On The Magic Mountain: a couple of sections, quoted
I'm nearly a fifth into The Magic Mountain, which I've written more about in this post. The edition I'm reading is translated by Simon Pare; he keeps a blog that he wrote about his translation work, which he did during 2024. The blog is named A Year on the Magic Mountain.
Here's the start of the book:
Arrival
An ordinary young man was travelling in midsummer from his home town of Hamburg to Davos-Platz in the Grisons region of Switzerland. He planned to visit for three weeks.
Yet it is a long journey from Hamburg to these mountains-too long a journey, in truth, for such a short stay. It leads through many different regions, uphill and down, descending from the south German plateau to the shores of the Swabian Sea and by ship across its leaping waves, over abysses once thought to be unfathomable.
Here, a journey that has so far proceeded smoothly and directly becomes fragmented. There are stops and disruptions. In a place called Rorschach, on the Swiss side, you once more entrust your progress to the railway, but only as far as Landquart, a small Alpine station where you are obliged to change trains. After standing around for some time in windy and rather unattractive surroundings, you board a narrow-gauge railway, and as the small yet uncommonly powerful locomotive pulls away, so the truly adventurous part of the journey begins, an abrupt and arduous climb that seems to go on for ever. For Landquart station lies at a middling altitude; now, though, the wild and rocky route forges up tenaciously towards the high peaks.
Hans Castorp for that is the young man's name-sat alone in a small, grey-upholstered compartment with his crocodile-skin bag (a gift from his uncle and guardian Consul Tienappel, whom we may as well introduce at this point), his winter coat, which was swaying from a peg, and his tartan blanket-roll. He was sitting with the window wound down, and since the afternoon was cooling fast, this cosseted, delicate boy had turned up the collar of his fashionably loose, silk-lined summer topcoat. On the seat beside him lay a paperbound book entitled Ocean Steamships, which he had dipped into earlier in his journey, but now it lay there ignored, while puffs of steam streaming in from the heavily panting locomotive speckled its cover with particles of soot.
***
Here's a great paragraph that I read this morning. Mind you, a lot of what I've read so far in the book are recollections, fragments, and inner workings that deal with conversations between people at one specific place.
Many ridiculous ideas have been disseminated about the nature of boredom. It is generally believed that interesting and novel ingredients help to 'pass' the time, meaning that they abbreviate it, whereas monotony and emptiness clog and block its course. That is not necessarily accurate. Emptiness and monotony may well stretch for a moment or an hour, leading to 'boredom', but they abbreviate larger magnitudes of time, the largest too, and can even dissolve them into nothing. Conversely, abundant and interesting content is very much capable of abbreviating and enriching an hour and even a day, but when scaled up it lends depth and weight and solidity to the passage of time, and as a result eventful years pass far more slowly than the meagre, empty, and flimsy ones the wind carries before it so that they fly past. What we call boredom is therefore actually more like a pathological, monotony-induced absorption in time; uninterrupted homogeneity shrinks great vistas of time in heart-chilling fashion; if one day is like every other, they are all the same, and the effect of perfect uniformity is that even the longest life would appear very short and be gone in the twinkling of an eye. Growing familiarity causes a dulling or blunting of our sense of time, and if we have the sensation that the years of our youth pass slowly and yet later life proceeds more and more swiftly, rushing past us, then familiarity must be the cause. We know that the addition of adjustments and new habits is the only way to control our lives, freshen up our sense of time, and bring about a rejuvenation, intensification, and deceleration of our experience of it-and with it a regeneration of our whole sense of being alive. That explains why we seek a change of scene and a change of air, why we go to the seaside and crave the relaxing effect of variety and the episodic. The first days in a new place have a youthful feel, a sense of force and breadth-we are talking about a period of between three and eight days. Then, as we 'settle in', there is a gradual and perceptible shortening: anyone who clings on to life-or, rather, would like to cling on to life-may become grimly aware of how the days begin to lose their density and race past again; the last week of four, say, is eerily fast-moving and brief. Admittedly, the refreshment of our sense of time continues beyond the interlude and, when we have returned to normal, asserts itself once more: the first days at home after the change once more have a newly spacious and youthful feel, but this ceases after a few days because we adapt faster to the rule than to the exception, and if our sense of time has been dulled by age or-a mark of an innate lack of life force-was not very highly developed in the first place, it very quickly fades and after only twenty-four hours it is as if we had never been away, as if our trip were the dream of a single night.
Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern in Wild at Heart, the film, as Sailor and Lula, respectively.
