In literature, there are two fundamental journeys: descent, katabasis, the progress into our basest element, and its reverse, ascent. At the extreme of each, there is knowledge: for every Gilgamesh or Aeneas, we find a Moses or Muhammed returning from the heights newly burdened with the truth.
But what of those who linger there, in the narrow space between the earth and sky? In the opening chapters of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, the young hero, the “perfectly normal” Hans Castorp, makes his own ascent to a sanitarium in the Alps, for a three week visit to his recuperating cousin Joachim. By the time he has returned, seven years have passed.
Up here, some 5,000 feet above the flatlands of his native Hamburg, Castorp discovers that time is fragile. Like the fellow guests who have entrusted themselves to the care of the sanatorium, it requires strict regimentation, or else it risks collapsing in upon itself. Yet amid the clouds those strictures shift; spring comes in midsummer, and snow smothers the valleys and mountain sides for months at a time, as Castorp’s stay extends further and further.
This mutability of time, this threat of collapse, is Mann’s essential theme; beneath his pen it stretches out and then contracts in turn, like the contours on a map. Six months will pass in a sentence, and then a single chapter is given over to a single conversation or stream of thought. We are left uncertain as to where we are, as Castorp lengthens his stay again and again, entranced by his new life, as it were his own One Thousand and One Nights, as another guest remarks.
Castorp comes up the mountain a technocrat, a young man about to embark on a career as a shipwright. What unfolds instead is a staggering expansion of consciousness as he in turn takes in botany, anatomy, astrology, politics and theology, becoming the very model of the enlightenment man, dedicated to the element of progress, of the perfecting of society, above all else. He is helped in his learnings by various figures: an Italian of the old world, a Jesuit reactionary, a psychoanalyst, all of whom fit comfortably into the fin-de-siècle glamour of the sanatorium.
This quest for knowledge engenders the great tension of the novel, the opposition of this thirst for progress against the essentially unchanging, timeless nature of Castorp’s abide at the spa. Nor is it without its own irony: it is only in this sphere, literally above the temporal world, that he can pursue the expansion of his understanding, untouched by the turnings of the world below. It’s a neat parallel to Mann’s countryman Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game; in the alternate Europe of that novel, the Alps contain an independent state, Castalia, walled-off from the world, where an order of ascetic monk-like scholars pursue higher thought to the expense of all else.
This ivory tower, however, can and will be toppled. Although Mann began his novel in 1912, we cannot help but read it against the great collapse of the First World War. The sanitorium, with its old world glamour, is a microcosm of the European society which is about to be burned to the ground, with the dreams of progress to be swept away in the tides of epoch-shattering conflict.
Mann’s question, then, becomes a simple one: what happens when the force of progress is halted in its tracks, when the dream of enlightenment brushes up against an opposing force that stops it and turns it back? And how, when this momentum has stalled, do we rebuild and go on again?
When an event happens that so fundamentally shatters reality, it is like an elastic band has broken. Under normal circumstances there is an amount of duress that can be borne, comfortable in the knowledge that at some point the band will return to its normal size. But when the force becomes so great as to break the band entirely, how then are we to return to what was before, now that the very dimensions we are accustomed to have been changed irreparably?
That we are all living through something fundamental, unprecedented and unknown is a given; what impact it will have remains to be seen, as does the shape of the world to which we will return in time. Perhaps we will look back at the events of the last months – and doubtless more – as an event with the same potential to shift the tectonic plates of the world as those great upheavals of the past. Or perhaps we are in hibernation, framed whole and intact in amber awaiting the thaw.
The devastation wrought by the Black Death created the conditions for social change on a near unprecedented scale in the West, with the newfound shortage of labour catalysing a redistribution of wealth across European society. The Thirty Years War – the bloodiest period in European history – gave way to the Treaty of Westphalia, which in turn accelerated the development of something akin to the modern nation state. It would be trite to compare the impact of the current pandemic with the scale of destruction entailed by the above examples, but perhaps it might accelerate the development of a genuinely green economic system, reconfigure the state in a way that better recognises the spread of value throughout society, or lead to the decline of the populist nationalism that has swept the globe in the last decade.
These are perhaps vaunting possibilities: more likely, the principle impact will be individual and mental rather than societal: the very uniqueness of this current situation in the western consciousness making this possibly the most self-referential epidemic there has ever been despite its comparative size, as everyone struggles to fix it to some reference point that can anchor us against the unknown.
It’s here, in the struggle for structure, that time begins to play its tricks on us, concertinaed and expanding in turn as we construct a new set of ligaments. Like Castorp, we have been wrenched outside the pattern of our lives for three weeks: a period in itself which is barely a heartbeat sub species aeternatis, but takes on its own monolithic weight when bereft of the essential signifiers to which we are accustomed, those daily structures of work and rest.
We will not spend seven years up the mountain; we might spend seven weeks, which will be enough to turn the spring to summer. It might not be long enough for our own Damascene conversion, and we will more likely be faced with restarting a mechanism in suspension than restoring or rebuilding it at a fundamental level. Yet the elastic band is stretched tight: we will discover how much it has left to give.
