I hate giving you fragments of this beautiful sequence, and have done so, come to think of it, only because of space and time. I dislike doing it partly because, since everything is in place of something else, anything missing creates a noplace, but even more because the fragmentation destroys the music. It’s not only that Mann loved music, knew and understood a great deal about it, but that he looked on his beloved triumvirate of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche as, above all, musicians. It is as if philosophy, literature, and music were for him one and the same, and he wanted his own works to be always good scores. So it’s important to find the music in the prose, something I think Woods’ translation captures as well as could be expected. It happens that I own an old LP, one of the long series of spoken-word releases from the Caedmon label. It is of Thomas Mann reading, in his native German, from three of his works. It was recorded at his California home in 1952, three years before the death of this writer who had been born in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck in the time of Bismarck and the Kaiser Wilhelm—as remote from our lives as Hans Castorp came to be from what had been his own, up on the Zauberberg. As I pulled the disc from the shelf, glancing through the loving and perceptive liner note by Mann’s daughter Monica, I thought of Mann’s own long journey through space and time—from, as it were, the salon of Elsa Bernstein (a/k/a Ernst Rosmer) in Munich to the salon of Salka Viertel in Santa Monica. I listened, with emotion, to Side One only, which is devoted to the first chapter of Tonio Kröger. And there, sure enough, is the music—a voice that could be that of a lively Karakterbariton, though no longer a young one, with a wide range of both pitch and color, along with the characterizational penchant, the instinct for rhythm and timing, the touch of wit, of a gifted actor. I’m not an audiobooks fan (I prefer my own interpretations, thanks), but I’d buy “Thomas Mann Reads Der Zauberberg!” Not for drivetime.

There is one more book I’d like to briefly mention, brought to my attention by a smart, sociopolitically informed young man I know. It is Social Acceleration/A Theory of Modernity, by Hartmut Rosa and translated by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys. I’ve only had time to skim through it, but I’m excited by its central thesis—that the fact that we live in a self-propelling “acceleration society,” driven by economic, cultural, and socio-structural motors, where the ever-increasing speed of everything is also a compression of space—is the defining aspect of modernity. I mentioned above that I had felt a connection to Thomas Mann’s sense of his own turn of age coinciding with “a thundering turning-point in the world.” Our own crises, grave as they are, do not constitute quite such a turning-point—for us, the thunder still rumbles at a distance—and I am well past Mann’s actuarial marker twice over. But my own sense is of having been at turning-points as long as I can remember, in ever-quicker succession. Yet these junctures seem to invariably turn back upon themselves, and their quickened pace is somehow also a closing-in of breathing-room. Rosa’s sense of our being at a “frenetic standstill” captures the feeling. And when I see that in his opening pages Rosa is bouncing from Goethe (already wary of a quickening pace) to Nietzsche, and then to Mann himself (he points out that the very structure of The Magic Mountain is a metaphor for a careening forward, the pages required in the early chapters for the passage of a few hours or days serving by the end to record a rush of months or even years), the lure grows stronger. I look forward to spending concentrated time with this book.

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NEXT TIME: As I said at the outset, I’ll be putting the blog on hiatus over the summer. I shall continuing with my teaching, work on the archiving of some of my materials, prepare a talk for delivery to the Jussi Bjoerling Society in the fall, and put the finishing touches on my essay for the long-promised, oft-delayed Marston Records multi-CD Lawrence Tibbett release, also in the fall. That will be plenty, but will still leave me, for the first time in a number of years, with some easement of my own space/time continuum.