Thursday, March 13, 2025

The Magic Mountain




Thomas Mann creates a clever item in The Magic Mountain. It’s called a "silent sister"--a thermometer without a scale. The subject is pathology. How do you determine if someone is sick? One of Mann’s characters is deeply upset to learn she is to be sent home from "the berghof" (a sanitarium) because she has nothing wrong with her. Another of Mann’s profound concerns is time for which he evinces a more labile Bergsonian paradigm. Remember the clocks with no hands in Wild Strawberries? Where the mental life is concerned, there is the DSM, but therapists are, by definition, locked into their own counter-transference. When it comes to spirituality, Mann’s invisible gradation is a dramatic representation of life itself.

listen to "Love's In Need of Love Today" by Stevie Wonder

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