Four-year-old-British-girl-killed-tragic-car-accident-popular-Florida-beach.html#ixzz0jMmSgekQ

 

 

IDEAS PLEASE I ME I ME I PLEASE IDEAS

 

 

PLACET EXPERIRI EXPERIRI PLACET

 

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are echoes here of Hans Castorp’s Mountain motto, ‘placet experiri’, which. states a positive commitment to experience and experiment. The same idea ... assets.cambridge.org/97805216/53107/sample/9780521653107ws

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Placet experiri. Latin phrase meaning "It pleases to experiment", Ch. 4. “Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on.. “Behold the Fatherland.” ... en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann

3

Mann Quote: Placet experiri. ... Famous Quotes |Placet experiri. Printable Version · Cite this Page.Placet experiri. - Thomas Mann ... www.enotes.com/famous-quotes/placet-experiri

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Diesen Ausgang verdankt Hans Castorp dem ,Placet experiri, der Erfahrung, ... Re:Placet experiri... dominikus franke schrieb am 24.07.2007 um 01:43 Uhr: ... www.albertmartin.de/latein/forum

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Placet experiri. Wie schön, daß damals, auf dem Höhepunkt der Thomas-Mann-Begeisterung, das Krankenhaus, in dem ich lag, sich so leicht zum „Berghof“ (aus ... www.werner-radtke.de/1995/03/224-placet-experiri.html

 

 

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-
-
7
3
1
3
5
2
-
5
6
7
5
9
9
9
9
+
=
80
8+0
=
8
-
8
-
8
-
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
occurs
x
1
=
1
=
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
occurs
x
1
=
2
=
2
-
-
-
3
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
occurs
x
1
=
3
=
3
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
FOUR
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
occurs
x
3
=
15
1+5
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
occurs
x
1
=
6
=
6
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
occurs
x
2
=
14
1+4
5
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
EIGHT
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
9
9
-
-
9
occurs
x
4
=
36
3+6
9
12
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
33
-
-
14
-
80
-
35
1+2
1+4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
9
9
-
-
3+3
-
-
1+4
-
8+0
-
3+5
3
5
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
6
-
-
5
-
8
-
8
--
--
7
3
1
3
5
2
-
5
6
7
5
9
9
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
--
--
-
-
-
3
5
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
6
-
-
5
-
8
-
8

 

 

14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
`-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
18
9
18
9
+
=
54
5+4
=
9
-
9
-
9
-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
9
9
9
9
+
=
36
3+6
=
9
-
9
-
9
`-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
18
9
18
9
+
=
54
5+4
=
9
-
9
-
9
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
3
1
3
5
2
-
5
6
7
5
-
--
-
--
+
=
44
4+4
=
8
-
8
-
8
`-
16
12
1
3
5
20
-
5
24
16
5
-
--
-
--
+
=
107
1+0+7
=
8
-
8
-
8
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
`-
16
12
1
3
5
20
-
5
24
16
5
18
9
18
9
+
=
161
1+6+1
=
8
-
8
-
8
-
7
3
1
3
5
2
-
5
6
7
5
9
9
9
9
+
=
80
8+0
=
8
-
8
-
8
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
occurs
x
1
=
1
=
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
occurs
x
1
=
2
=
2
-
-
3
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
occurs
x
1
=
3
=
3
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
occurs
x
3
=
15
1+5
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
occurs
x
1
=
6
=
6
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
occurs
x
2
=
14
1+4
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
9
9
-
-
9
occurs
x
4
=
36
3+6
9
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
33
-
-
14
-
80
-
35
1+4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
9
9
-
-
3+3
-
-
1+4
-
8+0
-
3+5
5
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
6
-
-
5
-
8
-
8
--
7
3
1
3
5
2
-
5
6
7
5
9
9
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
--
--
-
-
-
5
P
L
A
C
E
T
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
6
-
-
5
-
8
-
8

 

 

14
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
`-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
18
9
18
9
+
=
54
5+4
=
9
-
9
-
9
-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
9
9
9
9
+
=
36
3+6
=
9
-
9
-
9
`-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
18
9
18
9
+
=
54
5+4
=
9
-
9
-
9
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
3
1
3
5
2
5
6
7
5
-
--
-
--
+
=
44
4+4
=
8
-
8
-
8
`-
16
12
1
3
5
20
5
24
16
5
-
--
-
--
+
=
107
1+0+7
=
8
-
8
-
8
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
`-
16
12
1
3
5
20
5
24
16
5
18
9
18
9
+
=
161
1+6+1
=
8
-
8
-
8
-
7
3
1
3
5
2
5
6
7
5
9
9
9
9
+
=
80
8+0
=
8
-
8
-
8
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
occurs
x
1
=
1
=
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
occurs
x
1
=
2
=
2
-
-
3
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
occurs
x
1
=
3
=
3
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
occurs
x
3
=
15
1+5
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
occurs
x
1
=
6
=
6
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
occurs
x
2
=
14
1+4
5
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
9
9
-
-
9
occurs
x
4
=
36
3+6
9
14
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
33
-
-
14
-
80
-
35
1+4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
9
9
-
-
3+3
-
-
1+4
-
8+0
-
3+5
5
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
6
-
-
5
-
8
-
8
--
7
3
1
3
5
2
5
6
7
5
9
9
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
--
--
-
-
-
5
P
L
A
C
E
T
E
X
P
E
R
I
R
I
-
-
6
-
-
5
-
8
-
8

 

 

7
IT
29
11
2
4
PLEASES
77
23
5
6
TO
35
8
8
4
EXPERIMENT
129
57
3
17
First Total
270
99
18
1+7
Add to Reduce
2+7+0
9+9
1+8
8
Second Total
9
18
9
-
Reduce to Deduce
-
1+8
-
8
Essence of Number
9
9
9

 

 

10
COMMITMENT
125
44
8
2
TO
35
8
8
10
EXPERIENCE
104
59
5
3
AND
19
10
1
10
EXPERIMENT
129
57
3
45
First Total
412
178
25
4+5
Add to Reduce
4+1+2
1+7+8
2+5
9
Second Total
7
16
7
-
Reduce to Deduce
-
1+6
-
9
Essence of Number
7
7
7

 

 

7
IT
29
11
2
4
PLEASES
77
23
5
6
TO
35
8
8
4
EXPERIMENT
129
57
3
17
First Total
270
99
18
1+7
Add to Reduce
2+7+0
8+1
1+8
8
Second Total
9
9
9
-
Reduce to Deduce
-
1+8
-
8
Essence of Number
9
9
9

 

 

-
21
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
1
-
-
6
-
-
6
-
-
-
9
-
-
5
-
+
=
37
3+7
=
10
1+0
1
=
1
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
19
-
19
-
-
15
-
-
24
-
-
-
9
-
-
14
-
+
=
109
1+0+9
=
10
1+0
1
=
1
-
21
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
7
3
5
1
-
5
-
-
2
-
-
5
-
7
5
9
-
4
5
-
2
+
=
62
6+2
=
8
=
8
=
8
-
-
-
20
-
16
12
5
1
-
5
-
-
20
-
-
5
-
16
5
18
-
13
5
-
20
+
=
161
1+6+1
=
8
=
8
=
8
-
21
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
-
-
-
--
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
20
-
16
12
5
1
19
5
19
-
20
15
-
5
24
16
5
18
9
13
5
14
20
+
=
270
2+7+0
=
9
=
9
=
9
-
-
9
2
-
7
3
5
1
1
5
1
-
2
6
-
5
6
7
5
9
9
4
5
5
2
+
=
99
9+9
=
18
1+8
9
=
9
-
21
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
occurs
x
3
=
3
=
3
-
``-
-
2
-`
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-`
2
-
-`
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
2
-
-
2
occurs
x
3
=
6
=
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
3
occurs
x
1
=
3
=
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
4
occurs
x
1
=
4
=
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
5
5
-
-
-
5
occurs
x
6
=
30
3+0
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
occurs
x
2
=
12
1+2
3
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
occurs
x
2
=
14
1+4
5
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
EIGHT
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
occurs
x
3
=
27
2+7
9
8
21
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
37
-
-
21
-
99
-
36
-
2+1
9
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
5
-
-
-
5
5
-
-
-
3+7
-
-
2+1
-
9+9
-
3+6
8
3
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
10
-
-
3
-
18
-
9
-
-
9
2
-
7
3
5
1
1
5
1
-
2
6
-
5
6
7
5
9
9
4
5
5
2
-
-
1+0
-
-
-
-
1+8
-
-
8
3
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
E
N
T
-
-
1
-
-
3
-
9
-
9

 

 

1
I
T
-
P
L
E
A
S
E
S
-
T
O
-
E
X
P
E
R
I
M
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Placet experiri. Latin phrase meaning "It pleases to experimnent", Ch. 4. “Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.” ... en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann

Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.

Contents [hide]
1 Sourced
1.1 Tristan (1902)
1.2 Tonio Kröger (1903)
1.3 Death in Venice (1912)
1.4 The Magic Mountain (1924)
1.5 Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)
1.6 Freud and the Future (1937)
1.7 The Beloved Returns (1939)
1.8 Doctor Faustus (1947)
1.9 Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)
2 Unsourced
3 External links

[edit] Sourced
I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I 
suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?
Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 34
Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising there wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!
Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 35
We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman], Pt 11, Ch. 2
That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life.
"Sleep, Sweet Sleep" ["Süßer Schlaf] first published in Neue Freie Presse [Vienna] (30 May 1909), as translated by Helen T. Knopf in Past Masters and Other Papers (1933), p. 269
The important thing for me, then, is not the "work," but my life. Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.
Reflections of a Non-Political Man [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918)]
Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)
The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.
Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog)
I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.
Nobel Banquet Speech (10 December 1929)
This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
On German fascism, in "An Appeal to Reason" ["Deutsche Ansprache. Ein Appell an die Vernunft"] in Berliner Tageblatt (18 October 1930); as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (1942), p. 57
In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.
Letter to the dean of the Philosophical Faculty, Bonn University (January 1937)
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)
In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.
The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)
This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected — in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
"Early Sorrow in Tellers of Tales: 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany edited by William Somerset Maugham (1939), p. 884
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
As quoted in The New York Times (21 June 1939)
Unhappy German nation, how do you like the Messianic rôle allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men.
"This War" (1939); also in Order of the Day (1942)
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
Speech at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin (22 January 1929); also in Essays of Three Decades (1942)
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Essays of Three Decades (1942)
Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.
Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
As quoted in The New York Times (18 June 1950); also in Thomas Mann: A Critical Study (1971) by R. J. Hollingdale, Ch. 2
It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.
Quoted in Survey of Contemporary Literature (1977) by Frank Northen Magill, p. 4263

[edit] Tristan (1902)
It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.
Ch. 7
They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night’s magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!
Ch. 8
It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.
Ch. 10

[edit] Tonio Kröger (1903)
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Variant translation: It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind.
As translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
"Tonio Kröger" on general opinions about artists.
This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.
Ch. 4, and also in Ch. 9, as translated by David Luke
He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust — oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick — and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.
Ch. 8, as translated by David Luke
I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.
Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
What I have done is nothing, not much — as good as nothing. I shall do better things, Lisaveta — this is a promise. While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once — and to these I am very devoted. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the bright-spirited living ones, the happy, amiable, and commonplace.
Do not speak lightly of this love, Lisaveta; it is good and fruitful. There is longing in it and melancholy envy, and a tiny bit of contempt, and an unalloyed chaste blissfulness.
Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
Variant translation: But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
Ch. 9, as translated by David Luke

[edit] Death in Venice (1912)
Der Tod in Venedig, originally published in Die Neue Rundschau 23 (Oct-Nov 1912)

The figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.
The disposition of the main character "Gustav Aschenbach", Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body ... the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.
Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.
Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.
Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.
On a short story of the character, "Gustav Aschenbach". Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!
Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke
With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.
Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke
The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke
Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke
This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.
Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke
I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke

[edit] The Magic Mountain (1924)
Der Zauberberg (1929), using quotes primarily from the translation of Helen T. Lowe-Porter (1955)

Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
Ch. 1
Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.
"Hans Castorp" in Ch. 1
I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.
The psychoanalyst "Dr. Krokowski" in Ch. 1
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
Ch. 2, “At Tienappels’,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928).
Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze.
Ch. 3
I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life ... with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him — literally.
Ch. 3
In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope.
Ch. 3
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
Ch. 4
Placet experiri
Latin phrase meaning "It pleases to experiment", Ch. 4
“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”
"Herr Settembrini" commenting on Germany, in Ch. 4
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
Ch. 4
My aversion from music rests on political grounds.
Ch. 4
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
Settembrini's view of literature, Ch. 4

This triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable."Love as a force contributory to disease."
The title of "Dr. Krokowski" lectures. Ch. 4
This conflict between the powers of love and chastity ... it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.
Ch. 4
It seemed that at the end of the lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psycho-analysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to come unto him. "Come unto me," he was saying, though not in those words, " come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden." And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the unconscious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamorphosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confidence; he promised relief.
Ch. 4

All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics...Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.
Ch. 4
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
Ch. 4
Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. Yes, they were all one, one and the same force, one and the same idea, and all of them could be comprehended in one single word... The word was — civilization!
Ch. 4
Frau Stöhr ... began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough.... Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn’t stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.
Ch. 4
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
Ch. 4
Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,... but it is also good for the disease.
Ch. 4
A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R.I.P. — requiescat in pace — you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression — I like it much better than ‘He is a jolly good fellow,’ which is simply rowdy.
Ch. 5
Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.
Settembrini on the Magic Mountain Society, in Ch. 5
It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.
Hans Castorp on the world outside the sanatorium, in Ch. 5

The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation...The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.
Ch. 5
The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.
Ch. 5

Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death...Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
Ch. 5
Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.
Ch. 5
Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death.
Ch. 5
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
Ch. 5
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.
Ch. 5
Asien verschlingt uns. Wohin man blickt: tatarische Gesichter.
Asia surrounds us — wherever one’s glance rests, a Tartar physiognomy.
Variant translation: Asia devours us. Wherever one looks: Tartar faces.
Settembrini in Ch. 5

What was life?'What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of protein molecules that were too impossibly ingenious in structure.
Ch. 5
Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.
Ch. 5
Le corps, l'amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu'un. Car le corps, c'est la maladie et la volupté, et c'est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l'amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie!
Rough translation of this passage written in French: The body, love, death, these three only. For the body, this is the disease and exquisite delight, and this that does die, yes, they are carnal both of them, love and death, and thus their terror and their great magic!
Hans Castorp to Chauchat, in French, Ch. 5
L’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde!
Love for him, for the human body, was extremely humanitarian an interest and had more educational power than the whole teaching skills of the world!
Ch. 5
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
Ch. 6
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Ch. 6
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
Ch. 6
The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.
Ch. 6
There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.
Ch. 6; variant translation: I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind.
Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives kind thoughts.
Ch. 6; variant translation: It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives 
sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization.
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.
Ch. 6
Everything is politics.
Ch. 6
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.

Ch. 6
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
Ch. 6
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.
Ch. 7
Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Ch. 7
The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.
Ch. 7
Absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent — the State, family life, secular art and science — was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.
Naphta in Ch. 7
We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
Ch. 7
Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race.


[edit] Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)
"Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners" in Die Neue Rundschau, Jahrgang 44, Heft 4 (April 1933), as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Essays by Thomas Mann (1957), p. 199
He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.
It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear.
What was it that drove these thousands into the arms of his art — what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered — in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?
Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self- critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.

[edit] Freud and the Future (1937)
"Freud und die Zukunft" in Imago, vol. 22 (1936); as translate by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Essays by Thomas Mann (1957) p. 307

While in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one.When it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artistic temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life; for while in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one.
I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud’s life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity.
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.

[edit] The Beloved Returns (1939)
Lotte in Weimar as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter, Knopf (1940); also titled as 'Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
Ch. 7
Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage.
Ch. 7
Profundity must smile.
Ch. 7

[edit] Doctor Faustus (1947)
This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy — not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether — where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei — I am surprised it is not forbidden.
Ch. 9
Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?
Ch. 15

[edit] Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)
Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954), as translated by Denver Lindley
What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!
Bk. 1, Ch. 1
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
Bk. 1, Ch. 8
The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.
Madame Houpflé, Bk. 2, Ch. 9
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
Bk. 2, Ch. 4
O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes.
Bk. 2, Ch. 4

[edit] Unsourced
I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.
Letter, (1950); as quoted in Thomas Mann — The Birth of Criticism (1987) by Marcel Reich-Ranicki
The positive thing about the sceptic is that he considers everything possible!
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

[edit] External links
Wikipedia has an article about:
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Thomas MannThe Nobel Prize Bio on Mann
Brief biography
Works by Thomas Mann at Project Gutenberg
Bibliography
FBI File on Thomas Mann
Retrieved from "http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann"

 

Rhadamanthus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In Greek myths, Rhadamanthus (Ῥαδάμανθυς; also transliterated as Rhadamanthys or Rhadamanthos) was a wise king, the son of Zeus and Europa. ...
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Rhadamanthus
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For other uses, see Rhadamanthus (disambiguation).
"Rhadamanthys" redirects here. For the fictional character in Saint Seiya, see Wyvern Rhadamanthys.
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In Greek myths, Rhadamanthus (Ῥαδάμανθυς; also transliterated as Rhadamanthys or Rhadamanthos) was a wise king, the son of Zeus and Europa. Later accounts even make him out to be one of judges of the dead. His brothers were Sarpedon and Minos (also a king and later a judge of the dead). Rhadamanthus was raised by Asterion. He had two sons, Gortys and Erythrus.

[edit] In Greek and Roman accounts
According to one account, Rhadamanthus ruled Crete before Minos, and gave the island an excellent code of laws, which the Spartans were believed to have copied.

Driven out of Crete by his brother, Minos, who was jealous of his popularity, he fled to Boeotia, where he wedded Alcmene. Homer represents him as dwelling in the Elysian Fields (Odyssey, iv. 564), the paradise for the immortal sons of Zeus.

According to later legends (c. 400 BC), on account of his inflexible integrity he was made one of the judges of the dead in the lower world, together with Aeacus and Minos. He was supposed to judge the souls of Asians, Aeacus those of Europeans, while Minos had the casting vote (Plato, Gorgias, 524A).

Virgil (69 - 18 BC) makes Rhadamanthus one of the judges and punishers of the damned in the Underworld (Tartarus) section of The Aeneid.

Pindar says that he is the right-hand man of Cronus (now ruling Elysium) and was the sole judge of the dead.

In another version, Minos, Sarpedon and Rhadamanthus quarreled over a beautiful boy they were all in love with, by the name of Miletus, son of Apollo and Areia. The youth however preferred Sarpedon, so Minos in revenge went to war and conquered the whole island. Sarpedon and his beloved escaped to Lycia, where Miletus founded the city that bore his name. Other mythographers claimed that the beloved youth's name was Atymnios, and that he was the son of Zeus and Cassiopeia. (Apollodorus III.1.2)

Bernard Sergent claims that the story is a late invention in that the theme of competition for a beloved youth is not in keeping with the Cretan pederastic tradition, and there is no record of this Miletus prior to the second century BC.[citation needed]

[edit] Other uses
In Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, Rhadamanthys is the cynical nickname Mr. Settembrini uses for Doctor Behrens, head of the Davos Sanatorium, who decides who gets to leave and who has to remain hospitalized.
Rhadamanthus also lends its name to the English word 'rhadamanthine', an adjective describing any just but inflexible judgment. (The Aeneid, vi. 566)
The Kuiper belt object 38083 Rhadamanthus is named after this figure.
In Stephen King's Rose Madder, Rhadamanthus is the name of the white pony tied to the broken cart in Rosie's picture.
In Wild Arms 2, one of the major antagonists of the game is named Vinsfield Rhadamanthus.
In the popular manga series Saint Seiya , Wyvern Rhadamanthys is the name of one of the generals of hades.
In the Hyperion Cantos, Rhadamanth Nemes is sent after the main characters, encountering them on two occasions.
In John C. Wright's novel The Golden Age and its sequels, Rhadamanthus is the name of the artificial intelligence, called a Sophotech, that advises and serves the household of the protagonist, Phaethon, and his father, Helion, who in turn are named after the mythical Greek characters Phaëton and Helios.
In Charlotte Bronte's Villette, John Graham Bretton refers to himself as Rhadamanthus in his response of justice to the behavior of Ginerva Fanshawe, a young girl with whom he had been infatuated.
In the PC Game Diablo II, there is an undead boss called Radament, possibly influenced by Rhadamanthus.
In the Playstation Game Persona 2, one of the first Personae available in the game is called Rhadamanthys.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhadamanthus"
Categories: Greek mythology | Kings of Crete | Greek judges of the dead | Pederastic heroes and deities | Offspring of Zeus | Demigods of Classical mythology

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann Translated by H.T. Lowe Porter

Der Zauberg 1924

Page56

Satana

His age would have been hard to say, probably between thirty and forty; for though he gave an impression of youthfulness, yet hair on his temples was sprinkled with silver and gone quite thin on his head. Two bald bays ran along the narrow scanty parting, and added to the height of his forehead. His clothing, loose trousers in light yellowish checks, and too long, double. double-breasted pilot coat, with very wide lapels, made no slightest claim to elegance; and his stand-up collar, with rounding comers, was rough on the edges from frequent washing. His black cravat showed wear, and he wore no cuffs, as Hans Castorp saw at once from thee lax way the sleeve hung round the wrist. But despite all he knew he had a gentleman before him: the stranger's easy, charming pose and cultured expression left no doubt of that. Yet by this mingling of shabbiness and grace, by the black eyes and softly waving moustaches, Hans Castorp was irresistibly reminded of certain foreign musicians who used to come to Hamburg at Christmas to play in the streets before people's doors. He could see them rolling up their velvet eyes and holding .ut:their soft hats for the coins tossed from the windows. "A hand-organ man," he thought. Thus he was not surprised at the name he heard, as Joachim rose from the bench and in some embarrassment presented him: "My cousin Castorp, Herr Settembrini."

Hans Castorp had got up at the same time, the traces of his burst of hilarity still on his face. But the Italian courteously bade them both not to disturb themselves, and made them sit down /Page 57/ again, while he maintained his easy pose before them. He smiled, standing there and looking at the cousins, in particular at Hans Castorp; a smile that was a fine, almost mocking deepening and crisping of one corner of the mouth, just at the point where the full moustache made its beautiful upward curve. It had upon the cousins a singular effect: it somehow constrained them to mental alertness and clarity; it sobered the reeling Hans Castorp in a twinkling, and made him ashamed.
Settembrini said: " You are in good spirits - and with reason too, with excellent reason. What a splendid morning! A blue sky, a smiling sun" - with an easy, adequate motion of the arm he raised a small, yellowish-skinned hand to the heavens, and sent a lively glance upward after it - " one could almost forget where one is."

He spoke without accent, only the precise enunciation betrayed the foreigner. His lips seemed to take a certain pleasure in forming the words. It was most agreeable to hear him.
"You had a pleasant journey hither, I hope? " he turned to Hans Castorp. "And do you already know your fate - I mean has the mournful ceremony of the first examination taken place? " Here, if he had really been expecting a reply he should have paused; he had put his question, and Hans Castorp prepared to answer. But he went on: "Did you get off easily? One might put - " here he paused a second, and the crisping at the corner of his mouth grew crisper - "more than one interpretation upon your laughter. How many months have our Minos and Rhadamanthus knocked you down for? " The slang phrase sounded droll on his lips. "Shall I guess? Six? Nine? You know we are free with the time up here - "

Hans Castorp laughed, astonished, at the same time racking his brains to remember who Minos and Rhadamanthus were. He answered: "Not at all - no, really, you are under a misapprehension, Herr Septem - "

"Settembrini," corrected the Italian, clearly and with emphasis, making as he spoke a mocking bow.

" Herr Settembrini - I beg your pardon. No, you are mistaken. Really I am not ill. I have only come on a visit to my cousin Ziemssen for a few weeks, and shall take advantage of the opportunity to get a good rest - "

"Zounds! You don't say? Then you are not one of us? You are well, you are but a guest here, like Odysseus in the kingdom of the shades? You are bold indeed, thus to descend into these depths peopled by the vacant and idle dead - "

Page 58

- "Descend, Herr Settembrini? I protest. Here I have climbed up some five thousand feet to get here - "

" That was only seeming. Upon my honour, it was an illusion," the Italian said, with a decisive wave of the hand. " We are sunk enough here, aren't we, Lieutenant?" he said to Joachim, who, - no little gratified at this method of address, thought to hide his satisfaction, and answered reflectively:

"I suppose we do get rather one-sided. But we can pull ourselves together, afterwards, if we try."

"At least, you can, I'm sure-you are an upright man," Settembrini said. "Yes, yes, yes," he said, repeating the word three times, with a sharp s, turning to Hans Castorp again as he spoke, and then, in the same measured way, clucking three times. with his tongue against his palate. "I see, I see, I see," he said again, giving the s the same sharp sound as before. He looked the newcomer so steadfastly in the face that his eyes grew fixed in a stare; then, becoming lively again, he went on: "So you come up quite of your own free will to us sunken ones, and mean to bestow upon us the pleasure of your company for some little while? That is delightful. And what term had you thought of - putting to your stay? I don't mean precisely. I am merely interested to know what the length of a man's sojourn would be when it is himself and not Rhadamanthus who prescribes the limit."

"Three weeks," Hans Castorp said, rather pridefully, as he saw himself the object of envy.

" O dio! Three weeks! Do you hear, Lieutenant? Does it: not sound to you impertinent to hear a person. say: 'I am stopping for three weeks and then I am gomg away again ? We up here are not acquainted with such an unit of time as the week - if I may be permitted to instruct you, my dear sir. Our smallest unit is the month.We reckon in the grand style-that is a privilege we shadows have. We possess other such; they are all of the same quality. May I ask what profession you practise down below?

Or, more probably, for what profession are you preparing yourself? You see we set no bounds to our thirst for iriformation­curiosity is another of the prescriptive rights of shadows."

"Pray don't mention it,' said Hans Castorp. And told him.

"A ship-builder! Magnificent! " cried Settembrini. "I assure you, I find that magnificent - though my own talents lie in quite another direction.

"Herr Settembrini is a literary man," Joachim explained, rather self-consciously. "He wrote the obituary notices of Carducci for the German papers-Carducci, you know." He got /Page 59/ more self-conscious still, for his cousin looked at him in amazement, as though to say: "Carducci? What do you know about him? Not any more than I do, I'll wager."

"Yes," the Italian said, nodding. "I had the honour of telling your countrymen the story of our great poet and free­thinker, when his life had drawn to a close. I knew him, I can count myself among his pupils. I sat at his feet in Bologna. I may thank him for what culture I can call my own - and for what joyousness of life as well. But we were speaking of you. A ship­builder! Do you know you have sensibly risen in my estimation? You represent now, in my eyes, the world of labour and practical genius."

"Herr Settembrini, I am only a student as yet, I am just beginning."

" Certainly. It is the beginning that is hard. But all work is hard, isn't it, that deserves the name? "

"That's true enough, God knows - or the Devil does," Hans Castorp said, and the words came from his heart.

Settembrini's eyebrows went up.

" Oh," he said, "so you call on the Devil to witness that sentiment - the Devil incarnate, Satan himself? Did you know that my great master wrote a hymn to him? "

"I beg your pardon," Hans Castorp said, "a hymn to the Devil? "

"The very Devil himself, and no other. It is sometimes sung, in my native land, on festal occasions. 'O salute, O Satana, O ribellione, O forza vindice della ragione!. . .' It is a magnificent song. But it was hardly Carducci's Devil you had in mind when you spoke; for he is on the very best of terms with hard work; whereas yours, who is afraid of work and hates it like poison, is probably the same of whom we are told that we may not hold out even the little finger to him."

All this was making the very oddest impression on our good Hans Castorp. He knew no Italian, and the rest of it sounded no less uncomfortable, and reminded him of Sunday sermons, though delivered quite casually, in a light, even jesting tone. He looked at his cousin, who kept his eyes cast down; then he said: "You take my words far too literally, Herr Settembrini. When I spoke of the Devil, it was just a manner of speaking, I assure you.'

" Somebody must have some esprit," Settembrini said, looking straight ahead, with a melancholy air. Then recovering himself, he skilfully got back to their former subject, and went on blithely: " At all events, I am probably right in concluding from /Page 60/ your words that the calling you have embraced is as strenuous as it is honourable. As for myself, I am a humanist, a homo humanus. have no mechanical ingenuity, however sincere my respect for But I can well understand that the theory of your craft requires a clear and keen mind, and its practice not less than the man. Am I right? "

"You certainly are, I can go all the way with you there," Hans Castorp answered. Unconsciously he made an effort to reply with eloquence.

The demands made to-day on a man in my profession aresimply enormous. It is better not to have too clear an idea of their magnitude, it might take away one's courage: no, it's no joke. And if one isn't the strongest in the world - It is true that I am here only on a visit; but I am not very robust, and I cannot with truth assert that my work agrees with me so wonderfully wel1. It would be a great deal truer to say that it rather takes it out of me. I only feel reallyfit when I am doing nothing at alI."

" As now, for example?"

"Now? Oh, now I am so new up here, I am still rather bewildered - you can imagine."

"Ah - bewildered."

"Yes, and I did not sleep so very well, and the early breakfast wasreally too solid. - I am accustomed to a fair breakfast, but this was a little too rich for my blood, as the saying goes. In short, I feel a sense of oppression - and for some reason or other, my cigar this morning hasn't the right taste, something that as good as never happens to me, or only when I am seriously upset ­to-day It is like leather. I had to throw it away, there was no forcing it. Are you a smoker, may I ask? No? Then you cannot imagine the annoyance and disappointment it is for anyone like me, who have smoked from my youth up, and taken such pleasure in it"

"I am without experience in the field," Settembrini answered, I find that my lack of it is in no poor company. So many, self-denying spirits have refrained. Carducci had no use for the practice. But you will find our Rhadamanthus a kindred spirit. He is a devotee of your vice."

"Vice, Herr Settembrini? "

"Why not? One must call things by their right names; life is enriched and ennobled thereby. I too have my vices."

" So Hofrat Behrens is a·connoisseur? A charming man."

"Yon find him so? Then you have already made his acquaintance?"

"Yes, just now, as we came out. It was almost like a profe-/Page 61/ ssional visit - but gratis, you mow -sine pecunia. He saw at once that I am anaemic. He advised me to follow my cousin's regimen entirely: to lie out on the balcony a good deal he even said I should take my temperature."

"Did he indeed?" Settembrini cried out. "Capital!" He laughed and threw back his head. "How does it go, that opera of yours? ' A fowler bold in me you see, forever laughing merrily! ' Ah, that is most amusing! And you will follow his advice? Of course, why shouldn't you? He's a devil of a fellow, our Rhadamanthus! 'Forever laughing' - even if it is rather forced at times. He is inclined to melancholia, you know. His vice doesn't agree with him - of course, else it would be no vice. Smoking gives him fits of depression; that is why our respected Frau Directress has taken charge of his supplies, and only deals him out daily rations. It even happens sometimes that he yields to the temptation to steal it, and then he gets an attack of melancholia. A troubled spirit, in short. Do you know your Directress already, too? No? You have made a inistake. You must remedy it at the earliest opportunity. My dear sir, she comes of the noble race of von Mylendonk. And she is distinguished from the Medici Venus by the fact that where the goddess has a bosom, she has a cross."

"Ah, ha ha! - capital! " Hans Castorp laughed. " Her Christian name is Adriatica."

"Adriatica! " shouted Hans Castorp. "Priceless! Adriatica von Mylendonk! Isn't that splendid! Sounds as though she had been dead a very long time. It is'positively mediaeval."

"My dear sir," Settembrini answered him, "there is a good deal up here that is positively mediaeval, as you express it. Personally, I am convinced that Rhadamanthus was actuated simply and solely by artistic feeling when he made this fossil head overseer of his Chamber of Horrors. You lmow he is an artist, by the bye. He paints in oils. Why not? There's no law against it - anybody can paint that likes. Frau Adriatica tells all who will listen to her, not counting those who won't, that a Mylendonk was abbess of a cloister at Bonn on the Rhine, in the thirteenth century. It can't have been long after that she herself saw the light of day."

"Ha ha! Why, Herr Settembrini, I find you are a mocker! " "A mocker? You mean I am malicious? Well, yes, perhaps I am, a little," said Settembrini. " My great complamt is that it is my fate to spend my malice upon such insignificant objects. I hope, Engineer, you have nothing against malice? In my eyes, it is ,reason's keenest dart against the powers of darkness and /Page 62/ ugliness."

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

The Thunderbolt

Page 706
"SEVEN years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Partisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savour of the mythical; one might even say that it is more filling to the spirit than a dull academic half-dozen. Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the "bad" Russian table, and his company there two Ar-menians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. He sat at the " bad " Russian table, wearing a recent little blond beard, vaguish in cut, which we are disposed to regard as a sign of philosophic indiffer-ence to his own outer man. Yes, we will even go further, and relate his carelessness of his person to the carelessness of the rest of the world regarding him. The authorities had ceased to devise him distractions. There was the morning inquiry, as to, whether he had slept well, itself purely rhetorical and summary; and that aside, the Hofrat did not address him with any particularity; while Adriatica von Mylendonk-she had, at the time of which we write, a stye in a perfect state of maturity - did so seldom, in fact scarcely ever. They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being "asked" any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further - an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, in-deed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind. At all events, here was one on whom the authorities no longer needed to keep an eye, being assured that no wild or defiant resolves were ripen-ing in his breast. He was " settled," established. Long ago he had ceased to know where else he should go, long ago he had ceased to be capable of a resolve to return to the flat-land. Pid not the very fact that he was sitting at the " bad " Russian table witness a certain-abandon? No slightest adverse comment upon the said table being intended by the remark! Among all the seven, no single one could be said to possess definite tangible advantages or / Page 707 / disadvantages. We make bold to say that here was a democracy of tables, all honourable alike. T:he same tremendous meals were served here, as at the others; Rhadamanthus himself occasionally folded his huge hands before the doctor's place at the head; and the nations who ate there were respectable members of the human race, even though they boasted no Latin, and were not exag-geratedly dainty at their feeding.
Time - yet not the time told by the station clock, moving with- a jerk five minutes at once, but rather the time of a tiny timepiece, the hand of which one cannot see move, or the time the grass keeps when it grows, so unobservably one would say it does not grow at all, until some morning the fact is undeni- able - time, a line composed of a succession of dimensionless points (and now we are sure the unhappy deceased Naphta would interrupt us to ask how dimensionless points, no matter how many of them, can constitute a line), time, we say, had gone on, in its furtive, unobservable, competent way, bringing about changes. For example, the boy Teddy was discovered, one day- not one single day, of course, but only rather indefinitely from which day - to be a boy no longeer. No more might ladies take him on their laps, when, on occasion, he left his bed, changed his pyjamas for his knickerbockers, and came downstairs. Im-perceptibly that leaf had turned. Now, on such occasions, he took them. on- his instead, and both sides were as well, or even better pleased. He was become a youth; scarcely could we say he had bloomed into a youth; but he had shot up. Hans Castorp had not noticed it happening, and then, suddenlyy, he did. The shooting-up, however, did not suit the lad Teddy; the temporal became him not. In his twenty-first year he departed this life; dying of the disease for which he had proved receptive; and they cleansed and fumigated after him. The fact makes little claim upon our emotions, the change being so slight between his one state and his next.
But there were other deaths, and more important; deaths down in the flat-land, which touched, or would once have touched, our hero more nearly. We are thinking of the recent decease of old .Consul Tienappel, Hans's great-uncle and foster-father, of faded memory. He had carefully avoided unfavourable conditions of atmospheric pressure, and left it to Uncle James to stultify him-self; yet .an apoplexy carried him off after all; and a telegram, couched m brief but feelmg terms - feeling more for the departed than for the recipient of the wire - was one day brought to Hans Castorp where he lay.in his excellent chair. He acquired / Page 708 / some black-bordered note-paper, and wrote to his uncle-cousins: he, the doubly, now, so to say, triply orphaned, expressed him- self as being the more distressed over the sad news, for that cir- cumstances forbade him interrupting his present sojourn even to pay his great-uncle the last respects.
To speak of sorrow would be disingenuous. Yet in these days Hans Castorp's eyes did wear an expression more musing than common. This death, which could at no time have moved him greatly, and after the lapse of years could scarcely move him at all, meant the sundering of yet another bond with the life below; gave to what he rightly called his freedom the final seal. In the time of which we speak, all contact between him and the flatland had ceased. He sent no letters thither, and received none thence. He no longer ordered Maria Mancini, having found a brand up here to his liking, to which he was now as faithful as once to his old-time charmer: a brand that must have carried even a polar explorer through the sorest and severest trials; armed with which, and no other solace, Hans Castorp could lie and bear it out indefinitely, as one does at the sea-shore. It was an especially well cured brand, with the best leaf wrapper, named "Light of Asia "; rather more compact than Maria, mouse-grey in colour with a blue band, very tractable and mild, and evenly consuming to a snow-white ash, that held its shape and still showed traces of the veining on the wrapper; so evenly and regularly that it might have served the smoker for an hour-glass, and did so, at need, for he no longer carried a timepiece. His watch had fallen from his night-table; it did not go, and he had neglected to have it regulated, perhaps on the same grounds as had made him long since give up using a calendar, whether to keep track of the day, or to look out an approaching feast: the grounds, namely, of his freedom." Thus he did honour to his abiding-everlasting, his walk by the ocean of time, the hermetic enchantment to which he had proved so extraordinarily susceptible that it had become tlle fundamental adventure ofhis life, in which all the alchemisti-cal processes of his simple substance had found full play.
Thus he lay; and thus, in high summer, the year was once more rounding out, the seventh year, though he knew it not, of his sojourn up here.
Then, like a thunder-peal-
But God forbid and modesty withhold us from speaking over- much of what the thunder-peal bore us on its wave of sound! Here rodomontade is out of place. Rather let us lower our voice to say that then came the peal of thunder we all know so well; / Page 709 / that deafening explosion of long-gathering magazines of passion and spleen. That historic thunder-peal, of which we speak with bated breath, made the foundations of the earth to shake; but for us it was the shock that fired the mine beneath the magic mountain, and set our sleeper ungently outside the gates. Dazed he sits in the long grass and rubs his eyes - a man who, despite many warnings, had neglected to read the papers.
His Mediterranean friend and mentor had ever tried to prompt him; had felt it incumbent upon him to instruct his nurslmg, the object of his solicitude, in what was going on down below; but his pupil had lent no ear. The young man had indeed, in a stock- taking way, preoccupied himself. with this or that among the subjective shadows of things; but the things themselves he had heeded not at all, having a wilful tendency to take the shadow for the substance, and in the substance to see only shadow. For this, however, we must not judge him harshly, since the relation between'substance and shadow has never been defined once and for all.
Long ago it had been Herr Settembrini who brought sudden illumination into the room, sat down beside the horizontal Hans and sought to influence and instruct him upon matters of life and death. But now it was the pupil, who, seated with his hands between his knees, at the bedside of the humanist, or near his couch in the cosy and retired little mansard, study, with the car- bonaro chairs and the water-bottle, kept him company and listened courteously to his utterances upon the state of Europe - for in these days Herr Ludovico was seldom on his legs. Naphta's violent end, the terroristic deed of that desperat~ antagonist, had dealt his sensitive nature a blow from which it could scarcely rally; weakness and infirmity had since been his portion. He could
no longer work on the Sociological Pathology; the League waited in vain for that lexicon of all the masterpieces of letters having human suffering for their central theme. Herr Ludovico had per-force to limit to oral efforts his contribution to the organization of progress; and even so much he must have foregone had not Hans Castorp's visits given him opportunity to spread his gospel.
His voice was weak, but he spoke with conviction, at length and beautifully, upon the self-perfecting of the human spirit through social betterment. Softly, as though on the wings of doves, came the words of Herr Ludovico. Yet again, when he came to speak of the unification and universal well being of the liberated peoples, there mingled a sound - he neither knew nor willed it, of course - as of the rushing pinions of eagles. That / Page 710 / was the political key, the grandfatherly inheritance that united in him with the humanistic gift of the father, to make up the litterateur - precisely as humanism and politics united in the lofty ideal of civilization, an ideal wherein were blended the mildness of doves and the boldness of eagles. That ideal was only biding its time, until the day dawned, the Day of the People, when,. the principle of reaction should be laid low, and the Holy Alliance of civic democracIes take Its place. Yes, here seemed to sound two voices, with differing counsels. For Herr Settembrini was a hu-manitarian, yet at the same time, half explicitly, he was warlike too. In the duel with the outrageous little Naphta he had borne himself like a man. But in general it still remained rather vague what his position was to be, when humanity in an outburst of enthusiasm united itself with politics in support of a triumphant and dominating world-civilization, and the burgher's pike was dedicated upon the altar of humanity. There was some doubt whether he would then hold back his hand from the shedding of blood. Yes, it seemed the prevailing temper more and more held sway in the Italian's mind and view; the boldness of the eagle was gradually outbidding the mildness of the dove.
Not infrequently his attitude toward the existing great political systems was divided, embarrassed, disturbed by scruples. The. diplomatic rapprochement between his country and Austria, their co-operation in Albania, had reflected itself in his conversation: a co-operation that raised his spirits in that it was directed against Latinless half-Asia - knout, Schlusselburg, and all- yet tormented them in that it was a misbegotten alliance with the hereditary foe, with the principle of reaction and subjugated nationalities. The autumn previous, the great French loan to Russia, for the purpose of building a network of railways in Poland, had awakened in him similar misgivings. For Herr Settembrini belonged to the Fran-cophile party in his own country, which was not surprising when one recalled that his grandfather had compared the six days of the July Revolution to the six days of the creation, and seen that they were as good. But the understanding between the en-lightened republic and Byzantine Scythia was too much for him, it oppressed his breast, and at the same time made him breathe quicker for hope and joy at the thought of the strategic meaning of that network of railways. Then came the Serajevo murder, for everyone excepting German Seven-Sleepers a storm-signal; de-cisive for the informed ones, among whom we may reckon Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp saw him shudder as a private citizen at the frightful deed, while in the same moment his breast heaved / Page 711 / with the knowledge that this was a deed of popular liberation, directed against the citadel of his loathing. On the other hand, was it not also the fruit of Muscovite activity, and as such giving rise to great heart.;searchings? Which did not hinder him, three weeks later, from characterizing the extreme demands of the monarchy upon Servia as a hideous crime and an insult to human dignity, the consequences of which he could forese well enough, and awaited in breathless excitement.
In short, Herr Settembrini's feelings were as complex as the fatality he saw fast rolling up, for which he sought by hints and half-words to prepare his pupil, a sort of national courtesy and compunction preventIng him from speaking out. In the first days of mobilization, the first declaration of war, he had a way of putting out both hands to his visitor; taking Hans Castorp's own and pressing them, that fairly went to our young noodle's heart, if not precisely to his head. " My friend," the Italian would say, " gunpowder, the printing-press, yes, you have certainly given us all that. but if you think we could march against the Revolution-Caro. . . .
During those days of stifling expectation, when the nerves of Europe were on the rack, Hans Castorp did not see Herr Settembrini. The newspapers with their wild, chaotic contents pressed up out of the depths to his very balcony, they disorganized the house, filled the dining-room with their sulphurous, stifling breath, even penetrated the chambers of the dying. These were the moments when the "Seven-Sleeper," not knowing what had hap-pened, was slowly stirring himself in the grass, before he sat up, rubbed his eyes - yes, let us carry the figure to the end, in order to do justice to the movement of our hero's mind: he drew up his legs, stood up, looked about him. He saw himself released, freed from enchantment -not of his own motion; he was fain to confess, but by the operation of exterior powers, of whose activities his own liberation was a minor incident Indeed! Yet though his tiny destiny fainted to nothing in the face of the general, was there not some hint of a personal mercy and grace for him, a manifestation of divine goodness and justice? Would Life receive again her erring and "delicate " child-not by a cheap and easy slipping back to her arms, but sternly, solemnly, peni-entially - perhaps not even among the living, but only with three salvoes fired over the grave of him a sinner? Thus might he return. He sank on his knees, raising face and hands to a heaven that howsoever dark and sulphurous was no longer the gloomy grotto of his state of sin.

Page 712

And in this attitude Herr Settembrini found him - figura-tively and most figuratively spoken, for full well we know our hero's traditional reserve would render such theatricality im-possible. Herr Settembrini, in fact, found him packing his trunk. For since the moment of his sudden awakening, Hans Castorp had been caught up in the hurry and scurry of a "wild" de-parture, brought about by the thunder-peal. "Home" - the Berghof - was the picture of an ant-hill in a panic: its little popu- lation was flinging itself, heels over head, five thousand feet downwards to the catastrophe-smitten flat-land. They stormed the little trains, they crowded them to the footboard -luggageless, if needs must, and the stacks of luggage piled high the station platform, the seething platform, to the height of which the scorching breath from the flat-land seemed to mount - and Hans Castorp stormed with them. In the heart of the tumult Ludovico embraced him, quite literally enfolded him in his arms and kissed him, like a southerner - but like a Russian too - on both his cheeks; and this, despite his own emotion, took our wild traveller no little aback. But he nearly lost his composure. when, at t.he very last, Herr Settembnm called him " Giovanni" and, laying aside the form, of address common to the cultured West, spoke to him with the thou!
"E cosi in giu," he said. "Cosi vai in giu finalmente - add-io, Giovanni mio! Quite otherwise had I thought to see thee go. But be it so, the gods have willed it thus and not otherwise. I hoped to discharge you to go down to your work, and now you go to fight among your kindred. My God, it was given to you and not to your cousin, our Tenente! What tricks life plays! Go, then, It is your blood 'that calls, go and fight bravely. More than that can no man. But forgive me if I devote the remnant of my powers to incite my country to fight where the Spirit and sacra egoismo point the way. Addio! " .
  Hans Castorp thrust out his head among ten others, filling the little open window-frame. He waved.. And Herr Settembrini waved back, with his right hand, while with the ring-finger of his left he delicately touched the comer of his eye.

What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us? Twilight, rain, filth. Fiery glow of the overcast sky, ceaseless booming of heavy thunder; the moist air rent by a sharp singing whine, a raging, swelling howl as of some hound of hell, that ends its course in a splitting, a splintering and sprinkling, a crackling, a coruscation; by groans and shrieks, by trumpets blowing fit to / Page 713 /  burst, by the beat of a drum coming faster, faster- There is a wood, discharging drab hordes, that come on, fall, spring up again, come on - Beyond, a line of hill stands out against the fiery sky, whose glow turns now and again to blowing flames. About us is rolling plough-land, all upheaved and trodden into mud; athwart it a bemired high road, disguised with broken branches and from it again a deeply furrowed, boggy field-path leading off in curves toward the distant hills. Nude, branchless trunks of trees meet the eye, a cold rain falls. Ah, a signpost! Useless, though, to question it, even despite the half-dark, for it is shattered, illegible. East, west? It is the flat-land, it is the war. And we are shrinking shadows by the way-side, shamed by the security of our shadowdom, and noways minded to indulge in any rodomontade; merely led hither by the spirit of our nar-rative, merely to see again, among those running, stumbling, drum- mustered grey comrades that swarm out of yonder wood, one we know; merely to look once more in the simple face of our one-time fellow of so many years, the genial sinner whose voice we know so well, before we lose him from our sight.
They have been brought forward, these comrades, for a final thrust in a fight that has already lasted all day long, whose ob-jective is the retaking of the hill position and the burning villages beyond, lost two days since to the enemy. It is a volunteer regiment, fresh young blood and mostly students, not long in the field. They were roused in the night, brought up in trains to morning, then marched in the rain on wretched roads - on no roads at all, for the roads were blocked, and they went over moor and ploughed land with full kit for seven hours, their coats. sodden. It was no pleasure excursion. If one did not care to lose one's boots, one stooped at every second step, clutched with one's fingers into the straps and pulled them out of the quaking mire. It took an hour of such work to cover one meadow. But at last they have reached the appointed spot, exhausted, on edge, yet the reserve strength of their youthful bodies has kept them tense, they crave neither the sleep nor the food they have been denied. Their wet, mud-bespattered faces, framed between strap and grey-covered helmet, are flushed with exertion - perhaps too with the sight of the losses they suffered on their march through that boggy wood. For the enemy, aware of their advance, have concentrated a barrage of shrapnel and large-calibre grenades upon .the way they must come; it crashed among them in the wood, and howling, flaming, splashing, lashed the wide ploughed land.
They must get through, these three thousand ardent youths; / Page 714 / they must reinforce with their bayonets the attack on the burning villages, and the trenches in front of and behind the line of hills; they must help to advance their line to a point indicated in the dispatch their leader has in his pocket. They are three thousand, that they may be two thousand when the hills, the villages are reached; that is the meaning of their number. They are a body of troops calculated as sufficierit, even after great losses, to attack and carry a position and greet their triumph with a thousand-voiced huzza - not counting the stragglers that fall out by the way. Many a one has thus fallen out on the forced march, for which he proved too young and weak; paler he grew, staggered, set his teeth, drove himself on - and after all he could do fell out notwithstanding. Awhile he dragged himself in the rear of the marching column, overaken and passed by company after company; at length he remained on the ground, lying where it was not good to lie. Then came the shattering wood. But there are so many of them, swarming on - they can survive a blood-letting and still come on in hosts. They have already overflowed the level, rain-lashed land; the high road, the field road, the boggy ploughed land; we shadows stand amid and among them. At the edge of the wood they fix their bayonets, with the practised grips; the horns enforce them, the drums roll deepest bass, and forward they stumble, as best they can, with shrill cries; night- marishly, for clods of earth cling to their heavy boots and fetter them.
They fling themselves down before the projectiles that come howling on, then they leap up again and hurry forward; they exult, in their young, breaking voices as they run, to discover themselves still unhit. Or they are hit, they fall, fighting the air with their arms, shot through the forehead, the heart, the belly; They lie, their faces in the mire, and are motionless. They lie, their backs elevated by the knapsack, the crowns of their heads pressed into the mud, and clutch and claw in the air. But the wood emits new swarms, who fling themselves down, who spring up, who, shrieking or silent, blunder forward over the fallen.
Ah, this young blood, with its knapsacks and bayonets, its mud-befouled boots and clothing! We look at it, our humanistic- aesthetic eye pictures it among scenes far other than these: we see these youths watering horses on a sunny arm of the sea; roving with the beloved one along the strand, the lover's lips to the ear of the yielding bride; in happiest rivalry bending the bow. Alas, no, here they lie, their noses in fiery filth: They are glad to be here - albeit with boundless anguish, with unspeakable / Page 715 / sickness for home; and this, of itself, is a noble and a shaming thing - but no good reason for bringing them to such a pass.
There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognize him at a distance, by the little beard he assumed while sitting at the bad" Russian table. Like all the others, he is wet through and glowing.. He is running, his feet heavy with mould, the bayonet swinging in his hand. Look! He treads on the hand of a fallen comrade; with his hobnailed boot he treads the hand deep into the slimy, branch-strewn ground. But it is he. What, singing? As one sings, unaware, staring stark ahead, yes, thus he spends his hurrying breath, to sing half soundlessly:

"And loving words I've carven
 Upon its branches fair - "

He stumbles, No, he has flung himself down, a hell-hound is coming howling, a huge explosive shell, a disgusting sugar-loaf from the infernal regions. He lies with his face in the cool mire, legs sprawled out, feet twisted, heels turned down. The product of a perverted science, laden with death, slopes earth-ward thirty paces in front of him. and buries its nose in the ground;. explodes InsIde there, wIth hideous expense of power, and raises up a fountain high as a house, of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, scattered fragments of humanity. Where it fell, two youths had lain, friends who in their need flung themselves down together - now they are scattered, commingled and gone.
Shame of our shadow-safety! Away! No more! - But our friend? Was he hit? He thought so, for the moment. A great clod of earth struck him on the shin, it hurt, but he smiles at it. Up he gets, and staggers on, limping on his earth-bound feet, all un-consciously singing:

"Its waving branches whi-ispered
A mess-age in my ear-"

and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out of our sight.
Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life's delicate child! Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake, not for yours, for you were simple. But after all, it was your story, it befell you, you must have more in you than we thought; we will not disclaim the pedagogic weakness we conceived for / Page 716 / you in the telling; which could even lead us to press a finger delicately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever.
Farewell- and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?"

FINIS OPERIS

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

Page 58

- "Descend, Herr Settembrini? I protest. Here I have climbed up some five thousand feet to get here - "

" That was only seeming. Upon my honour, it was an illusion," the Italian said, with a decisive wave of the hand. " We are sunk enough here, aren't we, Lieutenant?" he said to Joachim, who, - no little gratified at this method of address, thought to hide his satisfaction, and answered reflectively:

"I suppose we do get rather one-sided. But we can pull ourselves together, afterwards, if we try."

"At least, you can, I'm sure-you are an upright man," Settembrini said. "Yes, yes, yes," he said, repeating the word three times, with a sharp s, turning to Hans Castorp again as he spoke, and then, in the same measured way, clucking three times. with his tongue against his palate. "I see, I see, I see," he said again, giving the s the same sharp sound as before. He looked the newcomer so steadfastly in the face that his eyes grew fixed in a stare; then, becoming lively again, he went on: "So you come up quite of your own free will to us sunken ones, and mean to bestow upon us the pleasure of your company for some little while? That is delightful. And what term had you thought of - putting to your stay? I don't mean precisely. I am merely interested to know what the length of a man's sojourn would be when it is himself and not Rhadamanthus who prescribes the limit."

"Three weeks," Hans Castorp said, rather pridefully, as he saw himself the object of envy.

" O dio! Three weeks! Do you hear, Lieutenant? Does it: not sound to you impertinent to hear a person. say: 'I am stopping for three weeks and then I am gomg away again ? We up here are not acquainted with such an unit of time as the week - if I may be permitted to instruct you, my dear sir. Our smallest unit is the month.We reckon in the grand style-that is a privilege we shadows have. We possess other such; they are all of the same quality. May I ask what profession you practise down below?

 

 

CLOSER TO THE LIGHT

Melvin Morse with Paup Perry 1990

Page 78

CONJURED DEATHS AND ANCIENT RULERS

"Deep in an underground chamber a solemn group of men is seeking guidance "from death. They are dressed in white robes and chanting softly around a casket that is sealed with wax. One of their members is steadfastly counting to himself, carefully marking the time. After about eight minutes, the casket is opened, and the man who nearly suffocated inside is revived by the rush of fresh air. He tells the men around him what he saw. As he passed out from lack of oxygen, he saw a light that became brighter and larger as he sped toward it through a tunnel. From that light came a radiant person in white who delivered a message of eternal life.
The priest who is attending this ceremony is pleased with the results. "No man escapes death," he says. "And every living soul is destined to resurrection. You go into the tomb alive that you will learn of the light."
The man who died" but is now reborn is happy. He is now a member of one of the strangest societies in history, a group of civic leaders who induced nearly fatal suffocation to create a near-death experience."

Page 84

""How is it that many physicians have stopped ob­serving and listening?
Only twenty years ago, it came as a complete surprise to the medical profession that dying people actually went through a variety of psychological stages before passing on. In her hotly debated "pioneering" work, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kiibler-Ross claimed that there were five stages of dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Yet this "hotly debated" information has long been common knowledge to most nurses, who attend patients and talk to them instead of at them.
The medical establishment has managed to make near­death experiences a freakish event, not the rule. It has con­vinced patients that they are having bad dreams, not profound experiences that bond them with all of humanity."

 

3
THE
33
15
6
6
LIVING
73
37
1
5
DEATH
38
20
2
14
-
144
72
9
1+4
-
1+4+4
7+2
-
5
-
9
9
9

 

THE BIOLOGY OF DEATH

Lyall Watson 1974

Page 49

"As long ago as 1836, in a Manual of Medical Jurisprudence, this was said: 'Individuals who are apparently destroyed in a sudden manner, by certain wounds, diseases or even decapi­tation, are not really dead, but are only in conditions incompatible with the persistence of life. '231 This is an elegant and vital distinction. Death is not 'incompatible with the persistence of life'. Our ability to bring all kinds of death back to life is limited only by the state of our technology."

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

Page 496

" There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity.

I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts.

For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else."

Page 496 / 497

"Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death . Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilisation, friendly and enlightened , beautiful human intercourse-always in silent recognition of the blood-sacrifice. Ah, yes, it is it is well and truly dreamed. I have taken stock I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet well remember that faith with death and the dead is evil, is hostile to mankind, so soon as we give it power over thought and action.
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
And with this -I awake. For I have dreamed it out to the end, I have come to my goal."

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

HYSTERICA PASSIO

Page; 693

lHow could such primitive unreason be reconciled with the conception of the universe which underlay their calling? The contradiction diverted him, he held forth upon it in extenso. But such illustrations of Naphta's malevolence are without number let us abandon them for the all-too-pertinent tale we have to tell.
One afternoon in February, the gentlemen arranged an excursion to Monstein, some hour and a half from the village by sleigh. The party consisted of Naphta and Settembrini; Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal. In two one-horse sleighs, Hans Castorp with the humanist, Naphta with Ferge and Wehsal, the last-named sitting with the coachman, they left the greengrocer's at about three o'clock in the afternoon, and well bundled up drove off to the friendly music of bells, that sounds so pleasant through still, snowy air. They took the right-hand road, past Frauenkirch and Glans, southwards. Storm-clouds pushed up rapidly from that direction, and soon the only streak of blue in the sky lay behind them, over the Rhatikon. The cold was severe, the mountains misty. The road, a narrow, railingless shelf between mountain wall and abyss, rose steeply into the fir forests. They went at a foot-pace. Coasting-parties rode downhill toward them, and had to dismount as they met. Sometimes from round a bend in the road would come the clear and warning sound of other bells; sleighs driven tandem would be approaching and some skill was required to pass in the narrow road. Near their destination was a beautiful view of a rocky stretch of the Zugenstrasse. They disentangled themselves from their wraps and climbed out in front of the little Monstein inn, that called itself a Kurhaus, and went on foot a few steps further to get the view south-west toward the Stulsergrat. The gigantic wall, three thousand metres high, was shrouded in vapours. Only one jagged tooth reared itself heavenward out of the mist superterrestrial, Valhallah, far and faint and awesomely inaccessible. Hans Castorp admired it immensely, and summoned the others to follow suit. It was he who with due respect dubbed it inaccessible — and afforded Herr Settembrini the chance of saying that this particular rock was considerably frequented. And, in general, that there were few spots where man had not set his foot. That was rather tall talk, retorted Naphta; and mentioned Mount Everest, which to date had icily refused to surrender to man's importunity, and seemed likely to continue to do so. The humanist was put out. They returned to the Kurhaus, before which stood other unharnessed sleighs beside their own

Page 694
One might have lodgment here; in the upper story were numbered rooms, and on the same floor the dining-room, furnished in peasant style, and well heated. They ordered a bite from the obliging landlady: coffee, honey, white bread and " pear bread," a sort of sweetmeat, the speciality of the place; red wine was sent out to the coachman. At the other tables were sitting Swiss and Dutch visitors.
We should have been glad to relate that our friends, being warmed and cheered by the hot and excellent coffee, proceeded to elevating discourse. But the statement would be inexact. For the discourse, after the first few words, took the form of a monologue by Naphta, and even as a monologue was conducted in a manner singularly offensive, from the social point of view; the ex-Jesuit flatly turning his back on Herr Settembrini, completely ignoring the other two gentlemen, and devoting himself to Hans Castorp, to whom he held forth with marked affability.
It would have been hard to give a name to the subject of this discourse, to which Hans Castorp listened, nodding from time to time as though in partial agreement. We may presume that it was scarcely a connected argument, but rather moved loosely in the realms of the intellectual; in general pointing out, with an accompanying comment which we may characterize as cheerless, the equivocal nature of the spiritual phenomena of life, the changeful aspects and contentious unserviceabilitv of the great abstract conceptions man has based on them, and indicating in what a rainbow-hued garment the Absolute appears upon this earth.
At any rate, we might take as the nucleus of his lecture the problem of freedom, which he treated in the sense of confusion. He spoke, among other matters, of the Romantic movement, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and its fascinating double meaning; pointing out how before it the conceptions of reaction and revolution went down, in so far as they were not incorporated in a new and higher one. For it was of course utterly absurd to try to associate the conception of revolution solely with progress and victoriously advancing enlightenment. The Romantic movement in Europe had been above all a movement of liberation: anti-classic, anti-academic, directed against French classicism, the old school of reason, whose defenders it derided as " powdered wigs."
And Naphta began upon wars of liberation, talked of Fichtean enthusiasms, of a singing, frenzied popular uprising against that unbearable tyranny, as which, unfortunately — he tittered —freedom that is to say the revolutionary idea had taken shape. Very /Page 695/ droll it was: singing loudly, the people had set out to shatter the revolutionary tyranny for the benefit of reactionary princely authority — and this they did in the name of freedom.
The youthful listener would perceive the distinction, even the opposition, between foreign and domestic freedom; also note the ticklish question, which unfreedom was soonest — he he! — which least compatible with a nation's honour.
Freedom, indeed, was a conception rather romantic than illuminating. Like romanticism, it inevitably limited the human impulse to expansion; and the passionate individualism in them both had similar repressive results. Individualistic thirst for freedom had produced the historic and romantic cult of nationalism, which was warlike in character, and was called sinister by humanitarian liberalism, though the latter also preached individualism, only the other way about. Individualism was romantic-medizval, in its conviction of the infinite, the cosmic, importance of the single human being, whence was deduced the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the geocentric doctrine, and astrology. But on the other hand, individualism was an aspect of liberalizing humanism, which inclined to anarchy and would in any case protect the precious individual from being offered up on the altar of the general. Such was individualism, in its two aspects — all things unto all men.
One had to admit that the freedom-pathos had produced the most brilliant enemies of freedom, the most brilliant knights-errant of tradition at war with irreverent, destructive progress. Naphta cited Arndt, who cursed industrialism and glorified the nobility; and Gorres, the author of Christian mysticism. Perhaps his hearer would ask what..mysticism had to do with progress? Had it not been anti-scholastic, anti-dogmatic, anti-priestly? One was, indeed, compelled to recognize in the Hierarchy a force making for freedom: had it not set limits to the boundless pretensions of monarchy? But the mysticism of the end of the Middle Ages had shown its liberal character as forerunner of the Reformation — he he! — which in its turn had been an inextricable and tangled weave, a weft of freedom with a warp of medixvalism.
Oh, yes, what Luther did possessed the merit of demonstrating crudely and vividly the dubious character of the deed itself, the deed in general. Did Naphta's listener know what a deed was? A deed, for example, was the murder of Councillor Kotzebue by Sand, the theological student and member of the Burschenschaft. What was it, to speak the language of criminology, had put the weapon into the hand of young Sand? Enthusiasm for freedom /Page 696/ course. But looked at more nearly, it had rather been moral fanaticism, and the hatred of light foreign ways. Kotzebue had been in the employ of Russia, in the service of the Holy Alliance, and thus Sand's shot had presumably been fired for freedom; which again declined into improbability by virtue of the circumstance that there were several Jesuits among his nearest friends. In short. whatever the " deed " might be, it was in any case a poor way of making one's meaning clear; as also it contributed little toward the clarification of intellectual problems.
" Might I take the liberty of inquiring if you will be bringing these scurrilities of yours to an end before long? "
Herr Settembrini put the question in withering tones. He had been drumming on the table, and twisting his moustaches. But now his patience was exhausted. It was too much. He sat upright, and more than upright, he sat, so to speak, on tiptoe, for only his shanks touched the chair; and with flashing black eyes faced the enemy, who turned toward him in assumed surprise.
" What, may I ask, was the expression you were pleased to use? " Naphta countered.
I was pleased to say," said the Italian, swallowing, " I am pleased to say, that I am resolved to prevent you from continuing to molest a defenceless youth with your equivocations."
" I invite you, sir, to take heed to your words."
" The reminder, sir, is unnecessary. I am accustomed to take heed to my words. They will precisely fit the fact if I say that your way of misleading unsettled youth, of dissipating and undermining his moral and intellectual powers, is infamous, and cannot receive a stronger chastisement than it merits."
With the word infamous, Settembrini struck the table with the flat of his hand, and pushing back his chair, stood up. It was a signal for the rest to do likewise. People looked across from the other tables — or, rather, from one, as the Swiss guests had left and only the Dutchmen remained, listening in amazement.
At our table they all stood there stiffly: Hans Castorp and the two antagonists, with Ferge and Wehsai opposite. All five were pale and wide-eyed, with twitching lips. Might not the three onlookers have made an effort to calm the troubled waters, to lighten the atmosphere with a jest, or bring affairs to a peaceful conclusion with some kind of human appeal? They did not try. The prevailing temper prevented them. They stood, all trembling, with hands that clenched involuntarily into fists. Even A. K. Ferge, to whom all elevated thoughts were foreign, who disclaimed from its inception any power to measure the seriousness of the dispute -/Page 697/even he was convincea tnat tnis was a quarrel a ourrance, ana tn there was nothing to do but let it take its course. His good-nature moustaches worked violently up and down.
There was a stillness, in which could be heard the gnashing of Naphta's teeth. To Hans Castorp, this was an experience like th one with Wiedemann's hair. He had supposed it to be a figure of speech, something which did not actually occur. Yet here was Naphta, and in the silence his teeth could be heard to grate; horribly unpleasant, a wild, incredible sound, which yet evinced self-control equally fearsome, for he did not storm, but said in quite a low voice, though with a sort of cackling half-laugh " Infamous? Chastisement? Ah, so the bleating sheep have take to butting? Have we driven the policemen of civilization so far that they draw their weapons? That is a triumph; won in passin I must say, considering what mild provocation sufficed to summa to arms the guardians of our morality! As for the rest, sir, it we follow in due course. The chastisement too. I hope your civilia principles will not prevent you from knowing what you owe me — else I shall be forced to put these principles to a test that — "
Herr Settembrini drew himself up; the movement was so expressive that Naphta went on: " Ah, I see, that will not be nec sary. I am in your way, you are in mine — good. We will transfe the settlement of our differences to a suitable place. For the mo ment, only this: your sentimental solicitude for the scholasti interpretation of the Jacobin Revolution envisages a pedagogi crime in my manner of leading youth to doubt, of throwing categories to the winds, of robbing ideas of their academic dignity And your anxiety is justified; far it happens on account of your humanity, be assured of that — happens and is done. For your hu manity is to-day nothing but a tail end, a stale classicistic survival a spiritual ennui; it is yawning its head off, while the new Revolution, our Revolution, my dear sir, is coming on apace to give it its quietus. We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than thi most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical scepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need. This for your instruction, am my justification. For the rest we must turn over the page. You wil hear from me."
" And you will find a hearing, sir," Settembrini called after him, as the Jesuit left his place and hurried to the hat-stand to seek his cloak. Then the Freemason let himself fall back with a thud on his hard chair, and pressed both hands to his heart. /Page 698/ "Distruttore! Cane arabbiato! Bisogna arnmazzarlo!" burst from him, pantingly.
The others still stood at the table. Ferge's moustaches went on wagging up and down. Wehsal's jaw was set hard awry. Hans Castorp was imitating his grandfather's famous attitude, for his neck was all a-tremble. They were thinking how little they had expected such an outcome as this to their excursion. And all of them, even Herr Settembrini, felt how fortunate it was that they had come in two sleighs. It simplified the return. But afterwards?
"He challenged you," Hans Castorp said, heavily.
"Undoubtedly," answered Herr Settembrini, and cast a glance upward at his neighbour, only to turn away again at once and lean his head on his hand.
"Shall you take it up?" Wehsal wanted to know.
"Can you ask? " answered Settembrini, and looked a moment at him too. " Gentlemen," he said then, and sat up, having brought himself again to perfect control, " I regret the outcome of our pleasure excursion; but in life one must be prepared to reckon with such events. Theoretically I disapprove of the duel, I am of a law-abiding temper. In practice, however, it is another matter. There are situations where — quarrels that — in short, I am at this man's service. It is well that in my youth I fenced a little. A few hours' practice will make my wrist supple again. Shall we go? The rendezvous will have to be made. I assume our gentleman will already have ordered them to put to the horses."
Hans Castorp had moments, during the drive home, and afterwards, when he became giddy in contemplation of what lay before them. Still more, when it subsequently appeared that Naphta would not hear of cut and thrust, but insisted on a duel with pistols. And he, as the injured party, had the choice of weapons. There were moments, we say, when Hans Castorp was able, to a certain extent, to free himself from embroilment with the prevailing temper and tell himself that all this was madness, and must be prevented.
" If even there were a real injury," he cried, in discussion with Herr Settembrini, Ferge and Wehsal — Naphta, on the way home, had invited the last-named to be his second, and he acted as intermediary between the factions. "An affront like that, purely civilian and social! If one of them had dragged the other's good name in the dirt, if it was a question of a woman, or anything else really momentous, that you could take hold of, so that you felt there was no possibility of reconciliation! For such cases the duel is the last resort; and when honour is satisfied andthe affair has gone off with /P699/credit to all parties, and the antagonists part friends, as they say, why, then it seems a very good arrangement, quite useful and practical, too, in complicated cases. But what was it he did? I don't mean to stand up for him, I only ask what the insult consisted in. He threw the categories to the winds, as you say, and robbed conceptions of their academic dignity. And you felt yourself insulted thereby — justifiably, let us assume — "
" Assume? " repeated Herr Settembrini, and looked at him.
" Oh, justifiably, quite justifiably! He affronted you. But he did not insult you. There is a difference. Permit me to say so. It was a matter of abstractions, an intellectual disagreement. On intellectual topics he could affront you, perhaps, but not insult you. That is axiomatic, any court of honour would tell you the same, I swear to God they would. And so neither was your answer to him, about infamy and chastisement an insult; because it was in an intellectual sense, the whole affair was in the intellectual sphere, and has nothing to do with the personal, and an insult can only be personal. The intellectual can never be personal, that is the conclusion and the explanation of the axiom, and therefore — "
" You err, my friend," answered Settembrini, with closed eyes. " You err first of all in the assumption that the intellectual cannot assume a personal character. You should not think that," he said, and smiled a peculiarly fine and painful smile. " The point at which you go wrong is in your estimation of the things of the mind, in general. You obviously think they are too feeble to engender conflicts and passions comparable for sternness with those real life brings forth, the only issue of which can be the appeal to force. All' incontro! The abstract, the refined-upon, the ideal, is at the same time the Absolute — it is sternness itself; it contains within it more possibilities of deep and radical hatred, of unconditional and irreconcilable hostility, than any relation of social life can. It astonishes you to hear that it leads, far more directly and inexorably than these, to radical intimacy, to grips, to the duel and actual physical struggle? The duel, my friend, is not an " arrangement," like another. It is the ultimate, the return to a state of nature, slightly mitigated by regulations which are chivalrous in character, but extremely superficial. The essential nature of the thing remains the primitive, the physical struggle; and however civilized a man is, it is his duty to be ready for such a contingency, which may any day arise. Whoever is unable to offer his person, his arm, his blood, in the service of the ideal, is unworthy of it; however intellectualized, it is the duty of a man to remain a man Thus was. Hans Castorp put in his place.What should he answer /Page 700/ He preserved a depressed and brooding silence. Herr Settembrini had spoken with composure, logically. But his words sounded strange in his mouth. His thoughts were not his own thoughts, the idea of the duel was one he would never have come upon of himself. He had only taken it over from the terroristic little Naphta. And what he said was but an expression of the strength of that prevailing temper, whose tool and underling Herr Settembrini's fine understanding had become. What? The intellectual, simply because it was so stern, must lead relentlessly to the animal, to the issue of physical combat? Hans Castorp set himself against it — or at least he tried, only to discover, in affright, that even he was powerless to do so. In him too the prevailing temper was strong, he was not the man to win free. There was an area of his brain where memory showed him Wiedemann and Sonnenschein grappled like animals; and with horror he understood that at the end of everything only the physical remained, only the teeth and the nails. Yes, they must fight; only thus could be assured even that small mitigation of the primitive by the rules of chivalry. Hans Castorp offered to act as Herr Settembrini's second.
The offer was refused. No, it was not fitting, it would not do, he was told: first by Herr Settembrini himself, with that fine, rueful smile; then, after brief consideration, by Ferge and Wehsal, who also, without specified reason, found it would not do for Hans Castorp to assist at the encounter in this capacity. As a neutral party, perhaps — the presence of such an one was a part of the prescribed chivalrous mitigations — he might be present. Even Naphta, through his second, let it be known that this was his view, and Hans Castorp was satisfied. As witness, or as neutral party, in either case he was able to exert his influence upon the details of the procedure now to be discussed and settled — an influence which proved necessary indeed.
For Naphta's proposals went beyond all bounds. He demanded a distance of five paces, and, if necessary, three exchanges of fire. These insane conditions he sent by Wehsal the very evening of the quarrel; Wehsal had succeeded in fully identifying himself with Naphta's mad ideas, and partly as representative, but certainly also in accordance with -his personal taste, obstinately insisted upon them. Settembrini, of course, found nothing in them to object to. But Ferge, as second, and the neutral Hans Castorp, were beside themselves, and the latter fell heavily upon the wretched Wehsal. Was he not ashamed to bring forward such frantic and inhuman ideas to meet a case where the injury was purely abstract, not sensible at all? As though pistols were not bad //Page 701/ enough, that they must add these murderous conditions! Where did the chivalrous mitigation come in? He might as well suggest firing across a handkerchief! He, Wehsal, was not going to be fired at five paces off — it was easy for him to be blood-thirsty! And so forth. Wehsal shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that precisely that extreme case was a contingency; thus reducing to silence Hans Castorp, who was inclined to forget the fact. But he succeeded, during the negotiations of the following day, in fixing the number of shots at one instead of three, and in dealing with the question of distance so as to arrange that the combatants should be placed fifteen paces apart, and have the right to advance five paces before firing. But in exchange for these concessions, he had to promise that no attempt should be made at reconciling the parties. — It was discovered that none of them had any pistols.
Herr Albin had. Besides the shiny little revolver with which he loved to frighten the ladies, he had a pair of officer's pistols from Belgium in a velvet case: Browning automatics, with brown wooden butts holding the magazine, blued steel mechanism and shining barrels, with crisp little sights atop. Hans Castorp had seen them in Herr Albin's room, and against his own convictions, out of sheer compulsion from the prevailing temper, offered to borrow them. He made no concealment of the purpose they were to serve, but appealing to the young swaggerer's honour, readily swore him to secrecy. Herr Albin instructed him how to load the pistols, and they tested both weapons with blank shots in the open.
All this took time: two days and three nights intervened between the quarrel and the meeting. The place was of Hans Castorp's choosing: that picturesque blue-blossoming scene of his retreat and stock-taking activities. On this spot the affair should take place, on the third morning, as soon as there should be light enough to see. The evening before, rather late, it occurred to Hans Castorp, by this time thoroughly wrought up, that there ought to be a physician present.
He immediately advised with Ferge, who foresaw great difficulty. Rhadamanthus himself was an old corps-student; but it would be impossible to ask the head of the establishment to act in an illegal affair, and between patients to boot. It was scarcely likely a doctor could be found who would be willing to lend a hand in a pistol duel between two severe cases. As for Krokowski, for all his brain, it was a question whether the technique of wound treatment would be his strong point.
Wehsal, who was present, announced that Naphta had already expressed himself to the effect that he wanted no doctor. He was /Page 702/ not going to the meeting-place to be salved and bandaged, but to lay about him, and that in grim earnest. It sounded a sinister declaration enough; but Hans Castorp tried to interpret it as meaning that Naphta felt there would be no need of a physician. Ferge too bore back a message from Herr Settembrini, that they might dispose of the question, it did not interest him. It was thus not unreasonable to hope that both antagonists had resolved not to let it come to the shedding of blood. Two nights had passed since the quarrel, and there would be yet a third. Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.
Hans Castorp's reflections proved in the event not far from justified; but justified in a manner unlike anything he could have dreamed. So far as Herr Settembrini was concerned, he was entirely right. But had he suspected in what direction Leo Naphta would have altered his intentions beforehand, or at the decisive moment, not even the prevailing temper, of which all this was the outcome, could have driven him to let the affair go on.
At seven o'clock next morning, the sun showed no sign of making an appearance above the mountain; yet day was dawning, difficultly, in a reek of mist, as Hans Castorp, after a restless night, left the Berghof to go to the rendezvous. The maidservants cleaning the hall looked after him in wonder. The house door, however, was unbolted; Ferge and Wehsal, alone or in company, had undoubtedly passed that threshold, the one to accompany Settembrini, the other Naphta, to the field of battle. He, Hans, went alone, his capacity of neutral not permitting him to attach himself to either party.
He moved mechanically, under the compulsion of honour, under pressure from the prevailing temper. It was necessary for him to be present at the encounter that went without saying. Impossible to stop away and await the event in bed, in the first place because — but he did not finish his firstly, but hastened on to secondly, which was that one could not leave the thing to itself. Thus far, thank Heaven, nothing dreadful had happened; and nothing dreadful need happen, it was really highly improbable that anything would. They had had to get up and dress by artificial light /Page 703/ and breakfastless, in the bitter frost, betake themselves to the appointed spot. But once there, under the influence of his, Hans Castorp's presence, the whole thing would surely be turned aside, work out for good — in some manner not yet foreseen, and best left unguessed at, since experience showed that even the simplest events always worked out differently from what one would have thought beforehand.
All which notwithstanding, this was the unpleasantest morning within his memory. He felt stale and seedy, his teeth tended to chatter; in the depth of his being he was prone to mistrust his own powers of self-control. These were such singular times. The lady from Minsk, who shattered her health on the point of a quarrel with her corsetiere, the raging schoolboy, Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, the Polish ear-boxes — drearily he thought of them. Simply he could not picture two people, before his eyes, in his presence, standing up to shoot at each other, spill each other's blood. But when he remembered what it had come to, what he had actually seen, in the case of Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, then he misdoubted himself, misdoubted all the world, and shivered in his fur jacket; though at the same time a feeling of the extraordinariness, the abnormality of all this, heightened by the quality of the early morning air, began now surprisingly to elevate and stimulate him.
In the dusk of that slow-brightening dawn, moved by such mingled and fluctuating hopes and feelings, he mounted the narrow path along the slope, from the village end of the bob-run; arrived at the deeply drifted woods, crossed the little wooden bridge over the course, and followed a way among the tree-trunks trodden by feet in the snow rather than cleared by any shovel. He walked fast, and very soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, the latter holding the case of pistols with one hand under his cloak. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and, coming abreast, was aware of Naphta and Wehsal, only a few paces in advance.
"-Cold morning; at least eighteen degrees of frost," said he, in the purity of his intentions, but started at the frivolity of his own remark, and added: " Gentlemen, I am convinced — "
The others were silent. Ferge's good-natured moustache wagged up and down. After a while Settembrini came to a pause, took Hans Castorp's hand, laid his own other one upon it, and spoke.
" My friend, I will not kill. I will not. I will offer myself to his bullet, that is all that honour can demand. But I will not kill, you may trust me."
He released the young man and walked on. Hans Castorp was /Page 704/ deeply moved. After a few steps he said: " That is splendid of you, Herr Settembrini. Now on the other side if he, for his part — "
But Herr Settembrini shook his head. Hans Castorp reflected that if one party did not fire, the other would surely not be able to bring himself to do it either; and his heart perceptibly lightened. Everything was going well, his predictions seemed about to be verified.
They crossed the foot-bridge over the gorge, where the waterfall hung stiff and silent. Naphta and Wehsal were walking up and down before the bench now upholstered with thick white cushions of snow: the bench on which Hans Castorp, lying to await the end of his nose-bleeding, had experienced such lively memories out of the distant past. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp questioned himself if he should do the same, but found he had no faintest desire. It seemed to him an affectation in the other. With the pleasure he always felt in these surroundings, he looked about at them in their icy state and found them notless beautiful than in the season of their blue blossom-time. The fir that jutted so boldly into the picture had its trunk and branches laden with snow.
" Good-morning," he said cheerily, with the idea of lending the scene a note of the natural, which should help to dissipate its evil bearing — but was out of luck, for nobody answered. The greetings consisted in silent bows, so stiff as to be almost imperceptible. However, he was resolved to convert the energy from his walk, the splendid warmth engendered by brisk motion in the cold air, at once and without delay to good purpose; and so began: " Gentlemen, I am convinced —"
" You will develop your convictions another time," Naphta cut him off icily. " The weapons, if you please," he added, in the same arrogant tone. Hans Castorp, thus slapped on the mouth, had to look on while Ferge brought out the fatal itui from beneath his cloak, and handed one pistol to Wehsal to pass on to Naphta. Settembrini took the other from Ferge's hand. The latter in a murmur asked them to make a space, and began measuring off the ground. He marked off the outer limits by lines dug with his heel in the snow, the inner by means of two canes, his own and Settembrini's.
Our good-natured sufferer, what sort of work was this for him? Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. Ferge was long-legged, he took proper strides, the fifteen paces, at least, were a goodly distance but the cursed canes, alas, were not far apart at all. Certainly, he was acting in all honour; but what a grip the prevailing /Page 705/temper had upon him, to enforce him to a procedure so monstrous in its significance!
Naphta had flung his fur cloak on the ground, so that its mink lining showed. Pistol in hand, he moved to one of the outer barriers directly it was established, and while Ferge was still marking off the other. When that was fixed, Settembrini took up his position, his shabby fur coat open in front. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of a stealing paralysis, and flung himself once more into the breach.
" Gentlemen," he said, choking, " don't be hasty. It is my duty, after all —"
" Silence! " cried out Naphta sharply. " Give the signal."
But no one gave the signal. It had not been arranged for. Somebody, of course, ought to say: " Fire! " but it had not been realized that it was the office of the neutral party to give the dread sign at least, it had not been mentioned. Hans Castorp remained silent, and nobody spoke in his place.
" We will begin," Naphta declared. " Come forward, sir, and fire," he called across to his antagonist, and began himself to advance, holding the pistol at arm's length, directed at Settembrini — an unbelievable sight. Settembrini did the same. At the third step — the other, without firing, was already at the barrier — the Italian raised the pistol very high, and fired. The shot awaked repeated echoes, the mountains flung back the sound and the rebound, the valley reverberated with the shock, until it seemed to Hans Castorp people must come running.
"You fired in the air," Naphta said collectedly to Settembrini, letting his own weapon sink.
Settembrini answered: " I fired where it pleased me to fire."
" You will fire again! "
" I have no such intention. It is your turn." Herr Settembrini, lifting his face toward the sky, had turned himself somewhat sidewise to his opponent. It was touching to realize that he had heard one should not offer one's breast full face to an opponent's fire; and that he was acting according to the regulations.
" Coward! " Naphta shrieked; and with this human shriek confessing that it takes more courage to fire than be fired upon, raised his pistol in a way that had nothing to do with duelling, and shot himself in the head.
Piteous, unforgettable sight! He staggered, or tottered, while the mountains played ball with the sound of his shot, a few steps backward, flinging out his legs jerkily; executed a right turn with his whole body, and fell with his face in the snow. /Page 706/ They all stood a moment rigid. Settembrini, hurling his weapon from him, was first at Naphta's side.
" Infelice!" he cried. " Che cosa fai, per Famor di Dio?"
Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They saw the blackened red hole m the temple. They looked into a face that one would do well to cover with the silk handkerchief, one corner of which hung out of Naphta's breast pocket.

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

The Thunderbolt

SEVEN years Hans Castorp remained amongst those up here. Partisans of the decimal system might prefer a round number, though seven is a good handy figure in its way, picturesque, with a savour of the mythical; one might even say that it is more filling to the spirit than a dull academic half-dozen. Our hero had sat at all seven of the tables in the dining-room, at each about a year, the last being the " bad " Russian table, and his company there two Armenians, two Finns, a Bokharian, and a Kurd. He sat at the " bad " Russian table, wearing a recent little blond beard, vaguish in cut, which we are disposed to regard as a sign of philosophic indiffer• ence to his own outer man. Yes, we will even go further, and relate his carelessness of his person to the carelessness of the rest of the world regarding him. The authorities had ceased to devise him distractions. There was the morning inquiry, as to whether he had slept well, itself purely rhetorical and summary; and that aside, the Hofrat did not address him with any particularity; while Adriatica von Mylendonk — she had, at the time of which we write, a stye in a perfect state of maturity — did so seldom, in fact scarcely ever. They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being " asked " any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further — an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, indeed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind. At all events, here was one on whom the authorities 'no longer needed to keep an eye, being assured that no wild or defiant resolves were ripening in his breast. He was " settled," established. Long ago he had ceased to know where else he should go, long ago he had ceased to be capable of a resolve to return to the flat-land. Did not the very fact that he was sitting at the " bad " Russian table witness a certain abandon? No slightest adverse comment upon the said table being intended by the remark! Among all the seven, no single one could be said to possess definite tangible advantages or page 707 disadvantages.

 

 

FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM

Simon Singh

THE SECRET CALCULATION

Page 238

Galois became obsessed with finding a recipe for solving quintic equations, one of the great challenges of the era, and by the age of seventeen he had made sufficient progress to submit two research papers to the Academy of Sciences. The referee appointed to judge the papers was Augustin-Louis Cauchy, who many years latcr would argue with Lame over an ultimately flawed proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Cauchy was highly impressed by the young man's work and judged it worthy of being entered for the Academy's Grand Prize in Mathematics. In order to qualify for competition the two papers would have to be re-submitted in 1hr form of a single memoir, so Cauchy returned them to Galois and awaited his entry.
Having survived the criticisms of his teachers and rejection by the Ecole Polytechnique Galois's genius was on the verge of being recognised, but over the course of the next three years a series of personal and professional tragedies would destroy his ambitions. In July of 1829 a new Jesuit priest arrived in the village of Bourg. le-Reine, where Galois's father was still mayor. The priest took exception to the mayor's republican sympathies and began a campaign to oust him from office by spreading rumours aimed at discrediting him. In particular the scheming priest exploited Nicolas-Gabriel Galois's reputation for composing clever rhymes. He wrote a series of vulgar verses ridiculing members of the community and signed them with the mayor's name. The elder Galois could not survive the shame and the embarrassment which resulted and decided that the only honourable option was to commit suicide' .
Evariste Galois returned to attend his father's funeral and saw for himself the divisions that the priest had created in the village. As the coffin was being lowered into the grave, a scuffle broke out between the Jesuit priest, who was conducting the service, and /Page 239/ supporters of the mayor, who realised that there had been a plot to undermine him. The priest suffered a gash to the head, the scuffle turned into a riot, and the coffin was left to drop unceremoniously into its grave. Watching the French establishment humiliate and destroy his father served only to consolidate Galois's fervent support for the republican cause.
Upon returning to Paris, Galois combined his research papers well ahead of the competition deadline and submitted the memoir to the secrerary of the Academy, Joseph Fourier, who was supposed to pass it on to the judging committee. Galois's paper did not offer a solution to the quintic problem but it did offer a brilliant insight and many mathematicians, including Cauchy, considered that it was a likely winner. To the shock of Galois and his friends, not only did he fail to win the prize, but he had not even been officially entered. Fourier had died a few weeks prior to the judging and, although a stack of corripetition entries was passed on to the committee, Galois's memoir was not among them. The memoir was never found and the injustice was recorded by a French journalist.
Last year before March 1st, Monsieur Galois gave to the secretary of the Institute a memoir on the solution of numerical equations. This memoir should have been entered in the competition for the Grand Prize in Mathematics. It deserved the prize, for it could resolve some difficulties that Lagrange had failed to do. Monsieur Cauchy had conferred the highest praise on the author about this subject. And what happened? The memoir is lost and the prize is given without the participation of the young savant.
Le Globe, 1831
Galois felt that his memoir had been deliberately lost by a politically biased Academy, a belief that was reinforced a year later /Page 240/ when the Academy rejected his next manuscript, claiming that 'his argument is neither sufficiently clear nor sufficiently developed to allow us to judge its rigour'. He decided that there was a conspiracy to exclude him from the mathematical community, and as a result he neglected his research in favour of fighting for the republican cause. By this time he was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure, a slightly less prestigious college than the Ecole Polytechnique. At the Ecole Normale Galois's notoriety as a trouble-maker was overtaking his reputation as a mathematician. This culminated during the July revolution of 1830 when Charles X fled France and the political factions fought for control in the streets of Paris. The Ecole's director Monsieur Guigniault, a monarchist, was aware that the majority of his students were radical republicans and so confined them to their dormitories and locked the gates of the college. Galois was being prevented from fighting alongside his brothers, and his frustration and anger were compounded when the republicans were eventually defeated. When the opportunity arose he published a scathing attack on the college director, accusing him of cowardice. Not surprisingly, Guigniault expelled the insubordinate student and Galois's formal mathematical career was at an end.
On 4 December the thwarted genius attempted to become a professional rebel by joining the Artillery of the National Guard, a republican branch of the militia otherwise known as the 'Friends of the People'. Before the end of the month the new king LouisPhillipe, anxious to avoid a further rebellion, abolished the Artillery of the National Guard, and Galois was left destitute and homeless. The most brilliant young talent in all of Paris was being persecuted at every turn and some of his former mathematical colleagues were becoming increasingly worried about his plight. Sophie Germain, who was by this time the elder stateswoman /Page 241 /of French mathematics, expressed her concerns to friend of the family Count Libri-Carrucci:
Decidedly there is a misfortune concerning all that touches upon mathematics. The death of Monsieur Fourier has been the final blow for this student Galois who, in spite of his impertinence, showed signs of a clever disposition. He has been expelled from the Ecole Normale, he is without money, his mother has very little also and he continues his habit of insult. They say he will go completely mad. I fear this is true.
As long as Galois's passion for politics continued it was inevitable that his fortunes would deteriorate further, a fact documented by the great French writer Alexandre Dumas. Dumas was at the restaurant Vendanges de Bourgogne when he happened upon a celebration banquet in honour of nineteen republicans aquitted of conspiracy charges:
Suddenly, in the midst of a private conversation which I was carrying on with the person on my left, the name Louis-Phillipe, followed by five or six whistles, caught my ear. I turned around. One of the most animated scenes was taking place fifteen or twenty seats from me. It would be difficult to find in all Paris two hundred persons more hostile to the government than those to be found reunited at five o'clock in the afternoon in the long hall on the ground floor above the garden.
A young man who had raised his glass and held an open dagger in the same hand was trying to make himself heard — Evariste Galois was one of the most ardent republicans. The noise was such that the very reason for this noise had become incomprehensible. All that I could perceive was that there was a threat and that the name of Louis-Phillipe had been mentioned: the intention was made clear by the open knife.
This went way beyond my own republican opinions. I yielded to the pressure from my neighbour on the left who, as one of the Kings /Page 242 /

comedians, didn't care to be compromised, and we jumped from the window sill into the garden. I went home somewhat worried. It was clear this episode would have its consequences. Indeed, two or three days later, Evariste Galois was arrested.
After being detained at Sainte-Pelagie prison for a month Galois was charged with threatening the King's life and brought to trial. Although there was little doubt from his actions that Galois was guilty, the raucous nature of the banquet meant that nobody could actually confirm that they had heard him make any direct threats. A sympathetic jury and the rebel's tender age — he was still only twenty — led to his acquittal. The following month he was arrested again.
On Bastille Day, 14 July 1831, Galois marched through Paris dressed in the uniform of the outlawed Artillery Guard. Although this was merely a gesture of defiance, he was sentenced to six months in prison and returned to Sainte-Pelagie. During the following months the teetotal youth was driven to drink by the rogues who surrounded him. The botanist and ardent republican Francois Raspail, who was imprisoned for refusing to accept the Cross of the Legion of Honour from Louis-Phillipe, wrote an account of Galois's first drinking bout:
He grasps the little glass like Socrates courageously taking the hemlock; he swallows it as one gulp, not without blinking and making a wry face. A second glass is not harder to empty than the first, and then the third. The beginner loses his equilibrium. Triumph! Homage to the Bacchus of the jail! You have intoxicated an ingenuous soul, who holds wine in horror.
A week later a sniper in a garret opposite the prison fired a shot into a cell wounding the man next to Galois. Galois was convinced that the bullet was intended for himself and that there was a / Page 243 /government plot to assassinate him. The fear of political persecution terrorised him, and the isolation from his friends and family and rejection of his mathematical ideas plunged him into a state of depression. In a bout of drunken delirium he tried to stab himself to death, but Raspail and others managed to restrain and disarm him. Raspail recalls Galois's words immediately prior to the suicide attempt:
Do you know what I lack my friend? I confide it only to you: it is someone I can love and love only in spirit. I have lost my father and no one has ever replaced him, do you hear me . . . ?
In March 1832, a month before Galois's sentence was due to finish, a cholera epidemic broke out in Paris and the prisoners of Sainte-Pelagie were released. What happened to Galois over the next few weeks has been the subject of intense speculation, but what is certain is that the evetns of this period were largely the consequence of a romance with a mysterious woman by the name of Stephanie-Felicie Poterine du Motel, the daughter of a respected Parisian physician. Although there are no clues as to how the affair started, the details of its tragic end are well documented.
Stephanie was already engaged to a gentleman by the name of Pescheux d'Herbinville, who uncovered his fiancée's infidelity. D'Herbinville was furious and, being one the finest shots in France, he had no hesitation in immediately challenging Galois to a duel at dawn. Galois was well aware of his challenger's reputation. During the evening prior to the confrontation, which he believed would be his last opportunity to commit his thoughts to paper, he wrote letters to his friends explaining his circumstances:
I beg my patriots, my friends, not to reproach me for dying otherwise than for my country. I died the victim of an infamous coquette and her two / Page 244 /

Figure 22(a). The night before the duel Galois attempted to write down all hi's mathematical ideas. Other comments, however, also appear in the notes. On this page, on the left below centre, are the words 'line femme' with the second word scribbled out, presumably a reference to the woman at the centre of the duel

Page 245/ dupes. It is in a miserable piece of slander that I end my life. Oh! Why die for something so little, so contemptible? I call on heaven to witness that only under compulsion and force have I yielded to a provocation which I have tried to avert by every means.
Despite his devotion to the republican cause and.his romantic involvement, Galois had always maintained his passion for mathematics and one of his greatest fears was that his research, which had already been rejected by the Academy, would be lost forever. In a desperate attempt to gain recognition he worked through the night writing out the theorems which he believed fully explained the riddle of quintic equations. Figure 22 shows some of the last pages written by Galois. The pages were largely a transcription of the ideas he had already submitted to Cauchy and Fourier, but hidden within the complex algebra were occasional references to `Stephanie' or `une femme' and exclamations of despair — 'I have not time, I have not time!' At tile end of the night, when his calculations were complete, he wrote a covering letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier, requesting that, should he die, the papers be distributed to the greatest mathematicians in Europe:
My Dear Friend,
I have made some new discoveries in analysis. The first concern the theory of quintic equations, and others integral functions.
In the theory of equations I have researched the conditions for the solvability of equations by radicals; this has given me the occasion to deepen this theory and describe all the transformations possible on an equation even though it is not solvable by radicals. All this will be found here in three memoirs . . .
In my life I have often dared to advance propositions about which I was not sure. But all I have written down here has been clear in my head for over a year, and it would not be in my interest to leave myself open to the /Page 247//

Page 246 /Figure 22(b) As Galois tried desperately to record everything before he fateful hour, it occurred to him that he might not complete the ask. The words je n'ai pas le temps' (I have no time) are visible at he end of the two lines in the lower left part of the page.

/Page 247//suspicion that I announce theorems of which I do not have a complete proof.
Make a public request of Jacobi or Gauss to give their opinions, not as to the truth, but as to the importance of these theorems. After that, I hope some men will find it profitable to sort out this mess.
I embrace you with effusion,
E. Galois
The following morning, Wednesday 30 May 1832, in an isolated field Galois and d'Herbinville faced each other at twenty-five paces armed with pistols. D'Herbinville was accompanied by seconds; Galois stood alone. He had told nobody of his plight: a messenger he had sent to his brother Alfred would not deliver the news of the duel until it was over and the letters he had written the previous night would not reach his friends for several days.
The pistols were raised and fired. D'Herbinville still stood, Galois was hit in the stomach. He lay helpless on the ground. There was no surgeon to hand andthe victor calmly walked away leaving his wounded opponent to die. Some hours later Alfred arrived on the scene and carried his brother to Cochin hospital. It was too late, peritonitis had set in, and the following day Galois died.
His funeral was almost as farcical as his father's. The police believed that it would be the focus of a political rally and arrested thirty comrades the previous night. Nonetheless two thousand republicans gathered for the service and inevitably scuffles broke out between Galois's colleagues and the government officials who had arrived to monitor events.
The mourners were angry because of a growing belief that d'Herbinville was not a cuckolded fiancé but rather a government agent, and that Stephanie was not just a lover but a scheming / Page 248 / seductress. Events such as the shot which was fired at Galois while he was in Sainte-Pelagie prison already hinted at a conspiracy to assassinate the young trouble-maker, and therefore his friends concluded that he had been duped into a romance which was part of a political plot contrived to kill him. Historians have argued about whether the duel was the result of a tragic love affair or politically motivated, but either way one of the world's greatest mathematicians was killed at the age of twenty, having studied mathematics for only five years.
Before distributing Galois's papers his brother and Auguste Chevalier rewrote them in order to clarify and expand the explanations. Galois's habit of explaining his ideas hastily and inadequately was no doubt exacerbated by the fact that he had only a single night to outline years of research. Although they dutifully sent copies of the manuscript to Carl Gauss, Carl Jacobi and others, there was no acknowledgment of 'Galois's work for over a decade, until a copy reached Joseph Liouville in 1846. Liouville recognised the spark of genius in the calculation and spent months trying to interpret its meaning. Eventually he edited the papers and published them in his prestigious Journal de Mathimatiques pures et appliquies. The response from other mathematicians was immediate and impressive because. Galois had indeed formulated a complete understanding of how one could go about finding solutions to quintic equations. First Galois had classified all quintics into two types: those that were soluble and those that were not. Then, for those that were soluble, he devised a recipe for finding the solutions to the equations. Moreover, Galois examined equations of higher order than the quintic, those containing x6, x7, and so on, and could identify which of these were soluble. It was one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century mathematics created by one of its most tragic heroes.

Page 249 /In his introduction to the paper Liouville reflected on why the young mathematician had been rejected by his seniors and how his own efforts had resurrected Galois:
An exaggerated desire for conciseness was the cause of this defect which one should strive above all else to avoid when treating the abstract and mysterious matters of pure Algebra. Clarity is, indeed, all the more necessary when one essays to lead the reader farther from the beaten path and into wilder territory. As Descartes said, 'When transcendental questions are under discussion be transcendentally clear.' Too often Galois neglected this precept; and we can understand how illustrious mathematicians may have judged it proper to try, by the harshness of their sage advice, to turn a beginner, full of genius but inexperienced, back on the right road. The author they censured was before them ardent, active; he could profit by their. advice.
But now everything is changed. Galois is no more! Let us not indulge in useless criticisms; let us leavcthe defects there and look at the merits . . .
My zeal was well rewarded, and I experienced an intense pleasure at the moment when, having filled in some slight gaps, I saw the complete correctness of the method by which Galois proves, in particular, this beautiful theorem.


Toppling the First Domino
At the heart of Galois's calculations was a concept known as grimp theory, an idea which he had developed into a powerful tool capable of cracking previously insoluble problems. Mathematically, a group is a set of elements which can be combined together using some operation, such as addition or multiplication, and which satisfy certain conditions.

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann 1875-1955

HYSTERICA PASSIO

Page 702

At seven o'clock next morning, the sun showed no sign of making an appearance above the mountain; yet day was dawning, difficultly, in a reek of mist, as Hans Castorp, after a restless night, left the Berghof to go to the rendezvous. The maidservants cleaning the hall looked after him in wonder. The house door, however, was unbolted; Ferge and Wehsal, alone or in company, had undoubtedly passed that threshold, the one to accompany Settembrini, the other Naphta, to the field of battle. He, Hans, went alone, his capacity of neutral not permitting him to attach himself to either party.
He moved mechanically, under the compulsion of honour, under pressure from the prevailing temper. It was necessary for him to be present at the encounter that went without saying. Impossible to stop away and await the event in bed, in the first place because — but he did not finish his firstly, but hastened on to secondly, which was that one could not leave the thing to itself. Thus far, thank Heaven, nothing dreadful had happened; and nothing dreadful need happen, it was really highly improbable that anything would. They had had to get up and dress by artificial light /Page 703/ and breakfastless, in the bitter frost, betake themselves to the appointed spot. But once there, under the influence of his, Hans Castorp's presence, the whole thing would surely be turned aside, work out for good — in some manner not yet foreseen, and best left unguessed at, since experience showed that even the simplest events always worked out differently from what one would have thought beforehand.
All which notwithstanding, this was the unpleasantest morning within his memory. He felt stale and seedy, his teeth tended to chatter; in the depth of his being he was prone to mistrust his own powers of self-control. These were such singular times. The lady from Minsk, who shattered her health on the point of a quarrel with her corsetiere, the raging schoolboy, Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, the Polish ear-boxes — drearily he thought of them. Simply he could not picture two people, before his eyes, in his presence, standing up to shoot at each other, spill each other's blood. But when he remembered what it had come to, what he had actually seen, in the case of Wiedemann and Sonnenschein, then he misdoubted himself, misdoubted all the world, and shivered in his fur jacket; though at the same time a feeling of the extraordinariness, the abnormality of all this, heightened by the quality of the early morning air, began now surprisingly to elevate and stimulate him.
In the dusk of that slow-brightening dawn, moved by such mingled and fluctuating hopes and feelings, he mounted the narrow path along the slope, from the village end of the bob-run; arrived at the deeply drifted woods, crossed the little wooden bridge over the course, and followed a way among the tree-trunks trodden by feet in the snow rather than cleared by any shovel. He walked fast, and very soon overtook Settembrini and Ferge, the latter holding the case of pistols with one hand under his cloak. Hans Castorp did not hesitate to join them, and, coming abreast, was aware of Naphta and Wehsal, only a few paces in advance.
"-Cold morning; at least eighteen degrees of frost," said he, in the purity of his intentions, but started at the frivolity of his own remark, and added: " Gentlemen, I am convinced — "
The others were silent. Ferge's good-natured moustache wagged up and down. After a while Settembrini came to a pause, took Hans Castorp's hand, laid his own other one upon it, and spoke.
" My friend, I will not kill. I will not. I will offer myself to his bullet, that is all that honour can demand. But I will not kill, you may trust me."
He released the young man and walked on. Hans Castorp was /Page 704/ deeply moved. After a few steps he said: " That is splendid of you, Herr Settembrini. Now on the other side if he, for his part — "
But Herr Settembrini shook his head. Hans Castorp reflected that if one party did not fire, the other would surely not be able to bring himself to do it either; and his heart perceptibly lightened. Everything was going well, his predictions seemed about to be verified.
They crossed the foot-bridge over the gorge, where the waterfall hung stiff and silent. Naphta and Wehsal were walking up and down before the bench now upholstered with thick white cushions of snow: the bench on which Hans Castorp, lying to await the end of his nose-bleeding, had experienced such lively memories out of the distant past. Naphta was smoking a cigarette, and Hans Castorp questioned himself if he should do the same, but found he had no faintest desire. It seemed to him an affectation in the other. With the pleasure he always felt in these surroundings, he looked about at them in their icy state and found them notless beautiful than in the season of their blue blossom-time. The fir that jutted so boldly into the picture had its trunk and branches laden with snow.
" Good-morning," he said cheerily, with the idea of lending the scene a note of the natural, which should help to dissipate its evil bearing — but was out of luck, for nobody answered. The greetings consisted in silent bows, so stiff as to be almost imperceptible. However, he was resolved to convert the energy from his walk, the splendid warmth engendered by brisk motion in the cold air, at once and without delay to good purpose; and so began: " Gentlemen, I am convinced —"
" You will develop your convictions another time," Naphta cut him off icily. " The weapons, if you please," he added, in the same arrogant tone. Hans Castorp, thus slapped on the mouth, had to look on while Ferge brought out the fatal itui from beneath his cloak, and handed one pistol to Wehsal to pass on to Naphta. Settembrini took the other from Ferge's hand. The latter in a murmur asked them to make a space, and began measuring off the ground. He marked off the outer limits by lines dug with his heel in the snow, the inner by means of two canes, his own and Settembrini's.
Our good-natured sufferer, what sort of work was this for him? Hans Castorp could not trust his eyes. Ferge was long-legged, he took proper strides, the fifteen paces, at least, were a goodly distance but the cursed canes, alas, were not far apart at all. Certainly, he was acting in all honour; but what a grip the prevailing /Page 705/temper had upon him, to enforce him to a procedure so monstrous in its significance!
Naphta had flung his fur cloak on the ground, so that its mink lining showed. Pistol in hand, he moved to one of the outer barriers directly it was established, and while Ferge was still marking off the other. When that was fixed, Settembrini took up his position, his shabby fur coat open in front. Hans Castorp wrenched himself out of a stealing paralysis, and flung himself once more into the breach.
" Gentlemen," he said, choking, " don't be hasty. It is my duty, after all —"
" Silence! " cried out Naphta sharply. " Give the signal."
But no one gave the signal. It had not been arranged for. Somebody, of course, ought to say: " Fire! " but it had not been realized that it was the office of the neutral party to give the dread sign at least, it had not been mentioned. Hans Castorp remained silent, and nobody spoke in his place.
" We will begin," Naphta declared. " Come forward, sir, and fire," he called across to his antagonist, and began himself to advance, holding the pistol at arm's length, directed at Settembrini — an unbelievable sight. Settembrini did the same. At the third step — the other, without firing, was already at the barrier — the Italian raised the pistol very high, and fired. The shot awaked repeated echoes, the mountains flung back the sound and the rebound, the valley reverberated with the shock, until it seemed to Hans Castorp people must come running.
"You fired in the air," Naphta said collectedly to Settembrini, letting his own weapon sink.
Settembrini answered: " I fired where it pleased me to fire."
" You will fire again! "
" I have no such intention. It is your turn." Herr Settembrini, lifting his face toward the sky, had turned himself somewhat sidewise to his opponent. It was touching to realize that he had heard one should not offer one's breast full face to an opponent's fire; and that he was acting according to the regulations.
" Coward! " Naphta shrieked; and with this human shriek confessing that it takes more courage to fire than be fired upon, raised his pistol in a way that had nothing to do with duelling, and shot himself in the head.
Piteous, unforgettable sight! He staggered, or tottered, while the mountains played ball with the sound of his shot, a few steps backward, flinging out his legs jerkily; executed a right turn with his whole body, and fell with his face in the snow. /Page 706/ They all stood a moment rigid. Settembrini, hurling his weapon from him, was first at Naphta's side.
" Infelice!" he cried. " Che cosa fai, per Famor di Dio?"
Hans Castorp helped him turn the body over. They saw the blackened red hole m the temple. They looked into a face that one would do well to cover with the silk handkerchief, one corner of which hung out of Naphta's breast pocket.

 

 

FERMAT'S LAST THEOREM

Simon Singh

THE SECRET CALCULATION

Page 247
The following morning, Wednesday 30 May 1832, in an isolated field Galois and d'Herbinville faced each other at twenty-five paces armed with pistols. D'Herbinville was accompanied by seconds; Galois stood alone. He had told nobody of his plight: a messenger he had sent to his brother Alfred would not deliver the news of the duel until it was over and the letters he had written the previous night would not reach his friends for several days.
The pistols were raised and fired. D'Herbinville still stood, Galois was hit in the stomach. He lay helpless on the ground. There was no surgeon to hand and the victor calmly walked away leaving his wounded opponent to die. Some hours later Alfred arrived on the scene and carried his brother to Cochin hospital. It was too late, peritonitis had set in, and the following day Galois died.
His funeral was almost as farcical as his father's. The police believed that it would be the focus of a political rally and arrested thirty comrades the previous night. Nonetheless two thousand republicans gathered for the service and inevitably scuffles broke out between Galois's colleagues and the government officials who had arrived to monitor events.
The mourners were angry because of a growing belief that d'Herbinville was not a cuckolded fiancé but rather a government agent, and that Stephanie was not just a lover but a scheming / Page 248 / seductress. Events such as the shot which was fired at Galois while he was in Sainte-Pelagie prison already hinted at a conspiracy to assassinate the young trouble-maker, and therefore his friends concluded that he had been duped into a romance which was part of a political plot contrived to kill him. Historians have argued about whether the duel was the result of a tragic love affair or politically motivated, but either way one of the world's greatest mathematicians was killed at the age of twenty, having studied mathematics for only five years.

 

 

W
=
5
-
4
WHAT
52
16
7
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
10
1
I
=
9
-
2
IT
29
11
2
-
-
23
-
8
-
109
37
10
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
5
WHERE
59
32
5
A
=
1
-
3
ARE
24
15
6
W
=
5
-
2
WE
28
10
1
-
-
11
-
10
?
111
57
12
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
7
WHITHER
91
46
1
H
=
8
-
3
HAS
28
10
1
T
=
2
-
3
THE
33
15
6
D
=
4
-
5
DREAM
41
23
5
S
=
1
-
8
SNATCHED
74
29
2
U
=
3
-
2
US
40
4
4
-
-
23
-
28
-
307
127
19
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
57
-
46
First Total
527
221
41
-
-
5+7
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+2+7
2+2+1
4+1
-
-
12
-
10
Second Total
14
5
5
-
-
1+2
-
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+4
-
-
-
-
3
-
1
Essence of Number
5
5
5

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

The Thunderbolt

Page 712

What is it? Where are we? Whither has the dream snatched us?

 

W
=
5
-
4
WHAT
52
16
7
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
10
1
I
=
9
-
2
IT
29
11
2
-
-
23
-
8
-
109
37
10
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
5
WHERE
59
32
5
A
=
1
-
3
ARE
24
15
6
W
=
5
-
2
WE
28
10
1
-
-
11
-
10
?
111
57
12
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
7
WHITHER
91
46
1
H
=
8
-
3
HAS
28
10
1
T
=
2
-
3
THE
33
15
6
D
=
4
-
5
DREAM
41
23
5
S
=
1
-
8
SNATCHED
74
29
2
U
=
3
-
2
US
40
4
4
-
-
23
-
28
-
307
127
19
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
57
-
46
First Total
527
221
41
-
-
5+7
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+2+7
2+2+1
4+1
-
-
12
-
10
Second Total
14
5
5
-
-
1+2
-
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+4
-
-
-
-
3
-
1
Essence of Number
5
5
5

 

 

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Thomas Mann

1875 1955

Page 715 Farewell, honest Hans Castorp, farewell, Life's delicate child! Your tale is told. We have told it to the end, and it was neither short nor long, but hermetic. We have told it for its own sake, not for yours, for you were simple. But after all, it was your story, it befell you, you must have more in you than we thought; we will not disclaim the pedagogic weakness we conceived for / Page 716 / you in the telling; which could even lead us to press a finger deli-cately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever.
Farewell- and if thou livest or diest! Thy prospects are poor. The desperate dance, in which thy fortunes are caught up, will last yet many a sinful year; we should not care to set a high stake on thy life by the time it ends. We even confess that it is without great concern we leave the question open. Adventures of the flesh and in the spirit, while enhancing thy simplicity, granted thee to know in the spirit what in the flesh thou scarcely couldst have done. Moments there were, when out of death, and the rebellion of the flesh, there came to thee, as thou tookest stock of thyself, a dream of love. Out of this universal feast of death, out of this extremity of fever, kindling the rain-washed evening sky to a fiery glow, may it be that Love one day shall mount?"

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
F
=
6
-
8
FAREWELL
82
37
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
H
=
8
-
6
HONEST
81
27
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
H
=
8
-
4
HANS
42
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
C
=
3
-
7
CASTORP
92
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
25
-
25
First Total
297
108
18
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
2+5
-
2+5
Add to Reduce
2+9+7
1+0+8
1+8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
7
Second Total
18
9
9
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
51
-
51
Reduce to Deduce
1+8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
7
Essence of Number
9
9
9
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
F
=
6
-
8
FAREWELL
82
37
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
6
IF
15
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
4
THOU
64
19
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
L
=
3
-
7
LIVEST
87
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
O
=
6
-
8
OR
33
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
D
=
4
-
5
DIEST
57
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
8
THY
53
17
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
P
=
7
-
5
PROSPECTS
131
41
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
3
ARE
24
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
P
=
7
-
4
POOR
64
28
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
2
THE
33
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
D
=
4
-
4
DESPERATE
93
39
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
D
=
4
-
2
DANCE
27
18
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
I
=
9
-
4
IN
23
14
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
4
WHICH
51
33
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
2
THY
53
17
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
F
=
6
-
2
FORTUNES
118
37
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
3
ARE
24
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
C
=
3
-
3
CAUGHT
60
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
U
=
3
-
3
UP
37
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
2
WILL
56
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
L
=
3
-
3
LAST
52
7
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
Y
=
7
-
7
YET
50
14
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
M
=
4
-
5
MANY
53
17
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
A
=
1
-
1
A
1
1
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
S
=
1
-
4
SINFUL
81
27
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
Y
=
7
-
3
YEAR
49
22
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
W
=
5
-
8
WE
28
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
S
=
1
-
3
SHOULD
79
25
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
N
=
5
-
6
NOT
49
13
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
C
=
3
-
4
CARE
27
18
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
T
=
2
-
7
TO
35
8
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
S
=
1
-
8
SET
44
8
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
A
=
1
-
1
A
1
1
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
H
=
8
-
8
HIGH
32
32
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
S
=
1
-
5
STAKE
56
11
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
O
=
6
-
4
ON
29
11
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
2
THY
53
17
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
L
=
3
-
2
LIFE
32
23
5
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
-
B
=
2
-
2
BY
27
9
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
T
=
2
-
2
THE
33
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
4
TIME
47
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
4
IT
29
11
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
2
ENDS
42
15
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
-
-
163
-
176
First Total
2133
711
216
-
9
10
6
8
25
60
14
48
36
-
-
1+6+3
-
1+7+6
Add to Reduce
2+1+3+3
7+1+1
2+1+6
-
-
1+0
-
-
2+5
6+0
1+4
4+8
3+6
-
-
10
-
14
Second Total
9
9
9
-
9
1
6
8
7
6
5
12
9
-
-
1+0
-
1+4
Reduce to Deduce
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+2
-
-
-
1
-
5
Essence of Number
9
9
9
-
9
1
6
8
7
6
5
3
9

 

ADVENT 2244 ADVENT

 

13
SETI-MER-EN-PTAH
-
-
-
-
SETI
53
26
8
-
MER
36
18
9
-
EN
19
10
1
-
PTAH
45
18
9
13
SETI-MER-EN-PTAH
153
72
27
1+3
-
1+5+3
7+2
2+7
4
SETI-MER-EN-PTAH
9
9
9

 

 

 
 
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