The long-and yet short-month of March, in which those of us lucky enough not to have to man the spuckschutzscheibe of the supermarkets and corner stores instead hunkered down in our apartments and rooms, waiting for when it was safe to return to what had been “life,” readied me for Mann’s definition of “tedium” as “an abnormal shortening of the time consequent upon monotony.” With the world outside forsworn, all my days before the computer became an endless, eternal plain stretching out in mirrored Mac windows. I had, like many of us, already learned something about time’s impossible elasticity. When I started reading the novel last April, it did seem to capture something of the past month’s experience. I read it, admittedly, thinking it might be appropriate to the moment. And I knew it to be a novel about illness-bacterial illness, it is true, but one whose mysterious spread also demanded a different mode of living. I considered it could be a novel of isolation. I knew of it as a novel of ideas, built out of long discourses about philosophy and politics, psychoanalysis and x-rays. I thought of it as the pinnacle of the German tradition of bildungsroman-a novel about a character’s education.

Time takes on different rhythms here: “One’s ideas get changed.”īut, despite time being such a central concern of the novel, when I chose it to read I did not have in mind that it was a novel about time. “You’ll learn all about it,” Joachim tells this newcomer to the world of the ill. “oh, time-!” exclaims Joachim, a six-month veteran of the sanitorium, correcting Hans, who thinks half a year is a long time. Lowe-Porter, who first translated the 1924 novel into English in 1927, writes in her translator’s note, “of the author of The Magic Mountain it can be said in a special sense that he has looked into the seeds of Time.” And you are warned from the novel’s very beginning that time is its object. Magic Mountain, which tells the story of Hans Castorp’s three-week visit to his consumptive cousin, Joachim Ziemßen, that becomes a sanitorium stay of seven years, is famously about time. For a little while, I was carried along by its music, the rhythm of its prose became the rhythm of my thoughts, and there developed a structuring of time that settled the thoughts that the severing of the everyday had let scatter. But, for a little while, the famous time-romance gently reshaped my experience of time, offering, if not a cure, a palliative. It was not that I expected the novel to, of course. Today, as I write this, my rhythms are just as strange and my thoughts as scattered as they were that day, eighteen months, a minute, or a lifetime ago-I almost cannot tell you how long-when I first began to read Thomas Mann’s novel on the banks of the Landwehr Canal in the first spring of the pandemic.

I must begin with a dumb, obvious admission: The Magic Mountain did not cure me.

The magic mountain novel