Scaling the magic mountain
In a prior note, I reflected on ‘time, for what purpose?’. One prompt for it was the Japanese term, ‘time performance’, used to evaluate the supposed value of time spent on an activity. As with so much of the present moment, it is both logically consistent and absurd. Certain it fits with the logic of the digital milieu in which we find ourselves, in which time seemingly needs to be saved and optimised, yet is so easily spent and wasted on the banalities that social media and apps serve up. L.M. Sacasas has reflected quite a bit about time, in a recent essay he writes:
So how then do we understand the temporal heart beating out the rhythm of digital culture? I’d hazard the following thesis for disputation: digital culture is defined precisely by the fact that it exhibits no discernible temporal rhythm, and many of our social disorders, from the deprivations of private life to the disintegration of public life and the apparent stagnation of culture, stem from this fact.
I’ve been reflecting on temporal rhythms again, partly due to being in Kyoto, where one is constantly reminded of time, but also due to the experience of making my way through another big book. In this case, I am currently reaching the final quarter of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a work layered with time.
It is a long novel, more than 700 pages in the English translation. As with any works of great length, it accompanies your life as you move through it. I am listening to the audio book version of it, almost 40 hours of length, narrated with aplomb by Peter Noble. Page by page, hour by hour, one stays with the characters and the narrator. Time within the novel marks time without. Hans Castorp’s arrival at the sanatorium I associate with Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, in a country now struggling with its time: a young, settler culture of only a few hundred years implanted on a land with ways of living and being stretching thousands of years. Castorp’s dreams of humanity in the pivotal ‘Snow’ chapter I connect with the shinkansen in Japan, arriving at Kyoto’s main station, a building that strangely pairs with Kyoto tower in refusing to participate in the continuity of the city’s time. Time, binding and cutting; loosening and tightening.
Mann described Magic Mountain as a ‘time romance’ or ‘time novel’. He first conceived of the work as a short story after his wife’s visit to a sanatorium in Davos in 1912, and started work on it a year later. Another year on, Europe was at war and the writing stopped. When Mann restarted in 1919 he found himself in a new world, the Europe of old was shattered, gone forever. The book was finally finished in 1924. Despite being set between 1907-1914, he wrote in the foreword that it ‘is a story that took place long ago’. Mann further explained:
But let us not intentionally obscure a clear state of affairs: the extraordinary pastness of our story results from its having taken place before a certain turning point, on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and consciousness. It takes place, or, to avoid any present tense whatever, it took place back then, long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose beginning so many things began whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased. It took place before the war, then, though not long before. But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the “before”?
Reflecting on the book decades later, Mann described the book as a ‘swan song’ for a certain kind of existence. That which can only be fully enunciated once it has gone. The pastness of the before. And how many more ‘befores’ have now passed?
There are many reflections on the meaning and passing of time through the book:
Narrative… has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative’s imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches out over light-years.
The novel itself has its own distinct temporalities, with the passage of time inside the work shifting as the experiences being depicted change. Hermann Weigand explained in his study on the novel:
What matters is that we should come to experience the first few days of Hans Castorp's exposure to the atmosphere of Haus Berghof as packed with new and strange impressions tending to endow the swing of the pendulum with an amplitude far in excess of the normal; and that we should then be gradually imbued with a sense of the passage of time, that we should feel it slip by at a progressively faster rate, coming to lose count by and by, and imperceptibly finding ourselves become dwellers, with Hans Castorp, in a charmed circle, more and more approaching a state of pure, changeless duration. How to make the sense of the passage of time a vital element of the reader's experience…
Interestingly this has extended to engaging with the text itself - at some stages I have move rapidly forward, at other periods my attention has drifted elsewhere and the story put to one side, but without every quite stopping or forgetting. Speeding up and slowing down, time steady but inconsistent.
Time is vividly present throughout Magic Mountain: the different temporalities within it, the different temporalities of reading, the ‘before’ where it was set, the ‘after’ in which it was written and the ‘after after’ in which it is now read. The book is layered with references to texts and traditions, according to Mann - and matching Nabokov’s expectations - it should be re-read to fully comprehend. The book took 12 years for Mann to complete, it demands time to know, and yet the experience is not hurried, nor is it linear, although there are clear breaks. Regardless of temporalities, the logic present is not a monetary one of costing and saving time, it is in a different register.
While moving through Mann’s Magic Mountain, I have also been reading and thinking about the current wave of generative AI models and the world they might point towards. As Ted Chiang has beautifully conveyed, what one is often provided with is an approximation of an approximation, which he describes as a ‘blurry jpeg of the web’. What Chiang points to is how much is inevitably left out and simplified in the process by which these models produce output. What is striking about Mann’s novel - and the experience of reading it - is how much of it necessarily cannot be captured through summarising and re-presenting it. Elsewhere Chiang has captured this in a quite profound way: ‘experience is algorithmically incompressible.’
As a way of finishing, I recall Paul Valery’s ‘The Embroidery of Marie Monnier’, which was incidentally published in the same year as Magic Mountain:
Some precious things, like diamonds, happiness, and certain very pure emotions, are the result of an extremely rare conjunction of favourable circumstances. Others are produced by the accumulation of an infinite number of imperceptible events and essential elements over a very long period time and require as much patience as time. Fine pearls, complex and mature wines, highly accomplished people, all bring to mind the unhurried accretion of successive and similar causes. The slow, incremental development of their excellence is aimed at nothing less than perfection.
He contrasted this need for patience with a world shaped by the tempo of expectation.
The era is past when time did not matter. Today no one cultivates what cannot be created quickly. The idea of eternity seems to have faded as the distaste for lengthy tasks has grown. We are no longer willing to create inestimable value through work as steady and unceasing as nature’s. Patience and determination weigh on our age, eager as it is to dispatch work quickly with an enormous outlay of energy…
Today no one cultivates what cannot be created quickly. If that was Valery’s judgement in 1924, what to say about conditions a hundred years later? A world of instant fulfillment and the really real ‘Mechanical turks’ of our digital world. As my interlocutor PC rightly wonders, ‘is this any good, actually?’.