Magic Mountain(s)
The notion that most strongly affected me in Mann's "The Magic Mountain" is the notion of a worldview in which one is a terminal case.
Sanitariums like that in Monn's novel did exist, and there are those today (we all know a couple) that are firmly in the hands of the doctors today. But the metaphor pushed by Mann is more pervasive than that.
Two models affected me back when i read the novel (must have been a decade ago) ... depth psychology and born-again Christianity. In both cases many seemly healthy and happy individuals fall into the clutches of a world view that only asks "in what ways am i ill?" They push the conception that everyone is ill, rather anyone knows it or not, and that no one is able to help themselves out of the illness. Also, the more time one spends within this worldview the more sick one discovers oneself to have actually been, and the more sick one sees the others around themselves. Even first hand reports of the health and happiness of others are denied, it becomes so "by definition" (and the few cases that are accepted are "converted to the cause by definition").
In way case you need the clinical professional to heal you, and in the other case God's grace ... but in neither case is anyone ever healed, they are only always healing.
There are many other such worldviews. I ought not pick on just those two above listed. Any mode of thought that focusses on the lack of something, and on the lack of being able to do anything about it by oneself, be it material or ideal, is capable of becoming a Magic Mountain upon which one sits by and frets. ... upon which one sits and lets the world go by down below.
"The far future" is no less a symptom than is the health professional or the divine. Combined with the focus on any "lack of" ... it is a dangerous thought to oneself, to one's happiness and to one's well-being.
Sanitariums like that in Monn's novel did exist, and there are those today (we all know a couple) that are firmly in the hands of the doctors today. But the metaphor pushed by Mann is more pervasive than that.
Two models affected me back when i read the novel (must have been a decade ago) ... depth psychology and born-again Christianity. In both cases many seemly healthy and happy individuals fall into the clutches of a world view that only asks "in what ways am i ill?" They push the conception that everyone is ill, rather anyone knows it or not, and that no one is able to help themselves out of the illness. Also, the more time one spends within this worldview the more sick one discovers oneself to have actually been, and the more sick one sees the others around themselves. Even first hand reports of the health and happiness of others are denied, it becomes so "by definition" (and the few cases that are accepted are "converted to the cause by definition").
In way case you need the clinical professional to heal you, and in the other case God's grace ... but in neither case is anyone ever healed, they are only always healing.
There are many other such worldviews. I ought not pick on just those two above listed. Any mode of thought that focusses on the lack of something, and on the lack of being able to do anything about it by oneself, be it material or ideal, is capable of becoming a Magic Mountain upon which one sits by and frets. ... upon which one sits and lets the world go by down below.
"The far future" is no less a symptom than is the health professional or the divine. Combined with the focus on any "lack of" ... it is a dangerous thought to oneself, to one's happiness and to one's well-being.
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 3:40 PM
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