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Evokation
  
 
Index
  

 

 

 

 

 

 

THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY

THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE

AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED

THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF

THE

ALPHABET

IS

GIVEN

A

NUMERICAL

VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS

REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS

THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS

 

 

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

 

 

THE LIGHT IS RISING NOW RISING IS THE LIGHT

 

 

0
-
Z
=
8
-
4
ZERO
64
28
1
1
-
O
=
6
-
3
ONE
34
16
7
2
-
T
=
2
-
3
TWO
58
13
4
3
-
T
=
2
-
5
THREE
56
29
2
4
-
F
=
6
-
4
FOUR
60
24
6
5
-
F
=
6
-
4
FIVE
42
24
6
6
-
S
=
1
-
3
SIX
52
16
7
7
-
S
=
1
-
5
SEVEN
65
20
2
8
-
E
=
5
-
5
EIGHT
49
31
4
9
-
N
=
5
-
4
NINE
42
24
6
45
-
-
-
42
-
40
Add
522
225
45
4+5
-
-
-
4+2
-
4+0
Reduce
5+2+2
2+2+5
4+5
9
-
-
-
6
-
4
Deduce
9
9
9

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
0
-
Z
=
8
-
4
ZERO
64
28
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
O
=
6
-
3
ONE
34
16
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
2
-
T
=
2
-
3
TWO
58
13
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
3
-
T
=
2
-
5
THREE
56
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
-
F
=
6
-
4
FOUR
60
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
5
-
F
=
6
-
4
FIVE
42
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
6
-
S
=
1
-
3
SIX
52
16
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
7
-
S
=
1
-
5
SEVEN
65
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
E
=
5
-
5
EIGHT
49
31
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
N
=
5
-
4
NINE
42
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
45
-
-
-
42
-
40
Add
522
225
45
-
1
4
3
8
5
18
14
8
9
4+5
-
-
-
4+2
-
4+0
Reduce
5+2+2
2+2+5
4+5
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+8
1+4
-
-
9
-
-
-
6
-
4
Deduce
9
9
9
-
1
4
3
8
5
9
5
8
9

 

 

1
-
O
=
6
-
3
ONE
34
16
7
2
-
T
=
2
-
3
TWO
58
13
4
3
-
T
=
2
-
5
THREE
56
29
2
4
-
F
=
6
-
4
FOUR
60
24
6
5
-
F
=
6
-
4
FIVE
42
24
6
6
-
S
=
1
-
3
SIX
52
16
7
7
-
S
=
1
-
5
SEVEN
65
20
2
8
-
E
=
5
-
5
EIGHT
49
31
4
9
-
N
=
5
-
4
NINE
42
24
6
45
-
-
-
34
-
36
Add
458
197
44
4+5
-
-
-
3+4
-
3+6
Reduce
4+5+8
1+9+7
4+4
9
-
-
-
7
4
9
Deduce
17
17
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Produce
1+7
1+7
-
9
-
-
-
7
-
9
Essence
8
8
8

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
O
=
6
-
3
ONE
34
16
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
2
-
T
=
2
-
3
TWO
58
13
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
3
-
T
=
2
-
5
THREE
56
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
4
-
F
=
6
-
4
FOUR
60
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
5
-
F
=
6
-
4
FIVE
42
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
6
-
S
=
1
-
3
SIX
52
16
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
-
7
-
S
=
1
-
5
SEVEN
65
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
E
=
5
-
5
EIGHT
49
31
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
N
=
5
-
4
NINE
42
24
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
-
45
-
-
-
34
-
36
Add
458
197
44
-
1
4
3
8
5
18
14
8
9
4+5
-
-
-
3+4
-
3+6
Reduce
4+5+8
1+9+7
4+4
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+8
1+4
-
-
9
-
-
-
7
4
9
Deduce
17
17
8
-
1
4
3
8
5
18
14
8
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Produce
1+7
1+7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
-
-
7
-
9
Essence
8
8
8
-
1
4
3
8
5
9
5
8
9

 

 

0
-
4
ZERO
8
5
9
6
-
=
28
2+8
=
10
1+0
1
1
-
3
ONE
6
5
5
-
-
=
16
1+6
=
7
-
7
2
-
3
TWO
2
5
6
-
-
=
13
1+3
=
4
-
4
3
-
5
THREE
2
8
9
5
5
=
29
2+9
=
11
1+1
2
4
-
4
FOUR
6
6
3
9
-
=
24
2+4
=
6
-
6
5
-
4
FIVE
6
9
4
5
-
=
24
2+4
=
6
-
6
6
-
3
SIX
1
9
6
-
-
=
16
1+6
=
7
-
7
7
-
5
SEVEN
1
5
4
5
5
=
20
2+0
=
2
-
2
8
-
5
EIGHT
5
9
7
8
2
=
31
3+1
=
4
-
4
9
-
4
NINE
5
9
5
5
-
=
24
2+4
=
6
-
6
45
-
40
Add
42
70
58
43
12
-
225
-
-
63
-
45
4+5
-
4+0
-
4+2
7+0
5+8
4+3
1+2
-
2+2+5
-
-
6+3
-
4+5
9
-
4
Reduce
6
7
13
7
3
-
9
-
-
9
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+3
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
-
4
Deduce
6
7
4
7
3
-
9
-
-
9
-
9

 

 

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

 

 

THE TIME IS COMING AND NOW IS

 

 

I

SAY

HAVE

I

MENTIONED DIVINE THOUGHT DIVINE CONSCIENCE

I

SAY

HAVE

I

MENTIONED

GODS

DIVINE LOVE DIVINE

HAVE

I

MENTIONED

THAT

?

I

HAVE

O

GOOD

 

 

THOSE PATENT PATIENT PATTERN MAKERS

 

 

Nature's Numbers
Ian Stewart 1995

Numerology is the easiest-and consequently the most dangerous-method for finding patterns. It is easy because anybody can do it and dangerous for the same reason. The difficulty lies in distinguishing significant numerical patterns from accidental ones. Here's a case in point. Kepler was fascinated with patterns in nature, and he devoted much of his life to looking for them in the behaviour of the planets. He devised a simple and tidy theory for the existence of precisely six planets (in his time only Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were known). He also discovered a very strange pattern relating the orbital period of a / planet- the time it takes to go once around the Sun-to its distance from the Sun. Recall that the square of a number is what you get when you multiply it by itself: for example, the square of 4 is 4 x 4 = 16. Similarly, the cube is what you get when you multiply it by itself twice: for example, the cube of 4 is 4 x 4 x 4 = 64. Kepler found that if you take the cube of the distance of any planet from the Sun and divide it by the square of its orbital period, you always get the same number. It was not an especially elegant number, but it was the same for all six planets.

Which of these numerological observations is the more significant? The verdict of posterity is that it is the second one, the complicated and rather arbitrary calculation with squares and cubes. This numerical pattern was one of the key steps towards Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, which has explained all sorts of puzzles about the motion of stars and planets. In contrast, Kepler's neat, tidy theory for the number of planets has been buried without trace. For a start it must have been wrong, because we now know of nine planets, not six. There could be even more, farther out from the Sun, and small enough to be undetectable But more important, we no longer expect to find a neat, tidy theory for the number of planets. We think that the Solar System condensed from a cloud of gas surrounding the Sun, and the number of planets presumably depended on the amount of matter in the gas cloud, how it was distributed, and how fast and in what directions it was moving. An equally plausible gas cloud could have given us eight planets, or eleven; the number is accidental, depending on the initial conditions of the gas cloud, rather than universal, reflecting a general law of nature"

Page 6

" The big problem with numerological pattern-seeking is that it generates millions of accidentals for each universal. Nor is it always obvious which is which. For example, there are three stars, roughly equally spaced and in a straight line, in the belt of the constellation Orion. Is that a clue to a significant law of nature?
Here's a similar question. Io, Europa, and Ganymede are three of Jupiter's larger satellites. They orbit the planet in , respectively, 1.77, 3.55, and 7.16 days. Each of these numbers is almost exactly twice the previous one. Is that a significant pattern? Three stars in a row, in terms of orbital period. Which pattern if either, is an important clue..."
    "… In addition to numerical patterns there are geometric ones…"
    "… Until recently the main shapes that appealed to mathematicians were very simple ones: triangles, squares, pen / Page 7 /tagons, hexagons, circles, ellipses, spirals, cubes, spheres, cones, and so on. All of these shapes can be found in nature, although some are far more common, or more evident, than others. The rainbow, for example, is a collection of circles, one for each colour. We don't normally see the entire circle just an arc; but rainbows seen from the air can be complete circles. You also see circles in the ripples on a pond, in the human eye, and on butterflies wings.
         Talking of ripples, the flow of fluids provides an inexhaustible supply of nature's patterns. There are waves of many different kinds-surging toward a beach in parallel ranks, spreading in a V-shape behind a moving boat, radiating outward from an underwater earthquake…"
"…There are swirling spiral whirlpools and tiny vortices. And there is the apparently structureless, random frothing of turbulent flow, one of the great enigmas of mathematics and physics. There are similar patterns in the atmosphere, too, the most dramatic being the vast spiral of a hurricane…"
    "…There are also wave patterns on land. The most strikingly mathematical landscapes on Earth are to be found in the great ergs, or sand oceans, of the Arabian and Sahara deserts. Even when the wind blows steadily in a fixed direction, sand dunes form. The simplest pattern is that of transverse dunes, which-just like ocean waves-line up in parallel straight rows at right angles to the prevailing wind direction. Sometimes the rows themselves become wavy in which case they are called barchanoid ridges; sometimes they break up into / Page 8 / innumerable shield-shaped barchan dunes. If the sand is slightly moist, and there is a little vegetation to bind it together, then you may find parabolic dunes-shaped like a U, with the rounded end pointing in the direction of the wind. These sometimes occur in clusters, and they resemble the teeth of a rake. If the wind direction is variable, other forms become possible. For example, clusters of sand shaped dunes can form, each having several irregular arms radiating from a central peak. They arrange themselves in a random pattern of spots.

Chapter 6

Page 81

"Nature's symmetries can be found on every scale, from the structure of subatomic particles to that of the entire universe. Many chemical molecules are symmetric. The methane molecule is a tetrahedron - a triangular-sided pyramid - with one carbon atom at its center and four hydrogen atoms at its corners Benzene has the sixfold symmetry of a regular hexagon. The fashionable molecule buckminsterfullerene is a truncated icosahedral cage of sixty carbon atoms. (An icosahedron is a regular solid with twenty triangular faces;
"truncated" means that the corners are cut off.) Its symmetry lends it a remarkable stability, which has opened up new possibilities for organic chemistry.
    On a slightly larger scale than molecules, we find symmetries in cellular structure; at the heart of cellular replication lies a tiny piece of mechanical engineering. Deep within each / Page 82  / living cell, there is a rather shapeless structure known as the centrosome, which sprouts long thin microtubules, basic components of the cell's internal "skeleton", like a diminutive sea urchin. Centrsomes were first discovered in 1887 and play an important role in organizing cell division. How-ever in one respect the structure of the centresome is astonishingly symmetric. Inside it has two structures, known as centrioles, positioned at right angles to each other. Each centriole is cylindrical, made from twenty-seven microtubules fused together along their lengths in threes, and arranged with perfect ninefold symmetry. The microtubules themselves also have an astonishingley regular symmetric form. They are hollow tubes, made from a perfect regular checkerboard pattern of units that contain two distinct proteins, alpha- and betatubulin. One day, perhaps, we will understand why nature chose these symmetric forms. But it is amazing to see symmetric structures at the core of a living cell. "

 

CELL = 3533 = CELL

3533 = CELL = 3533

CELL = 3533 = CELL

CELL = 5 = CELL

SEE EL EL SEE

C ELL ELL C

CIRCLE = 5 5 = CIRCLE

 

 

Formally stated, Newton's third law is: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The statement means that in every interaction, there is a pair of forces acting on the two interacting objects. The size of the forces on the first object equals the size of the force on the second object.

 

F
=
6
-
3
FOR
39
21
3
E
=
5
-
5
EVERY
75
30
3
A
=
1
-
6
ACTION
62
26
8
T
=
2
-
5
THERE
56
29
2
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
19
1
A
=
1
-
2
AN
15
6
6
E
=
5
-
5
EQUAL
56
20
2
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
O
=
6
-
8
OPPOSITE
115
43
7
R
=
9
-
8
REACTION
85
40
4
-
-
45
4
46
First Total
550
244
37
-
-
4+5
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+5+0
2+4+4
3+7
Q
-
9
-
10
Second Total
10
10
10
-
-
-
4
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+0
1+0
1+0
-
-
9
5
1
Essence of Number
1
1
1

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
F
=
6
-
3
FOR
39
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
5
-
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
5
EVERY
75
30
3
-
-
-
3
-
5
-
-
-
9
A
=
1
-
6
ACTION
62
26
8
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
8
9
T
=
2
-
5
THERE
56
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
19
1
-
1
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
A
=
1
-
2
AN
15
6
6
-
-
-
-
-
5
6
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
5
EQUAL
56
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
O
=
6
-
8
OPPOSITE
115
43
7
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
7
-
9
R
=
9
-
8
REACTION
85
40
4
-
-
-
-
4
5
-
-
-
9
-
-
45
4
46
First Total
550
244
37
-
2
4
6
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
4+5
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+5+0
2+4+4
3+7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Q
-
9
-
10
Second Total
10
10
10
-
2
4
6
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
-
4
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+0
1+0
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
5
1
Essence of Number
1
1
1
-
2
4
6
4
5
6
7
8
9

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
19
1
-
1
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
T
=
2
-
5
THERE
56
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
5
EQUAL
56
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
5
-
-
-
9
F
=
6
-
3
FOR
39
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
5
-
-
-
9
E
=
5
-
5
EVERY
75
30
3
-
-
-
3
-
5
-
-
-
9
R
=
9
-
8
REACTION
85
40
4
-
-
-
-
4
5
-
-
-
9
A
=
1
-
2
AN
15
6
6
-
-
-
-
-
5
6
-
-
9
O
=
6
-
8
OPPOSITE
115
43
7
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
7
-
9
A
=
1
-
6
ACTION
62
26
8
-
-
-
-
-
5
-
-
8
9
-
-
45
4
46
First Total
550
244
37
-
2
4
6
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
4+5
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+5+0
2+4+4
3+7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Q
-
9
-
10
Second Total
10
10
10
-
2
4
6
4
5
6
7
8
9
-
-
-
4
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+0
1+0
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
5
1
Essence of Number
1
1
1
-
2
4
6
4
5
6
7
8
9

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
6
7
8
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
19
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
T
=
2
-
5
THERE
56
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
5
EQUAL
56
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
F
=
6
-
3
FOR
39
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
5
EVERY
75
30
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
R
=
9
-
8
REACTION
85
40
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
2
AN
15
6
6
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
O
=
6
-
8
OPPOSITE
115
43
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
A
=
1
-
6
ACTION
62
26
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
-
-
45
4
46
First Total
550
244
37
-
2
4
6
4
6
7
8
-
-
4+5
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+5+0
2+4+4
3+7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Q
-
9
-
10
Second Total
10
10
10
-
2
4
6
4
6
7
8
-
-
-
4
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+0
1+0
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
5
1
Essence of Number
1
1
1
-
2
4
6
4
6
7
8

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
2
3
4
6
7
8
F
=
6
-
3
FOR
39
21
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
5
EVERY
75
30
3
-
-
-
3
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
6
ACTION
62
26
8
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
8
T
=
2
-
5
THERE
56
29
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
I
=
9
-
2
IS
28
19
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
2
AN
15
6
6
-
-
-
-
-
6
-
-
E
=
5
-
5
EQUAL
56
20
2
-
-
2
-
-
-
-
-
A
=
1
-
3
AND
19
10
1
-
1
-
-
-
-
-
-
O
=
6
-
8
OPPOSITE
115
43
7
-
-
-
-
-
-
7
-
R
=
9
-
8
REACTION
85
40
4
-
-
-
-
4
-
-
-
-
-
45
4
46
First Total
550
244
37
-
2
4
6
4
6
7
8
-
-
4+5
-
4+6
Add to Reduce
5+5+0
2+4+4
3+7
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Q
-
9
-
10
Second Total
10
10
10
-
2
4
6
4
6
7
8
-
-
-
4
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+0
1+0
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
9
5
1
Essence of Number
1
1
1
-
2
4
6
4
6
7
8

 

 

Causality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Causality is the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is a consequence of the first. ...
History - Logic - Theories - Fields

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality

Causality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

"Cause" redirects here. For the legal usage, see Cause (law).

The Illustrated Sutra of Cause and Effect. 8th century, Japan

Causality is the relationship between an event (the cause) and a second event (the effect), where the second event is a consequence of the first.[1]

The philosophical treatment of causality extends over millennia. In the Western philosophical tradition, discussion stretches back at least to Aristotle, and the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy. Aristotle distinguished between accidental (cause preceding effect) and essential causality (one event seen in two ways). Aristotle's example of essential causality is a builder building a house. This single event can be analyzed into the builder building (cause) and the house being built (effect).[2] Aristotle also had a theory that answered the question "why?" four different ways. The first was material cause, next was formal cause, then efficient cause, and lastly was final cause. These rules are known as "Aristotle's four causes".[3] [4]

Though cause and effect are typically related to events, candidates include objects, processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of affairs; characterizing the causal relationship can be the subject of much debate.

According to Sowa (2000),[5] up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality:

"Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect.

"Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect.

"Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (Born, 1949, as cited in Sowa, 2000)However, according to Sowa (2000), "relativity and quantum mechanics have forced physicists to abandon these assumptions as exact statements of what happens at the most fundamental levels, but they remain valid at the level of human experience."[5]

In the case of a mis-attribution of a cause to an effect, the event is known as questionable cause.

Contents

[hide]

1 History 1.1 Western philosophy 1.1.1 Aristotle

1.1.2 Causality, determinism, and existentialism

1.2 Indian philosophy

2 Logic 2.1 Necessary and sufficient causes

2.2 Causality contrasted with conditionals

2.3 Questionable Cause 2.3.1 Occurrence of Questionable Cause

3 Theories 3.1 Counterfactual theories

3.2 Probabilistic causation

3.3 Causal Calculus

3.4 Structure Learning

3.5 Derivation theories

3.6 Manipulation theories

3.7 Process theories

4 Fields 4.1 Science 4.1.1 Physics

4.1.2 Engineering

4.1.3 Biology and medicine

4.1.4 Psychology

4.2 Humanities 4.2.1 History

4.2.2 Law

4.2.3 Religion and theology

5 See also

6 References 6.1 Other references

7 External links 7.1 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

7.2 General

[edit] Western philosophy

[edit] Aristotle

In his Posterior Analytics and Metaphysics, Aristotle wrote, "All causes are beginnings...",[6] "... we have scientific knowledge when we know the cause...",[7] and "... to know a thing's nature is to know the reason why it is..."[8] This formulation set the guidelines for subsequent causal theories by specifying the number, nature, principles, elements, varieties, order of causes as well as the modes of causation. Aristotle's account of the causes of things is a comprehensive model.

Aristotle's theory enumerates the possible causes which fall into several wide groups, amounting to the ways the question "why" may be answered; namely, by reference to the material worked upon (as by an artisan) or what might be called the substratum; to the essence, i.e., the pattern, the form, or the structure by reference to which the "matter" or "substratum" is to be worked; to the primary moving agent of change or the agent and its action; and to the goal, the plan, the end, or the good that the figurative artisan intended to obtain. As a result, the major kinds of causes come under the following divisions:

The material cause is that "raw material" from which a thing is produced as from its parts, constituents, substratum, or materials. This rubric limits the explanation of cause to the parts (the factors, elements, constituents, ingredients) forming the whole (the system, structure, compound, complex, composite, or combination) (the part-whole causation).

The formal cause tells us what, by analogy to the plans of an artisan, a thing is intended and planned to be. Any thing is thought to be determined by its definition, form (mold), pattern, essence, whole, synthesis, or archetype. This analysis embraces the account of causes in terms of fundamental principles or general laws, as the intended whole (macrostructure) is the cause that explains the production of its parts (the whole-part causation).

The efficient cause is not the external entity from which the change or the ending of the change first starts. It identifies 'what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed' and so suggests all sorts of agents, nonliving or living, acting as the sources of change or movement or rest. Representing the current understanding of causality as the relation of cause and effect, this analysis covers the modern definitions of "cause" as either the agent, agency, particular causal events, or the relevant causal states of affairs.

The final cause is that for the sake of which a thing exists, or is done - including both purposeful and instrumental actions. The final cause, or telos, is the purpose, or end, that something is supposed to serve; or it is that from which, and that to which, the change is. This analysis also covers modern ideas of mental causation involving such psychological causes as volition, need, motivation, or motives; rational, irrational, ethical - all that gives purpose to behavior.

Additionally, things can be causes of one another, reciprocally causing each other, as hard work causes fitness, and vice versa - although not in the same way or by means of the same function: the one is as the beginning of change, the other is as its goal. (Thus Aristotle first suggested a reciprocal or circular causality - as a relation of mutual dependence, action, or influence of cause and effect.) Also; Aristotle indicated that the same thing can be the cause of contrary effects - as its presence and absence may result in different outcomes. In speaking thus he formulated what currently is ordinarily termed a "causal factor," e.g., atmospheric pressure as it affects chemical or physical reactions.

Aristotle marked two modes of causation: proper (prior) causation and accidental (chance) causation. All causes, proper and incidental, can be spoken as potential or as actual, particular or generic. The same language refers to the effects of causes; so that generic effects assigned to generic causes, particular effects to particular causes, and operating causes to actual effects. It is also essential that ontological causality does not suggest the temporal relation of before and after - between the cause and the effect; that spontaneity (in nature) and chance (in the sphere of moral actions) are among the causes of effects belonging to the efficient causation, and that no incidental, spontaneous, or chance cause can be prior to a proper, real, or underlying cause per se.

All investigations of causality coming later in history will consist in imposing a favorite hierarchy on the order (priority) of causes; such as "final > efficient > material > formal" (Aquinas), or in restricting all causality to the material and efficient causes or, to the efficient causality (deterministic or chance), or just to regular sequences and correlations of natural phenomena (the natural sciences describing how things happen rather than asking why they happen)..

[edit] Causality, determinism, and existentialism

Causality has taken many journeys in the minds of human beings for over 3000 years.[9] Determinism and existentialism are but a few of the manifestations of this journey.

The deterministic world-view is one in which the universe is no more than a chain of events following one after another according to the law of cause and effect. To hold this worldview, as an incompatibilist, there is no such thing as "free will". However, compatibilists argue that determinism is compatible with, or even necessary for, free will.

Existentialists have suggested that people believe that while no meaning has been designed in the universe, we each can provide a meaning for ourselves.

Though philosophers have pointed out the difficulties in establishing theories of the validity of causal relations, there is yet the plausible example of causation afforded daily which is our own ability to be the cause of events. This concept of causation does not prevent seeing ourselves as moral agents.

[edit] Indian philosophy

See also: Karma

Theories of causality in Indian philosophy focus mainly on the relationship between cause and effect. The various philosophical schools (darsanas) provide different theories.

The doctrine of satkaryavada affirms that the effect inheres in the cause in some way. The effect is thus either a real or apparent modification of the cause.

The doctrine of asatkaryavada affirms that the effect does not inhere in the cause, but is a new arising.

The Buddha, and subsequent Buddhist thinkers such as Nagarjuna, rejected both, instead proposing a middle way.

See Nyaya for some details of the theory of causation in the Nyaya school.

[edit] Logic

[edit] Necessary and sufficient causes

A similar concept occurs in logic, for this see Necessary and sufficient conditions

Causes are often distinguished into two types: Necessary and sufficient.[10] A third type of causation, which requires neither necessity nor sufficiency in and of itself, but which contributes to the effect, is called a "contributory cause."[11]

Necessary causes:

If x is a necessary cause of y, then the presence of y necessarily implies the presence of x. The presence of x, however, does not imply that y will occur.

Sufficient causes:

If x is a sufficient cause of y, then the presence of x necessarily implies the presence of y. However, another cause z may alternatively cause y. Thus the presence of y does not imply the presence of x.

Contributory causes:

A cause may be classified as a "contributory cause," if the presumed cause precedes the effect, and altering the cause alters the effect. It does not require that all those subjects which possess the contributory cause experience the effect. It does not require that all those subjects which are free of the contributory cause be free of the effect. In other words, a contributory cause may be neither necessary nor sufficient but it must be contributory.[12][13]

J. L. Mackie argues that usual talk of "cause," in fact refers to INUS conditions (insufficient and non-redundant parts of unnecessary but sufficient causes). For example, a short circuit as a cause for a house burning down. Consider the collection of events: the short circuit, the proximity of flammable material, and the absence of firefighters. Together these are unnecessary but sufficient to the house's destruction (since many other collections of events certainly could have destroyed the house). Within this collection, the short circuit is an insufficient but non-redundant part (since the short circuit by itself would not have caused the fire, but the fire would not have happened without it, everything else being equal). So, the short circuit is an INUS cause of the house burning down.

[edit] Causality contrasted with conditionals

Conditional statements are not statements of causality. An important distinction is that statements of causality require the antecedent to precede the consequent in time, whereas conditional statements do not require this temporal order. Confusion commonly arises since many different statements in English may be presented using "If ..., then ..." form (and, arguably, because this form is far more commonly used to make a statement of causality). The two types of statements are distinct, however.

For example, all of the following statements are true when interpreting "If ..., then ..." as the material conditional:

If George Bush is president of the United States in 2004, then Germany is in Europe.

If George Washington is president of the United States in 2004, then Germany is in Europe.

If George Washington is president of the United States in 2004, then Germany is not in Europe.

The first is true since both the antecedent and the consequent are true. The second is true because the antecedent is false and the consequent is true. The third is true because both the antecedent and the consequent are false. These statements are trivial examples. Of course, although none of these statements expresses a causal connection between the antecedent and consequent, they are nonetheless all true because no statement has the combination of a true antecedent and false consequent. Logic requires only that truth not be deceptive.

The ordinary indicative conditional has somewhat more structure than the material conditional. For instance, although the first is the closest, none of the preceding three statements seems true as an ordinary indicative reading. But the sentence

If Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon did not write Macbeth, then someone else did.

intuitively seems to be true, even though there is no straightforward causal relation in this hypothetical situation between Shakespeare's not writing Macbeth and someone else's actually writing it.

Another sort of conditional, the counterfactual conditional, has a stronger connection with causality, yet even counterfactual statements are not all examples of causality. Consider the following two statements:

If A were a triangle, then A would have three sides.

If switch S were thrown, then bulb B would light.

In the first case, it would not be correct to say that A's being a triangle caused it to have three sides, since the relationship between triangularity and three-sidedness is that of definition. The property of having three sides actually determines A's state as a triangle. Nonetheless, even when interpreted counterfactually, the first statement is true.

A full grasp of the concept of conditionals is important to understanding the literature on causality. A crucial stumbling block is that conditionals in everyday English are usually loosely used to describe a general situation. For example, "If I drop my coffee, then my shoe gets wet" relates an infinite number of possible events. It is shorthand for "For any fact that would count as 'dropping my coffee', some fact that counts as 'my shoe gets wet' will be true". This general statement will be strictly false if there is any circumstance where I drop my coffee and my shoe doesn't get wet. However, an "If..., then..." statement in logic typically relates two specific events or facts—a specific coffee-dropping did or did not occur, and a specific shoe-wetting did or did not follow. Thus, with explicit events in mind, if I drop my coffee and wet my shoe, then it is true that "If I dropped my coffee, then I wet my shoe", regardless of the fact that yesterday I dropped a coffee in the trash for the opposite effect—the conditional relates to specific facts. More counterintuitively, if I didn't drop my coffee at all, then it is also true that "If I drop my coffee then I wet my shoe", or "Dropping my coffee implies I wet my shoe", regardless of whether I wet my shoe or not by any means. This usage would not be counterintuitive if it were not for the everyday usage. Briefly, "If X then Y" is equivalent to the first-order logic statement "A implies B" or "not A-and-not-B", where A and B are predicates, but the more familiar usage of an "if A then B" statement would need to be written symbolically using a higher order logic using quantifiers ("for all" and "there exists")

[edit] Questionable Cause

Main article: Questionable cause

A breakdown of causality logic is known as questionable cause. This fallacy is committed when a person assumes that one event must cause another just because the events occur together. This fallacy involves drawing the conclusion that A is the cause of B simply because A and B are in regular conjunction (and there is not a common cause that is actually the cause of A and B). The mistake being made is that the causal conclusion is being drawn without adequate justification. One factor that makes causal reasoning complicated is that it is not always evident what is the cause and what is the effect.[14] This is particularly true when A and B cause each other by way of system feedback, where cycles tend to reinforce each other. Individual perception of causality can be clouded by emotions and ideologies. Errors of causality logic can be avoided by a careful study of the temporal sequence of events.

Confusing Cause and Effect is a fallacy that has the following general form:

A and B regularly occur together.

It then follows that A is the cause of B.[15]

Other reasons that A and B may regularly occur together, which tend to prove the fallacy, are B causes A, and some other event, C, causes both A, and B. It could also be the case that A and B are not really related by causality but only appear so in a limited study.

[edit] Occurrence of Questionable Cause

In some cases it will be evident that the fallacy is being committed. For example, a person might claim that an illness was caused by a person getting a fever. In this case, it would be quite clear that the fever was caused by illness and not the other way around. In other cases, the fallacy is not always evident. One factor that makes causal reasoning quite difficult is that it is not always evident what is the cause and what is the effect.[16] For example, a problem child might be the cause of the parents being short tempered or the short temper of the parents might be the cause of the child being problematic. The difficulty is increased by the fact that some situations might involve feedback. For example, the parents' temper might cause the child to become problematic and the child's behavior could worsen the parents' temper. In such cases it could be rather difficult to sort out what caused what in the first place.

In order to determine that the fallacy has been committed, it must be shown that the causal conclusion has not been adequately supported and that the person committing the fallacy has confused the actual cause with the effect. Showing that the fallacy has been committed will typically involve determining the actual cause and the actual effect. In some cases, as noted above, this can be quite easy. In other cases it will be difficult. In some cases, it might be almost impossible. Another thing that makes causal reasoning difficult is that people often have very different conceptions of cause and, in some cases, the issues are clouded by emotions and ideologies. For example, people often claim violence on TV and in movies must be censored because it causes people to like violence. Other people claim that there is violence on TV and in movies because people like violence or simply because it exists in the world in the first place. In this case, it is not obvious what the cause really is and the issue is clouded by the fact that emotions often run high on this issue.[17]

[edit] Theories

[edit] Counterfactual theories

Main article: Counterfactual conditional

The philosopher David Lewis notably suggested that all statements about causality can be understood as counterfactual statements.[18][19][20] So, for instance, the statement that John's smoking caused his premature death is equivalent to saying that had John not smoked he would not have prematurely died. (In addition, it need also be true that John did smoke and did prematurely die, although this requirement is not unique to Lewis' theory.)

Translating causal into counterfactual statements would only be beneficial if the latter were less problematic than the former. This is indeed the case, as is demonstrated by the structural account of counterfactual conditionals devised by the computer scientist Judea Pearl (2000).[21] This account provides clear semantics and effective algorithms for computing counterfactuals which, in contrast to Lewis' closest world semantics does not rely on the ambiguous notion of similarity among worlds. For instance, one can compute unambiguously the probability that John would be alive had he not smoked given that, in reality, John did smoke and did die. The quest for a counterfactual interpretation of causal statements is therefore justified.

One problem Lewis' theory confronts is causal preemption. Suppose that John did smoke and did in fact die as a result of that smoking. However, there was a murderer who was bent on killing John, and would have killed him a second later had he not first died from smoking. Here we still want to say that smoking caused John's death. This presents a problem for Lewis' theory since, had John not smoked, he still would have died prematurely. Lewis himself discusses this example, and it has received substantial discussion (cf).[22][23][24] A structural solution to this problem has been given in [Halpern and Pearl, 2005].[25]

[edit] Probabilistic causation

Main article: Probabilistic causation

Interpreting causation as a deterministic relation means that if A causes B, then A must always be followed by B. In this sense, war does not cause deaths, nor does smoking cause cancer. As a result, many turn to a notion of probabilistic causation. Informally, A probabilistically causes B if A's occurrence increases the probability of B. This is sometimes interpreted to reflect imperfect knowledge of a deterministic system but other times interpreted to mean that the causal system under study has an inherently chancy nature.

[edit] Causal Calculus

When experiments are infeasible or illegal, the derivation of cause effect relationship from observational studies must rest on some qualitative theoretical assumptions, for example, that symptoms do not cause diseases, usually expressed in the form of missing arrows in causal graphs such as Bayesian Networks or path diagrams. The mathematical theory underlying these derivations relies on the distinction between conditional probabilities, as in P(cancer | smoking), and interventional probabilities, as in P(cancer | do(smoking)). The former reads: "the probability of finding cancer in a person known to smoke" while the latter reads: "the probability of finding cancer in a person forced to smoke". The former is a statistical notion that can be estimated directly in observational studies, while the latter is a causal notion (also called "causal effect") which is what we estimate in a controlled randomized experiment.

The theory of "causal calculus"[21] permits one to infer interventional probabilities from conditional probabilities in causal Bayesian Networks with unmeasured variables. One very practical result of this theory is the characterization of confounding variables, namely, a sufficient set of variables that, if adjusted for, would yield the correct causal effect between variables of interest. It can be shown that a sufficient set for estimating the causal effect of X on Y is any set of non-descendants of X that d-separate X from Y after removing all arrows emanating from X. This criterion, called "backdoor", provides a mathematical definition of "confounding" and helps researchers identify accessible sets of variables worthy of measurement.

[edit] Structure Learning

While derivations in Causal Calculus rely on the structure of the causal graph, parts of the causal structure can, under certain assumptions, be learned from statistical data. The basic idea goes back to a recovery algorithm developed by Rebane and Pearl (1987)[26] and rests on the distinction between the three possible types of causal substructures allowed in a directed acyclic graph (DAG):

Type 1 and type 2 represent the same statistical dependencies (i.e., X and Z are independent given Y) and are, therefore, indistinguishable. Type 3, however, can be uniquely identified, since X and Z are marginally independent and all other pairs are dependent. Thus, while the skeletons (the graphs stripped of arrows) of these three triplets are identical, the directionality of the arrows is partially identifiable. The same distinction applies when X and Z have common ancestors, except that one must first condition on those ancestors. Algorithms have been developed to systematically determine the skeleton of the underlying graph and, then, orient all arrows whose directionality is dictated by the conditional independencies observed[21] [27] [28] .[29]

Alternative methods of structure learning search through the many possible causal structures among the variables, and remove ones which are strongly incompatible with the observed correlations. In general this leaves a set of possible causal relations, which should then be tested by designing appropriate experiments. If experimental data is already available, the algorithms can take advantage of that as well. In contrast with Bayesian Networks, path analysis and its generalization, structural equation modeling, serve better to estimate a known causal effect or test a causal model than to generate causal hypotheses.

For nonexperimental data, causal direction can be hinted if information about time is available. This is because (according to many, though not all, theories) causes must precede their effects temporally. This can be set up by simple linear regression models, for instance, with an analysis of covariance in which baseline and follow up values are known for a theorized cause and effect. The addition of time as a variable, though not proving causality, is a big help in supporting a pre-existing theory of causal direction. For instance, our degree of confidence in the direction and nature of causality is much greater when supported by data from a longitudinal study than by data from a cross-sectional study.

[edit] Derivation theories

The Nobel Prize holder Herbert Simon and Philosopher Nicholas Rescher[30] claim that the asymmetry of the causal relation is unrelated to the asymmetry of any mode of implication that contraposes. Rather, a causal relation is not a relation between values of variables, but a function of one variable (the cause) on to another (the effect). So, given a system of equations, and a set of variables appearing in these equations, we can introduce an asymmetric relation among individual equations and variables that corresponds perfectly to our commonsense notion of a causal ordering. The system of equations must have certain properties, most importantly, if some values are chosen arbitrarily, the remaining values will be determined uniquely through a path of serial discovery that is perfectly causal. They postulate the inherent serialization of such a system of equations may correctly capture causation in all empirical fields, including physics and economics.

[edit] Manipulation theories

Some theorists have equated causality with manipulability.[31][32][33][34] Under these theories, x causes y just in case one can change x in order to change y. This coincides with commonsense notions of causations, since often we ask causal questions in order to change some feature of the world. For instance, we are interested in knowing the causes of crime so that we might find ways of reducing it.

These theories have been criticized on two primary grounds. First, theorists complain that these accounts are circular. Attempting to reduce causal claims to manipulation requires that manipulation is more basic than causal interaction. But describing manipulations in non-causal terms has provided a substantial difficulty.

The second criticism centers around concerns of anthropocentrism. It seems to many people that causality is some existing relationship in the world that we can harness for our desires. If causality is identified with our manipulation, then this intuition is lost. In this sense, it makes humans overly central to interactions in the world.

Some attempts to save manipulability theories are recent accounts that don't claim to reduce causality to manipulation. These accounts use manipulation as a sign or feature in causation without claiming that manipulation is more fundamental than causation.[21][35]

[edit] Process theories

Some theorists are interested in distinguishing between causal processes and non-causal processes (Russell 1948; Salmon 1984).[36][37] These theorists often want to distinguish between a process and a pseudo-process. As an example, a ball moving through the air (a process) is contrasted with the motion of a shadow (a pseudo-process). The former is causal in nature while the latter is not.

Salmon (1984)[36] claims that causal processes can be identified by their ability to transmit an alteration over space and time. An alteration of the ball (a mark by a pen, perhaps) is carried with it as the ball goes through the air. On the other hand an alteration of the shadow (insofar as it is possible) will not be transmitted by the shadow as it moves along.

These theorists claim that the important concept for understanding causality is not causal relationships or causal interactions, but rather identifying causal processes. The former notions can then be defined in terms of causal processes.

Why-Because Graph of the capsizing of the Herald of Free Enterprise

Fields

[edit] Science

Using the scientific method, scientists set up experiments to determine causality in the physical world.

In addition, many scientists in a variety of fields[specify] disagree that experiments are necessary to determine causality. For example, the link between smoking and lung cancer is considered proven by health agencies of the United States government, but experimental methods (for example, randomized controlled trials) were not used to establish that link. This view has been controversial. In addition, many philosophers[specify] are beginning to turn to more relativized notions of causality[specify]. Rather than providing a theory of causality in toto[specify], they opt to provide a theory of causality in biology[specify] or causality in physics[specify].

The Fountain Theory of Realms of Science, part of the philosophy of science, says that the laws of physics describe cause and effect within physics, and can be seen as the underlying causes of biological events, but that the causal connections between the realms of physics and biology are rarely observed directly, and thus are not a major part of either science. For example, laws of gravity and molecular forces are seen as causes of animal motion. But studies of animal behavior such as hunting and sleeping rarely get down to series of events caused by individual molecular forces. Rather, biology mostly references cause and effect relationships within biology, using facts such as population, competition, and reproduction. Thus physics and biology exist in their own realms, and laws of cause and effect within each tend towards internal consistency, and towards whatever consistency is possible given the smaller connections the other realm of science (for example, animals are effected by the force of gravity). Contemporary knowledge in biology is thus expressed in a self-referential way, with limited causal connections from physics to the current state of scientific knowledge. A similarly limited causal connection is shown between other scientific realms in succeeding levels, such as physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology.

[edit] Physics

Main article: Causality (physics)

Physicists conclude that certain elemental forces: gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism are said to be the four fundamental forces which are the causes of all other events in the universe. The notion of causality that appears in many different physical theories is hard to interpret in ordinary language. One problem is typified by earth's interaction with the moon. It is inaccurate to say, "the moon exerts a gravitic pull and then the tides rise." In Newtonian mechanics gravity, rather, is a constant observable relationship among masses, and the movement of the tides is an example of that relationship. There are no discrete events or "pulls" that can be said to precede the rising of tides. Interpreting gravity causally is even more complicated in general relativity. Similarly, quantum mechanics is another branch of physics in which the nature of causality is particularly unclear. For statistical generalization, causality has further implications due to its intimate connection with the Second Law of Thermodynamics (see the fluctuation theorem).

[edit] Engineering

image omitted

Used in engineering, a fishbone diagram shows the factors that cause the effect. Smaller arrows connect the sub-causes to major causes.

A causal system is a system with output and internal states that depends only on the current and previous input values. A system that has some dependence on input values from the future (in addition to possible past or current input values) is termed an acausal system, and a system that depends solely on future input values is an anticausal system. Acausal filters, for example, can only exist as digital filters, because these filters can extract future values from a memory buffer or a file.

[edit] Biology and medicine

Austin Bradford Hill built upon the work of Hume and Popper and suggested in his paper "The Environment and Disease: Association or Causation?" that the following aspects of an association be considered in attempting to distinguish causal from noncausal associations in the epidemiological situation:

strength,

consistency,

specificity,

temporality,

biological gradient,

plausibility,

coherence,

experimental evidence,

analogy

[38]

Strength refers to the numerical strength of the correlation, expressed as relative risk or odds ratios. Strong correlation is much more convincing that a causal effect is at work.

Consistency refers to phenomena that have been observed in many places at many times by many different observers in different circumstances.

Specificity is where the effect is limited to certain workers in certain specific situations and where there is no other association between the work and other modes of dying.

Temporality is to do with the direction of causality. Which is the cart and which is the horse? This is particularly relevant where slowly progressing disease is concerned. Does the patient's diet cause the disease or does the disease alter the patient's diet?

Biological gradient, otherwise known as a dose-response relationship, when more of the alleged cause is associated with more of the response (or disease). For example, not only do smokers have a higher prevalence of lung cancer than non-smokers, but also heavy smokers have a higher prevalence than light smokers.

Plausibility refers to the scientific credibility of the relationship. In the case of smoking, cigarette smoke is known to contain many established toxins, which makes it a plausible cause of cancer.

Coherence is the idea that the possibility of the causal relationship should not conflict with what is known about the natural history and biology of the disease.

Experimental evidence may be relevant. For example, if it is suspected that dust is causing the disease then an experiment in which dust filters are fitted would be appropriate and, if successful, would bolster the theory that dust was a causal factor in the incidence of the disease.

Analogy is where we reason from similar phenomena, causes and diseases to the disease at hand.

[edit] Psychology

The above theories are attempts to define a reflectively stable notion of causality. This process uses our standard causal intuitions to develop a theory that we would find satisfactory in identifying causes. Another avenue of research is to empirically investigate how people (and non-human animals) learn and reason about causal relations in the world. This approach is taken by work in psychology. It also is possible to tackle causalities in surveys with a technique of elaboration. Given a relationship between two variables, what can be learned by introducing a third variable into the analysis (Rosenberg, 1968, xiii)? So elaboration is a device of the analysis that results in different kinds of relationships between variables e.g. suppression, extraneous, and distorter relations.

Attribution

Attribution theory is the theory concerning how people explain individual occurrences of causation. Attribution can be external (assigning causality to an outside agent or force - claiming that some outside thing motivated the event) or internal (assigning causality to factors within the person - taking personal responsibility or accountability for one's actions and claiming that the person was directly responsible for the event). Taking causation one step further, the type of attribution a person provides influences their future behavior.

The intention behind the cause or the effect can be covered by the subject of action (philosophy). See also accident; blame; intent; and responsibility.

Causal powers

Whereas David Hume argued that causes are inferred from non-causal observations, Immanuel Kant claimed that people have innate assumptions about causes. Within psychology, Patricia Cheng (1997)[39] attempted to reconcile the Humean and Kantian views. According to her power PC theory, people filter observations of events through a basic belief that causes have the power to generate (or prevent) their effects, thereby inferring specific cause-effect relations. The theory assumes probabilistic causation. Pearl (2000)[21] has shown that Cheng's causal power can be given a counterfactual interpretation, (i.e., the probability that, absent x and y, y would be true if x were true) and is computable therefore using structural models. Within a Bayesian framework, the power PC theory can be interpreted as a noisy-OR function used to compute likelihoods (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2005)[40]

Causation and salience

Our view of causation depends on what we consider to be the relevant events. Another way to view the statement, "Lightning causes thunder" is to see both lightning and thunder as two perceptions of the same event, viz., an electric discharge that we perceive first visually and then aurally.

Naming and causality

While the names we give objects often refer to their appearance, they can also refer to an object's causal powers - what that object can do, the effects it has on other objects or people. David Sobel and Alison Gopnik from the Psychology Department of UC Berkeley designed a device known as the blicket detector which suggests that "when causal property and perceptual features are equally evident, children are equally as likely to use causal powers as they are to use perceptual properties when naming objects".

Humanities

[edit] History

In the discussion of history, events are often considered as if in some way being agents that can then bring about other historical events. Thus, the combination of poor harvests, the hardships of the peasants, high taxes, lack of representation of the people, and kingly ineptitude are among the causes of the French Revolution. This is a somewhat Platonic and Hegelian view that reifies causes as ontological entities. In Aristotelian terminology, this use approximates to the case of the efficient cause.

[edit] Law

Main article: Causation (law)

According to law and jurisprudence, legal cause must be demonstrated in order to hold a defendant liable for a crime or a tort (i.e. a civil wrong such as negligence or trespass). It must be proven that causality, or a 'sufficient causal link' relates the defendant's actions to the criminal event or damage in question.

[edit] Religion and theology

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Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2006)

Cosmological argument

One of the classic arguments for the existence of God is known as the "Cosmological argument" or "First cause" argument. It works from the premise that every natural event is the effect of a cause. If this is so, then the events that caused today's events must have had causes themselves, which must have had causes, and so forth. If the chain never ends, then one must uphold the hypothesis of an "actual infinite", which is often regarded as problematic, see Hilbert's paradox of the Grand Hotel. If the chain does end, it must end with a non-natural or supernatural cause at the start of the natural world -- e.g. a creation by God.

As F.R. John Laux, M.A. puts it,

"In our experience every event (effect) is determined by a cause. That cause is in its turn determined by another cause. But we cannot assume an infinite series of causes, because an infinite series with no beginning involves a contradiction. And even if we did suppose the possibility of an infinite series, that would not explain how causation began. Hence there must be an uncaused Cause, the ultimate Cause of all the events which proceed from it. This ultimate and supreme Cause we call God."[41]

Big Bang causality

Sometimes the argument is made in non-temporal terms. The chain doesn't go back in time, it goes downward into the ever-more enduring facts, and thus toward the timeless.

Two questions that can help to focus the argument are:

What is an event without cause?

How does an event without a cause occur?

Critics of this argument point out problems with it. The Big Bang theory states that it is the point in which all dimensions came into existence, the start of both space and time. Then, the question "What was there before the Universe?" makes no sense; the concept of "before" becomes meaningless when considering a situation without time, and thus the concepts of cause and effect so necessary to the cosmological argument no longer apply. This has been put forward by Stephen Hawking, who said that asking what occurred before the Big Bang is like asking what is north of the North Pole. However, some cosmologists and physicists do attempt to investigate what could have occurred before the Big Bang, using such scenarios as the collision of branes to give a cause for the Big Bang.[42]

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

 

 

CHICKEN OR EGG EGG OR CHICKEN FIRST U C IT THEN YOU DONT

 

 

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 prmclple of. creative hystena, 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

 

 

Karma

Karma is the belief held by some major religions that a person's actions cause certain effects in the current life and/or in future life, positively or negatively.

For example, if a person always does good deeds then it is believed that he or she will be "rewarded" for his or her behavior with fortunate events such as avoiding fatal accident or winning the lottery. If he or she always commits antagonistic behaviors, then it is believed that he will be punished with unfortunate events.

According to Buddhism, inequality amongst living beings is due not only to heredity, environment, "nature and nurture", but also to Karma. In other words, it is the result of our own past actions and our own present doings. We ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We create our own Heaven. We create our own Hell. We are the architects of our own fate.

Perplexed by the seemingly inexplicable, apparent disparity that existed among humanity, a young truth-seeker approached the Buddha and questioned him regarding this intricate problem of inequality:

"What is the cause, what is the reason, O Lord," questioned he, "that we find amongst mankind the short-lived and long-lived, the healthy and the diseased, the ugly and beautiful, those lacking influence and the powerful, the poor and the rich, the low-born and the high-born, and the ignorant and the wise?"

The Buddha’s reply was:

"All living beings have actions (Karma) as their own, their inheritance, their congenital cause, their kinsman, their refuge. It is Karma that differentiates beings into low and high states."

He then explained the cause of such differences in accordance with the law of cause and effect

 

 

 

CHICKEN OR EGG EGG OR CHICKEN FIRST U C IT THEN YOU DONT

 

 

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 prmclple of. creative hystena, 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

 

Karma

Karma is the belief held by some major religions that a person's actions cause certain effects in the current life and/or in future life, positively or negatively.

For example, if a person always does good deeds then it is believed that he or she will be "rewarded" for his or her behavior with fortunate events such as avoiding fatal accident or winning the lottery. If he or she always commits antagonistic behaviors, then it is believed that he will be punished with unfortunate events.

According to Buddhism, inequality amongst living beings is due not only to heredity, environment, "nature and nurture", but also to Karma. In other words, it is the result of our own past actions and our own present doings. We ourselves are responsible for our own happiness and misery. We create our own Heaven. We create our own Hell. We are the architects of our own fate.

Perplexed by the seemingly inexplicable, apparent disparity that existed among humanity, a young truth-seeker approached the Buddha and questioned him regarding this intricate problem of inequality:

"What is the cause, what is the reason, O Lord," questioned he, "that we find amongst mankind the short-lived and long-lived, the healthy and the diseased, the ugly and beautiful, those lacking influence and the powerful, the poor and the rich, the low-born and the high-born, and the ignorant and the wise?"

The Buddha’s reply was:

"All living beings have actions (Karma) as their own, their inheritance, their congenital cause, their kinsman, their refuge. It is Karma that differentiates beings into low and high states."

He then explained the cause of such differences in accordance with the law of cause and effect

 

 

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 con­stardy changing, frenetically busy but nevertheless consistently and accurately meaningful pattern of electronic flows. The reli­ability and precision of all this activity, despite its daunting cornplexity, is the truly stunning part of computer design, and that's the bit I don't pretend to understand. 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 'vvritten, 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 dose 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 PERSNAE

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 ~rwin 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 sshe 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 qecome 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 reaHy confused: there seems to have been some kind of instan­timeous communication between the two gloves, but you can't ten 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 giove 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 real 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 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 physicist 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": 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 / rather 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 Sun

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Page 17

WORLD'S OLDEST WOMAN IS 130

A MOTHER of ten will mark her 130th birthday this week making her the world's person by 16 years.

Sakhan Dosova's passport states that she was born in 1879..."

"Her incredible age came to light during a census in Karaganda in northern Kazakhstan."

 

 

Daily Mirror

Wednesday. 25.03.2009

By Mark Dowdney

Page 27

"130 yrs old ...AND NOT ONE VISIT TO HER GP

AMAZING mum-of-ten Sakhan Dosova is said to be the worlds oldest human - outdoing her nearest rival by 16 years.

She is set to celebrate her 130th birthday on Friday without ever having visited a doctor or taken any medicine"

"Sakhan was discovered during a census in Karaganda, Kazakhstan."

"Her date of birth is said to be March 27, 1879 shown on her Soviet era passport and Kazakhstan identity card.

Her Granddaughter Gaukhar Kanieva, 42 said: She is a very cheerful woman. We think laughter and a good mood helped her live so long."

Karaganda statistics expert Nailya Dosayeva said there was no doubt Sakhan was nearing 130: "She has an old passport and documents which are genuine and based on these we can judge her age as being correct."

"But other Kazakh officials have cast doubt over the claim fearing humiliation if the story turns out to be untrue.

"One official said: "There's no doubt she is very old. But is she 130? Or was there a white lie long ago we need to find out."

 

S
=
1
-
6
SAKHAN
54
27
9
D
=
6
-
6
DOSOVA
76
31
4
-
-
7
-
12
Add to Reduce
130
58
13
-
-
-
4
1+2
Reduce to Deduce
1+3+0
5+8
1+3
Q
-
7
-
3
Essence of Number
4
13
4

 

 

G
=
7
-
7
GAUKHAR
67
31
4
K
=
2
-
7
KANIEVA
63
27
9
-
-
9
-
14
Add to Reduce
130
58
13
-
-
-
4
1+4
Reduce to Deduce
1+3+0
5+8
1+3
Q
-
9
-
4
Essence of Number
4
13
4

 

 

12
SAKHAN DOSOVA
130
58
4
12
GAUKHAR KANIEVA
130
58
4
9
KARAGANDA
58
31
4
10
KAZAKHSTAN
112
31
4
6
KAZAKH
58
22
4

 

 

K
=
2
-
9
KARAGANDA
58
31
4
K
=
2
-
10
KAZAKHSTAN
112
31
4
K
=
2
-
6
KAZAKH
58
22
4

 

 

Daily Mail

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Page 26

Is this woman really 130?

A WOMAN claiiming to be the world's oldest living person will celebrate her 130th birthday this week.
Sakhan Dosova, a mother of ten, was horn in 1879, making her 16 years older than her nearest rival. Her age came to light during a census in Karaganda, northern Kazakhstan, where demographers were amazed to find she appeared on Stalin's first census in 1926, aged 47.
Her date of birth, March 27, 1879 - the year the lightbulb was invented - appears on her Soviet era passport and Kazakhstan identity card.
Mrs Dosova said: 'Idon't have any special secret. I've never taken pills and I've never eaten sweets - I don't like them. But I love cottage cheese.' Her granddaughter, Gaukhar Kanieva, 42, said: 'She is a very cheerful woman. We think laughter and a good mood helped her live so long.'

 

 

Daily Mail

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

'World's oldest person' dies at 130 after a fall

Page 24

"A WOMAN thought to be the world's oldest person at 130 has died after slipping on the bathroom floor of her new flat.
Sakhan Dosova broke her hip in a fall last month and never. recovered.
She had been given the flat by officials in Kazakhstan who were embarrassed she was living in overcrowded conditions with her impoverished family.
Her age came to light after a census in the city of Karaganda. Demographers also found she as on Stalin's first census of the reolon in 1926, with her age given as 47.
The mother of ten, whose date of birth was registered as March 27, 1879, said she had never visited a doctor and 'put her longevity down to a sense of humour.
Officially, the oldest living-person in the world is American Edna Parker, who is 114."

 

 

 

 

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"

 

 

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

Page 510

"The higher degrees of Freemasonary were initiates of the 'physica et mystica ,'the representatives of a magic natural science, they were in the main great alchemists"
"…Alchemy :transmuting into gold, the philosophers stone, aurum potabile ."
"In the popular mind, yes. More informedly put, it was purifi-cation, refinement,metamorphosis, transubstantiation ,into a higher state , of course; the lapis philosophorum, the male female product / Page 511 / of sulphur and mercury,the res bina,the double-sexed prima ma-teria was no more ,and no less, than the principle of levitation, of the upward impulse due to the working of influences from without. Instruction in magic if you like."

Page 511"

The primary symbol of alchemic transmutation " "was par exellence the sepulchre." "The grave? " "Yes, the place of corruption .It comprehends all hermetics, all alchemy, it is nothing else than the receptacle, the well - guarded crystal retort wherein the material is compressed to its final trans-formation and purification."

 

SOLVITE CORPORA ET COAGULATE SPIRITUM

 

 

THE FULCANELLI PHENOMENON

Kenneth Rayner Johnson 1980

THE ULTIMATE MYSTERY

Page 263

"...Occultists have for long equated this gland with the Third Eye of the Eastern magical tradition, whose opening is said to confer all kinds of arcane powers, including the ability to view the human aura and a consciousness expanded to cosmic proportions.
It will be as well to recall here what Fulcanelli's reply was when Bergier asked him what the real nature of alchemy consisted in. He said:
'The secret of alchemy is that there exists a means of manipulating matter and energy so as to create what modern science calls a force-field. This force-field acts upon the observer and puts him in a privileged position in relation to the universe. From this privileged position he has access to realities that space and time, matter and energy, normally conceal from us. This is what we call the Great Work.' "

Page 273

VIII
Conclusion

"Within the human body there is hidden a certain metaphysical substance, known only to the very few, whose essence it is to need no medicament, for it is itself uncorrupted medicament. There is in natural things a certain truth which cannot be seen with the outward eye but is perceived by the mind alone. The philosophers have known it and they have found that its power is so great as to work miracles... In this lies the whole art of freeing the spirit from its fetters... it is the highest power and an impregnable fortress wherein the philosopher's stone lies guarded - Gerhard Dorn, pupil of Paracelsus.

WE HAVE journeyed a long way, from the ancient land of the Pyramids, through the Mysteries of pre-Christian cultures, the mysticism and magic of the secret fraternities who enshrined their arcane wisdom in written and sculptured cipher, down to the present-day aura of the elusive Fulcanelli, Master Alchemist.
I do not expect that every one of my readers will either fully comprehend, appreciate nor indeed accept, all of the doctrines, mysteries and ideals which have been set forth in this book.
But I have attempted to show that the everyday world of the limited senses of the average human being is not the total, infinite reality; that there lies, beyond mundane considerations, a much more profound and glorious region that connects both the inner space of the entire human psyche and the outer space of the entire majestic Creation.
So far as I am concerned, men, or rather .Men, like Fulcanelli, are more important to the progress of unenlightened mankind than those who, over the past few decades, have broken down / Page 274 / the barriers of outer space and set foot - in person or by
mechanised proxy - on other worlds.
For in the same way that the Total Science of Alchemy does not consist merely in the transmutation of base metals into gold, neither do the physical, technological conquests of orthodox science necessarily represent man's true evolution or ultimate destiny.
In choosing to relegate many of the ancient philosophical and metaphysical doctrines to the decay of locked vaults and unexplored library shelves, man has in a sense let his superficial, material progress outrun his spiritual fulfilment.
As the great sages and mystics of all ages have frequently insisted: Before one can properly look outward with clear vision, it is first necessary to look inward.
On his own record of tragic self-mismanagement, of his abuse of himself and his fellow-men, of his indifference to the elements of Nature which still sustain him, man has failed in this oblig­ation. Yet, despite this, there have been Men who perhaps in some way have made up for such neglectful deficiency.
It is to the words of these fulfilled Beings, these Perfected Ones, and not to the temporal babblings of fickle politicians, of irresponsible scientists, dogmatic theologians, greedy and un­scrupulous lords of commerce and industry, nor even to the
confused and self-destructive rantings of the mass media, that' we should be listening, if we are to take our proper place on the ladder of Evolution.
The Secret Masters do not direct, command or coerce. They merely advise, guide and instruct.
As Fulcanelli himself has indicated, we may not have an unlimited time in which to realize our ultimate and rightful evolutionary potential. But there is always hope.
Let us therefore seek encouragement in the magnificent words of such a sublime spirit, a man who conquered death itself:

'It is at the time when bodily inertia asserts itself, at the same hour when Nature finishes her work, that the Wise Man finally begins his own. Let us therefore lean towards the abyss, let us scrutinize its depths, rummage through the darkness which covers it, and the Void will instruct us. Birth teaches us few things, but death, from which life is born, can reveal all. It alone holds the keys of the laboratory of nature; it alone / Page 275 / delivers the spirit, imprisoned in the midst of the material body. Shadow, bestower of light, sanctuary of truth, asylum violated by wisdom, it hides and jealously withholds its treasures from timorous mortals, the indecisive, the sceptical, all those who disregard or dare not confront it.
'For the Philosopher, death is simply a transformation like that of the caterpillar into butterfly, which links the material plane to the divine. It is the earthly door opened to the heavens, the link between nature and divinity; it is the chain which joins those who yet live to those who have passed on. And if human evolution, in its physical sense, can of its own will dispose of the past and present, then in its turn it is death alone which belongs to the future.
'Consequently, far from inspiring a feeling of horror or repulsion in the Wise, death, the instrument of salvation, appears to him both useful and necessary. And if we are not allowed to allot tooursel ves the fixed time for our proper destiny, at least we have received the permission of the Eternal to call it forth from the grave matter, in accordance and submission to the orders of God, and to the will of man.
'One can thus understand why the Philosophers place so much insistence upon the necessity of material death. It is through death that the spirit, imperishable and always active, stirs up, sifts, separates, cleans and purifies the body. It is from death that there proceeds the possibility of assembling the purified parts, to build with them a new lodging place, finally to transmit to the regenerated form an energy which it does not possess.'
- Les Demeures Philosophales, Vol. II, pp. 324-5.

FINIS SED INCEPTIO EST

 

The

FULCANELLI

Phenomenon

Kenneth Rayner Johnson 1980

The Praxis

Page 190

Theoretical physics has become more and more occult, cheerfully breaking every previously sacrosanct law of nature and leaning towards such supernatural concepts as holes in space, negative mass and time flowing backwards ... The greatest physicists ... have been groping towards a synthesis of physics and parapsychology.

- Arthur Koestler: The Roots of Coincidence, (Hutchinson, 1972.)

 

 

THE STARGATE CONSPIRACY

Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince

Page206

"According to writers Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Daniels - who studied the effects of electro- magnetic waves on human beings - became convinced, in the 1970s, of the existence of some kind of intelligent force in the universe that operated through electromagnetic frequencies and that 'human beings can mentally interact with it,.47"

 

 

The FULCANELLI Phenomenon

Kenneth Rayner Johnson 1980

Page 195

"As Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola expresses it:
'It will thus be clear that the alchemical process of creation, is a microscopic reconstitution of the process of creation, in other words a re-creation. It is effected by the interplay of forces symbolized by two dragons, one black and one white, locked in an eternal circular combat. The white one is
winged, or volatile, the black one wingless, or fixed; they are accompanied by the universal alchemical formula solve et / Page 196 / coagula. This formula and this emblem symbolize the alternating role of the two indespensible halves that compose the whole. Solve et coagula is an injunction to alternate dissolution, which is a spiritualization or sublimation of solids, with coagulation, that is to say a re-matrialization of the purified products of the first operation. Its cyclic aspect is clearly expressed by Nicholas Valois: " Solvite corpora et coagulate spiritum " ; " Dissolve the body and coagulate the spirit." ' note 1
…'But when we marry the crowned king to our red daughter, and in a gentle fire, not hurtful she doth conceIve an exellent and supernatural son, which permanent life she doth also feed with a subtle heat, so that he lives at length in our fire…Then he is transformed, and his tincture by help / Page197 / of the fire remains red, as it were flesh. But our son the King begotten, takes his tincture from the fire, and death even,
and darkness, and the waters flee away. The Dragon shuns the sunbeams which dart through the crevices and our dead son lives; the king comes from the fire and rejoins with his spouse,the occult treasures are laid open, and the virgin's milk is whitened.'
- Tractacus aureus, or Golden Tracate of Hermes.
Or again:
' Take the serpent and place it in the chariot with four wheels and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea , and nothing more is visible but the blackest Dead sea …and when the vapour is precipitated like rain… you should bring the chariot from water to dry land, and then you have placed the four wheels on the chariot and will obtain the result if you will advance further to the Red Sea, running without running, moving without motion'
- The Tractate of Aristotle to Alexander the Great.

…" Whatever their names and however many processes might have been applied, the important factor to remember is that the alchemists saw their work as reflective and imitative of the cyclic order of Nature ; of the formation, development and eventual dissolution of the All - followed by its natural and / Page 198 / inevitable re-formation. ( This may be compared quite favourably with a cyclic universe, which begins as a primal atom containing everything,explodes to form the cosmos, then ultimately collapses back upon itself eventually to repeat the process over again ad infinitum)This process similarly applied on a lesser scale to all living entities including the earth, which went through an obvious cycle of birth, growth, decay death, and re-birth annually. Man himself also followed this assumed pattern of birth, life death and re-birth

 

 

THE TRUE AND INVISIBLE ROSICRUCIAN ORDER

Paul Foster Case 1981

Page 108

"The Zohar says that all is contained in the mystery of Vav, and thereby all is revealed. The same Qabalistic authority connects Vav with the Son of David, and this was interpreted by erudite Europe in the seventeenth century, as a reference to the Christos."


"The mountain is in the middle or center of an enclosure, surrounded by a wall having seven sides, whose corners bear the words, reading from left to right or clockwise around the wall: Dissolution, Purification, Azoth Pondus, Solution, Multiplication, Fermentation, Projection."

 

A ST AR ALIVE PROJECTION ALIVE AR ST A

 

 

WISDOM OF THE EAST

by Hari Prasad Shastri 1948

Page 8

"There is no such word in Sanscrita as 'Creation' applied to the universe. The Sanscrita word for Creation is Shristi, which means 'projection' Creation means to bring something into being out /Page 9/ of nothing, to create, as a novelist creates a character. There was no Miranda, for example, until Shakespeare created her. Similarly the ancient Indians (this term is innacurately used as there was no India at that time). who were our ancestors long, long ago. used a word for creation that means 'projection'

 

 

THE TRUE AND INVISIBLE ROSICRUCIAN ORDER

Paul Foster Case 1981

Page 108

"The Zohar says that all is contained in the mystery of Vav, and thereby all is revealed. The same Qabalistic authority connects Vav with the Son of David, and this was interpreted by erudite Europe in the seventeenth century, as a reference to the Christos.
Attached to the nail was a stone. This is the same stone we have mentioned before. It is the Stone rejected by the builders. It is the Stone of the Philosophers. It is ABN, Ehben, signifying the union of the Son with the Father.
We have already said that Henry Khunrath published in 1609 a book called Amphitheatrum Chemicum, in which appears an illustration showing the word ABN, Ehben, enclosed in a triangle. This radiant triangle, with the letters ABN at its corners, is borne by a dragon, and the dragon is on top of a mountain. The mountain is in the middle or center of an enclosure, surrounded by a wall having seven sides, whose corners bear the words, reading from left to right or clockwise around the wall: Dissolution, Purification, Azoth Pondus, Solution, Multiplication, Fermentation, Projection. Thus, the inner wall summarizes the alchemical operations. Its gate has the motto Non omnibus, meaning "Not for all," as if to intimate that entrance into the central mystery is not for everyone.
Surrounding this inner wall is another in the form of a seven- pointed star, composed of fourteen equal lines. The gate to this outer wall is flanked by two triangular pyramids, or obelisks. Over one is the sun, and this obelisk is named Faith. Over the other is the moon, and this pillar is named Taciturnity, or Silence. Between the pillars, in the gate, is a figure bearing the caduceus of Hermes or Mercury, standing behind a table on .- which is written "Good Works." Below is the motto: "The ignorant deride. what the wise extol and admire."
Thus, in Khunrath's diagram we have the same association between a seven-sided figure and a stone that occurs in the Fama. The mystic mountain, with the dragon at its summit, is also a Rosicrucian symbol, as one may see in Thomas Vaughan's Lumen de Lumine, where Section 2 is entitled "A Letter from the Brothers of R.C., "Concerning the Invisible, Magical Mountain and the Treasure therein Contained."

 

CONCERNING THE INVISIBLE MAGICAL MOUNTAIN AND THE TREASURE THEREIN CONTAINED

 

 

THE JOURNAL OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH

"5 The author of Magic Mountains (McOwen, 1996) refers to times when the hill .and glens were quiet and peaceful and the hill person could find solitude. Then, senses were heightened and psychic phenomena and "mind-links with the past could be more easily absorbed if the person were reasonably receptive"

 

 

2061 ODYSSEY THREE

Arthur C. Clarke 1987

"THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN"

 

WHY SMASH ATOMS

?

A. K. Solomon 1940

Page 77

"Once the fairy tale hero has penetrated the ring of fire round the magic mountain he is free to woo the heroine in her castle on the mountain top"

 

ONCE THE FAIRY TALE HERO HAS PENETRATED THE RING OF FIRE ROUND

THE

MAGIC

MOUNTAIN

HE IS FREE TO WOO THE HEROINE IN HER CASTLE ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP."

 

 

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"

 

 

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 shihsya 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 communica-tion 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 disem-bodied 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."

 

 

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 dread-ful 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? 1 have not been able to find out. Dis-cussion 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 explana-tion of the mystic word aum. The latter has exoteric, esoteric and mystic meanings. It may signify the three persons of the Hindu Trinity: Brah-ma, Vishnou, Shiva. It may signify the Brahman, the 'One without a second' of the adwaita philosophy. It stands as a symbol of the Inex-pressible Absolute, the last word to be uttered in mysticism, after which there follows only silence. It is, according to Shri SankarAcharya,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 sylla-bles, 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 [ances-tors] 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

 

 

153 x 12 ISISIS 1836

 

 

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

Page328

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.

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 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

 

Page 147

Page 147 containing seven lettered names of characters

Page 147 Penguin edition 1979 contains 43 lines

Joachim occurs x 10

Joachim's occurs x1

 

J
=
1
JOACHIM
7
occurs
x
11
=
77
7+7
14
1+4
5
B
=
2
BEHRENS
7
occurs
x
1
=
7
-
7
=
7
C
=
3
CASTORP
7
occurs
x
6
=
42
4+2
6
=
6
M
=
4
MARUSJA
7
occurs
x
3
=
21
2+1
3
=
3
-
-
10
-
28
-
21
-
147
-
21
-
21
-
-
1+0
-
2+8
-
2+1
-
1+4+7
-
2+1
-
2+1
-
-
1
-
10
-
3
-
12
-
3
-
3
-
-
1+0
-
1+0
-
-
1+2
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
-
1
-
3
-
3
-
3
-
3

 

 

J
=
1
7
JOACHIM
59
32
5
B
=
2
7
BEHRENS
71
35
8
C
=
3
7
CASTORP
92
29
2
M
=
4
7
MARUSJA
83
20
2
-
-
10
28
-
305
116
17
-
-
1+0
2+8
-
3+0+5
1+1+6
1+7
-
-
1
10
-
8
8
8
-
-
1+0
1+0
-
-
-
-
-
-
1
1
-
8
8
8

 

 

305 + 1 = 306

JOACHIM'S

APOSTROPHE'S

?

 

 

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 prmclple of. creative hystena, 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

 


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. Krakowski'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 hinl 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 ,recisely '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. Krakowski, 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 throught 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 "placetexperiri" 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 curiousity approached and overlapped, or had probably always done so; the pure curiousity 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 researchs 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."

HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE 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-follr. 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 stand­fig 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 Rerr 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 looke~ 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 Rolger'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 co~ld 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: "0 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;

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

the room was brilliantly ill~minated 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 tIi.med 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 per­yersity. ~ light. object lay in his lap; he .discovered it to ~e t~e "souverur·" which had once so surpnsed hIS uncle when he lifted It from his nephew's. table: the glass diapositive of Oavdia Chau­_chat'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 ii' out Ellen Brand, who remained sitting in her place in the same state, staring vacantly, with that curious simpering expression. r::err 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 finish­bg err the evening with a cognac in Herr Albin's room. He had iliscovered, 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 yUalIIlS hours after he has set foot on shore .

.' H}s curiosity was for the . t~me quen~~ed. Holger's J;oem had not oeen so pad; but the antlclpated futility and vulgarity of the ~cene 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 tho.rough-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, ?'hat imposture. Perhap~ the boundary line was not constant. Per­haps there were tranSltlonal 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 •• ase, it seemed to him, had a strongly moralizing flavour. What
HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE 667
did Herr Settembrini think about" delusions "j 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 pro~ duce a temporary reaction of the conscience, even somethi~g 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 b~ 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 systema~ically pro~uced a~d investigated, with every pOSSIble safeguardmg of theIr genuineness, after Com­rade Krokowski had 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 0?Crated 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

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

made no demands on a higher art,. and they served the purpose :=;;;:;. lI,dmirably.
~ 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 after­mttely·stopped arid set going again" without anyone touching it," a table-beIr " taken" and rimg.- 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, ~~ he. explained in his lectures. and in private conv~rsations, "tele­kltleuc' phenomena, cases of movement from a dIstance; he asso­ciated them with a class of manifestations which were scientifically kno\vn as materializations, and toward which his plans and at-
tempts 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 n.avJIt:.; a power, .which under ce~ain condition~ apperta~ned to thought, of drawmg sJlbstance to Itself, and clothing Itself III 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 wimessed in Dr. Krokowski's l-aboratory. 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 certaitllimits entered into contact with them. And here Dr. Kro­ko.wski's doctrine began, as it were, to squint; to look two ways llt Once. It took on a shifting and fluctuating character, like the method .of treatment he had adopted in his exposition of the nature

=--or 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 reUlrn to substantiality and show

HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE 669
themselves to their summoners.., in brief, with the spiritualistic invocation of the departed. .
Such manifestations it was that Comrade Krakowski, with the assistance of his foUowers, was latterly striving to produce; stur~ dily, with his ingratiating smile, challenging their cordial confi~ dence, 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 him~ self out to develop and discipline the extraordinary powers of Ellen Brand and, from what Hans Castorp could heat, 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 Krakowski'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.

o THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

That they were determined to do was to persuade Hans CaitOrp rescind his decree; positively, now that everything was sobrif­tIy in train, he must be present at the next seance. Elly, it
med, in her trance had promised to materialize the spirit of any arted person the t;:ircle chose.

-Ily departed person they chose? Hans Castorp still showed "Iuctance. But iliat it might be any person they chose occupied his mi..l1d to such an extent that in the next three days he came to .~- different conclusion. Strictly speaking it was not three days, but ,.5 mMlY minutes, which brought about the change. One evening, i,:, a solitary hour in the music-room, he played again the record ..,.';.at bore the imprint of Valentine's personality, to him so pro­JumUy moving. He sat there listening to the soldierly prayer of he hero departing for the field of honour:

"If God should summon me away, Thee I would watch and guard -alway,
o Marguerite! " -

. d, as ever, Hans Castorp was tilled by emotion at the sound, an lotion 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 t.now 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 tl1e 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 "tneir way down to the basement; They were all old inhabitants, ne-oldest of the old, or at least of long standing in the group, like ne Czech Wenzel and Dr. Ting-Fu; Ferge and Wehsal, Lawyer ?aravant, the ladies KIeefeld and Levi, !111d, in addition, those per-

-sons who had come to his balcony to announce to him the appari­tion of Holger's head, and of course tl1e medium, Elly Brand.

That child of tl1e nom-was already in tl1e doctor's charge when Hans Castorp passed through the door witl1 the visiting-card: the rloctor, in his black tunic, his arm laid fatl1erly across her shoulder, .m:ood at tl1e foot of tl1e stair leading from the basement floor and ::we!comed ~e guests~ ~d s~e ~th him. Everybody gr~eted every­body else, Wltl1 surpnsmg hilarIty and expansIveness -It seemed to be the common aim to keep the meeting pitched in a key free from all solemnity or constraint. They- talkea in loud, cheery voices.
"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 "W el- 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 refer­~nce-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 w~s 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

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

~.~_ e-bells, of different patterns, one to shake and one to press, J:he plate with flour, and the paper-basket. Some dozen chairs of dif· ferent shapes and sizes surrounded the table in a half-circle, one =rrd of which was formed by the foot of the chaise-longue, the her 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 ;;;ream-coloured blind hanging down in front of it.

After ten minutes the doctor returned with the three ladies. ,ny'S outer appearance had changed: she was not wearing her ,rdinary clothes, but a night-gownlike garment of white cr~pe,
>:fj;dled about the waist by. a cord, leaving her slender anTIS bare. -IeI' maidenly breasts showed themselves soft and unconfined be· this garment, it appeared she wore little else.

_ .ey all hailed her gaIly. "Hullo, Elly! ,How lovely she looks ag-ai..'1! 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, con­sdous of being disagreeably affected by the doctor's manner of address, was about to follow the example. of the others, who, shout­~g, chattering, slapping each other on the shoulders, were settling themselves'in the circle of chairs, when the doctor addressed him ·~onally.

" My friend," said he, ' .• you are a guest, perhaps a novice, in our ldst, and therefore I should like, this evening, to pay you special orreur. I confide to you the control of the medium. Our practice :5 as follows." He ushered the young man toward the ena 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 .• entrance door than to the centre of the room. He himself sat . close ill front of her in another such chair, and clasped her ids, at the same time holding both her knees finnIy between his W 14 •• Like'that," he, said. an4 gave his place to Hans Castorp, .:he assumed the same I?osition. " you'll grant 0at ~he arrest is

complete. But we shall gIveloU asslSta.llce too. Fraulem KIeefeld, mai I implore you to len us your aid~ " And the lady. thus courteousfy and exotically entreated came and sat down. clasping :Hy's fragile wrists, one in each hand.
HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE <?73
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 g~ed 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]oachim and himself and
regarded the unmade grave in the Dorf graveyard. '
The circle had sat down. They were thirteen persons; not count· ing the Czech Wenzel, whose function it was to serve Polyhymnia, and who accordingly, after putting his insttument 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 mystifica­'tion 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 wbich 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 pnysician. 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

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
the' expected phenomena. On the contrary, a slightly diE •
a.ttention, with conversation, was recommended. And Hans orp was cautioned, whatever else he did,' not to lose control
~e medium's extremities. '

1Ve will now form the chain," finished Dr. Krokowski; and ,ey did so, laughing when they could not find each other's hands ~ the dark. Dr. Ting-Fu, sitting next Hermine Kleefeld, laid his ght hand on her shoulder and reached his left to Herr Wehsal, -'0 came next. Beyond him were Herr and Frau Magnus, then

K. Ferge; who, if Hans Castorp mistook not, held the hand of . i.vory Levi on his right - and so on. " Music! " the doctor com· manded, and behind him his neighbour the Czech set the instru­ment in motion and placed the needle, ,?n the disk. "Talk! '1. ¥>J;okowski bade them, and as the first bars of an overture by Mil­locker were heard, they obediently bestirred themselves to make or'.o..:.versation, about nothing at all: the win~er snow-fall, the last 'ourse at dinner, a newly arrived patient, Ii departure, "wild" or ,tnenvise - artificially sustained, Jialf drowned by the music, and
--sing now and again. So some minutes passed. .

1 he record had not run out before Elly shuddered violently. trembling ran through her, she sighed, the upper pari of her
. dy sank forward so that her forehead rested against Hans Ca· :lip'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 i:1i.e baritone
awl of the doctor. "Is Holger present?' "
Elly shivered again. She swayea in her c1}air. Then Hans Ca· -'Ip 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 present. W el- come, Holger," he went on with unction." Wel come, friend and fellow comrade, heartily, heartilywel- come. '1d remember, when you were last with us," he went on, and

,s Castorp remarked that he did not use the form of address man to the civilized West - "you promised to make visible - mortal eyes some dear departed, whether brother soul or
er soul, whose name should be given to you by our circle. Are Oli willing? Do you feel yourself able to perlorm what you ·romised? "

}~Q'ain Elly shivered. She sighed and shivered as the answer came. ;lO\~ly she carried her hands and those of her guardians to herfore-
HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE 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 thersychicaI and ·the purely physical. There could scarcely be talk 0 fear, for our hero was in fact thinking: "Well, she is certainly biting off more than she can che~! " 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 hUll)anly 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 the'm all. Of those present, all excepting Dr.
Ting-Fu, Wenzel, and the medium had known the person asked

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

'f. The others, Ferge, Wehsal, Herr Albin, Paravant, Herr and :au Magnus, Frau Stohr, Fraulein Levi, and the Kleefeld, loudly Eillounced their satisfaction with the choice. Krokowski himself tlm:!ded well pleased, though his relations with Joachim had always been rather cool, owing to the latter's reluctance in the matter of sycho-analysis.

" Very good indeed," said the doctor. "Holger, did you hear? '4 he person named was a stranger to you in life. Do you know him 11 the Beyond, and are you prepared to lead him hither? " Imp-lcnse suspense. The sleeper swayed, sighed, and shuddered., he seemed to be' seeking, to be struggling; fallihg this way and
',at, whispering now to Hans Castorp, now to the Kleefeld, some:' . they could not catch. At last he received from her hands the ,ressure that meant yes. He announced himself to have done so.
nd- '

" Very well;-then," cried Dr. Krokowski. "To work, I:Iolgerl I',.Iusic," he cried. "Conversation! "and he repeated the injunction !:hat no fixing of the attention, no strained anticipation was in place, - t only an unforced and hovering expectancy.

And now followed the most extraordinary hours of our hero's oung 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.
Thev were hours - more than two of them, to be explicit, count­ing in 'a brief intermission in the efforts on Holger's part which "OW bel:ran, or rather, on 'the girl Elly's - of work so hard and so prolonged that they were all toward the end inclined to be faint­nta.."ted and despair of any result; out of pure pity, too, tempted tG resign an attempt which seemed pitilessly hard, and beyond the .-iellcate strength of her upon whom it was laid. We men, if we do uot shirk our humanity, are familiar with an hour of life when we t:1}owthis almost intolerable pity, which, absurdlr enough no one ;;lse,can feel, this rebellious" Enough, no more! ' whic:h is wrung' :romus, though it is not enough, and cannot or will not be enough. ~ntil 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 Ellis wrestling did so unmistakably resemble that ,'en he must recognize it who had never passed through this ex­. ence, even out young Hans Castorp; who, not having shirked , now came to know,-in such a guise, this aet, so full of organic wvsticism. In what a guise! To what an end! Under what circum­;r..ances! One could not regard as anything less than scandalous
c sights and sounds in this red-lighted lying-in chamber. the
HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE 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. a!1d 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:

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

carried the hand away from her body and then with scooping, raking motion drew It towards her, as though gathering some­thing and pullin~ idn. 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 exh!lusted 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, be­t'Neen 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 <.Jf 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 s""..reamed in a definite direction from the person of the medium. Others had seen light-phenomena, white spots, moving congloba~ hons 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 wor~ 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 Castotpsug~ gested that he be released from his post of first control, bilt 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 fumping 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? ~dness! What maternity was this, what delivery, of what should she be delivered? " Help, help,". the child
HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE 679
moaned, arid her s?asms 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 herface 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 per-: haps - 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 ~ossible, not out of the question, that its mood and atmosphere Illight 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.
U 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

THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

or c:lleIessness, in :my case luckily ~ it had partaken of the general wpsyturvyn~, 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 yoice 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 dan­ge.r, gallant, god-fearing, French. After that the finale, in full volume, the orchestrally supported refrain of the beginning.
" 0 Lord of heaven, hear me pray •••• "
Hans Castorp had wor~ 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: "Ziems - sen! "
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 OTIe 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.

"1 here was one more person in the room than before. There in _ me 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
Ri!yhad been sitting, Joachim sat. It was the Joachim of the last da:,;"s, 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 plairuy 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
distinguish something like a pistol-case in his belt. "But that was

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 acroSs. 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 bancf. 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; bl1t 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. Kra­kowski'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 stepby.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

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
ELLEN BRAND
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
5
ELLEN
48
21
3
B
=
2
-
5
BRAND
39
21
3
S
-
7
4
10
ELLEN BRAND
87
42
6
-
-
-
-
1+0
-
8+7
4+2
-
-
-
7
-
1
ELLEN BRAND
15
6
6
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+5
-
-
-
-
7
-
1
ELLEN BRAND
6
6
6

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
ELLY BRAND
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
4
ELLY
54
18
9
B
=
2
-
5
BRAND
39
21
3
S
-
7
4
9
ELLY BRAND
93
39
12
-
-
-
-
-
-
9+3
3+9
1+2
-
-
7
-
9
ELLY BRAND
12
12
3
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+2
1+2
-
-
-
7
-
9
ELLY BRAND
3
3
3

 

 

E
=
5
-
9
ELLY BRAND
93
39
3
E
=
5
-
10
ELLIE BLAND
76
40
4
S
-
10
4
19
First Total
169
79
7
-
-
1+0
-
1+9
Add to Reduce
1+6+9
7+9
-
-
-
1
-
10
Second Total
16
16
7
-
-
-
-
1+0
Reduce to Deduce
1+6
1+6
-
-
-
1
-
1
Essence of Number
7
7
7

 

 

-
-
-
-
-
ELLIE BLAND
-
-
-
E
=
5
-
5
ELLIE
43
25
7
B
=
2
-
5
BLAND
33
15
6
S
-
7
4
10
ELLIE BLAND
76
40
13
-
-
-
-
1+0
-
7+6
4+0
1+3
-
-
7
-
1
ELLIE BLAND
13
4
4
-
-
-
-
-
-
1+3
-
-
-
-
7
-
1
ELLIE BLAND
4
4
4

 

 

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.
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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

 

 

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. cc 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."

 

 

THIRTYFOUR = THIRTYFOUR

 

 

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, however, 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"

?

 

 

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."

 

 

PLACET EXPERIRI EXPERIRI PLACET

 

1

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

2

 

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

4

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

5

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

 

 

PLACET EXPERIRI THAT I AM ME I ME AM I THAT EXPERIRI PLACET

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

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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 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 population 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 corner 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 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?"

FINIS OPERIS

 

 

 

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 ri?

 

 

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 flatland, 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 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?"

FINIS OPERIS

 

 

RE LIGI ON LIGHT ON RE RE ON LIGHT RE LIGI ON

 

"BELOVED PAN AND ALL YE OTHER GODS WHO HAUNT THIS PLACE,

GIVE ME BEAUTY IN THE INWARD SOUL: AND MAY THE OUTWARD AND THE INWARD MAN BE AT ONE".

 

 

THE CITIZEN

WAKEFIELD

City of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council

Issue 26 July/August 2006

THE PAPER FOR THE DISTRICT'S RESIDENTS

Page 11

"WOW What's On in Wakefield District"

"DIARY OF FORTHCOMING EVENTS"

 

 

 

 
 
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