In the opening pages of Thomas Manns’ novel Der Zauberberg, the young protagonist Hans Castorp ascends the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim at the Berghof sanatorium in Davos, where he is treated for tuberculosis. As he ascends the mountain Castorp experiences a sense of vertigo and spiritual elevation, as he leaves the world of petty bourgeois obligations, social bonds and business interests behind. In some sense, confinement means freedom and self-discovery to him, and the sanatorium is also something of a symposium, where he is exposed to the opposing ideas of the enlightenment humanist Ludovico Settembrini, the authoritarian jesuit Leo Naphtha and the dionysian Mynheer Peeperkorn, among others.
Time flows differently at Berghof. The rigorously regimented life of a sanatorium resident makes three weeks of “flatland time” seem like one single day, and Castorp’s initial plan to stay for three weeks quickly becomes seven years. As his cousin Joachim remarks, the endless monotony of life on the mountain neither slows time down nor speeds it up: it simply suspends it. If all days are alike, then they really are one. Berghof is a simulation of infinity. Boredom consumes and compresses time, desensitizes the mind, dulls the senses, facilitates oblivion, and can make the longest of lives seem like a brief flash, which is why we need disruptions to “wake us up.” It is not the regime of clocks or seasons that determines time at Berghof, and our subjective sense of time is, Mann argues, intimately connected to our sense of life itself. If either is disrupted, the other is affected as well.
At the same time, the world below the mountain proceeds to change at an unrelenting pace, and once Castorp descends it, the comfortable bourgeois civilisation he had once been accustomed to is tearing itself apart in WWI. Whereas his militaristic cousin Joachim is saved from the decadence of Berghof by his own sense of duty and discipline, Castorp, a somewhat nondescript and uncommitted character without any deeply held convictions, hampered by passivity and doubt, slowly becomes infatuated with the atmosphere of the sanatorium among the sick, dying and dead, and grows indifferent to the malady affecting both him and his entire civilisation.
Talking about life in the Covid-era, my younger cousin recently remarked to me that she sometimes forgets that time exists while coped up at home. Night becomes day; monday becomes saturday, and the days, weeks and months pass monotonously, without anything novel in sight beyond a horizon that seems to drift increasingly distant. In this sense, we are living in a state of exception: the indefinite suspension of “normality.” Our unilinear sense of time as a succession of discrete events and progress, and our conventional rites of passage have been disrupted, and largely been replaced by repetition and routine. Many young people experienced 2020 as a “lost” or “wasted” year, with no development, no movement, no variation or change. I have heard friends say that their expectations for the future were lost, their plans delayed, cancelled or abandoned, and many lack any lodestars to fix their eyes on. Meanwhile, below the mountain so-to-speak, employers have been forced to implement structural transformations that would otherwise have taken decades to achieve, and entire industries have been decimated.
Many, myself included, feel uncertain about the future. How do I find grounding in this dual world of stasis and rapid change?
It is no surprise to me that The Plague by the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus, and Meditations by the stoic roman emperor Marcus Aurelius received much attention last year: offering lessons in psychological resilience, tranquility, moderation, patience, compassion, and an acceptance of that which we cannot control; reminding us that, though we may not be able to control external circumstances, we are in control of how we relate and react to them; to not let ourselves be consumed and overwhelmed by despair or hopelessness:
“I hear you say, ‘How unlucky that this should happen to me!’ Not at all! Say instead, ‘How lucky that I am not broken by what has happened and am not afraid of what is about to happen. The same blow might have struck anyone, but not many would have absorbed it without capitulation or complaint […] Not to feel exasperated or defeated or despondent because your days aren’t packed with wise and moral actions. But to get back up when you fail, to celebrate behaving like a human — however imperfectly — and fully embrace the pursuit you’ve embarked on.” — Marcus Aurelius
But stoicism should not mean to impose an austere regime of discipline on yourself, to let your heart grow indifferent and cold to pain and joy alike. To erect impenetrable walls between yourself and the world. It is not a doctrine of self-denial and emotional suppression, but an ars vivendi. And practiced wisely, in moderation, it can help us manage disappointment, failure, or whatever else may come our way. In the wise words of Doris from Finding Nemo: “when life gets you down, you know what you got to do? Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”
