T
homas Mann (1875 Lübeck-1955 Zürich),
Nobel prize for literature in 1933,
composed a great fresco of western civil
society at the turn of the 20th century
in the novel The Magic Mountain, written
between 1913 and 1924.
The story t akes place in a Swiss sanatorium,
the famous Berghof in Davos.
The protagonist is a young and naïve
voluntary engineer, Hans Castorp. Mann
describes him with subtle British humour,
“with the superior feeling a man has when
shaving himself in the clear light of reason.”
Hans is visiting his cousin Joachim Ziemssen,
a patient being cured at the Berghof,
not knowing the same disease will force
him to remain a long time in the Swiss
sanatorium, the “pedagogic province” in
which Hans Castorp will find his equilibrium.
Joachim welcomes Hans in the restaurant
that is “charming […] elegantly appointed
and well lighted,” and the two cousins
sit, as the author notes, “at the raised table
in the window, the pleasantest spot in the
room.” And to complete the picture, Mann
describes the cheeks of the two cousins
that are reddened with the artificial light,
“against the cream-coloured hangings,
their faces lighted by the red-shaded
table-lamp.”
“The room was further enlivened by several
electric chandeliers in bright brass,
consisting of three rings placed horizontally
one over the other and held together
by delicate woven work, the lowest ring set
with globes of milky glass like little moons.”
At breakfast, Hans heard the guests express
their unanimous dissatisfaction with the
kind of winter they were having: “They felt
it was not what they had a right to expect
The artificial sun
in the novel
The Magic Mountain
of these altitudes in winter. It failed
to deliver the renowned meteorological
remedies, for which the area was famous.”
Mountains and valleys all around were
covered with a lot of snow and the sun
had rarely been seen that winter. The writer
pointed out the “enormous amount
of missing sunshine, solar radiation, an
important drug without whose contribution
healing was undoubtedly procrastinated.”
The Management “showed a consciousness
of what it owed them by installing – Mann
rather ironically noted – a new apparatus
for heliotherapy, because they had two
already, but these did not suffice for the
demands of those who wished to get
sun-burnt by electricity, which was so
becoming to the ladies, young and old,
and made all the men, though confirmed
horizontallers, look irresistibly athletic
and with a conquering-hero air.”
However, Mann concluded that they were
quite far from accepting “the artificial
sun was far from making up for the lack
of the real one” and “ill-temper and
protests spread, the threat of arbitrary
departures were frequent and in fashion.”
Instead of the sun, however, there was
a lot of snow, quantities of snow that were
so great that Mann makes Castorp state,
“Such masses of snow as (he) had never
till now in all his life beheld.”
And in telling the stories of Hans, the author
skilfully describes the impact of the snow
on his face while skiing: “Hosts of flakes
flew into his face, melted there, and he
anguished with the cold of them. They flew
into his mouth, and died away with a weak,
watery taste; flew against his eyelids so that
La prima edizione
de La montagna
incantata, Fisher
Verlag, 1924 / The
first edition
of The Magic
Mountain, Fisher
Verlag, 1924 /
Ritratto di Thomas Mann, con cappello,
guanti e sigaro, 1937 / Portrait of Thomas Mann,
holding hat, gloves, and cigar, 1937
he winked, overflowed his eyes and made
seeing as difficult as it was now almost
for other reasons: namely, the dazzling
effect of all that whiteness, and the veiling
of his field of vision, so that his sense
of sight was almost put out of action.”
Castorp did not think he would see the light
again. The conflict between light and
darkness, between life and death, dwelled
inside him. The conclusion of the skiing
competition was uncertain, fortunately light
prevailed and the snow storm ceased.
The young engineer willingly remained
at the sanatorium as a “traveller in search
of culture” and continued to ask questions
as a compulsory passage towards learning,
without any claim to solve the conflict
between light and darkness. And when
Mann will poetically reveal the change in
season, “A rainbow flung its arc slanting
across the scene, most bright and perfect,
a sheer delight, all its rich glossy, banded
colours moistly shimmering down into
the thick, lustrous green,” Castorp, bored
with the uniformity of light, the uniformity
of life, will exclaim, “at long last, the
meadows have begun to green! What
a joy that was, what a boon to the eyes,
after so much white!”
5 – to be continued. For “Epiphanies of light”,
to date, the following short stories by
Empio Malara have been published in LUCE:
“Alessandro Manzoni, a creator of light” (n. 317,
September 2016); “Herman Melville. Light that
invites us on a journey” (n. 321, September
2017); “Light and dark in the portrait of James
Joyce as a youngt man” (n. 322, December
2017); “Flashes and lights in Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms” (n. 323, March 2018).
16
LUCE 324 / EPIFANIE DI LUCE