I left New York with two bags loaded with pasta and canned chickpeas and — more importantly — a crate of books. If we were going to be at my wife’s parents for several weeks, waiting for things to get less scary in the city, I was going to hide away and read. Read not just anything. I had ambitions. I would read the kind of books that — the clock constantly ticking, reminding me of all the things I hadn’t done — I’d never had time for, or never made time for. Books that intimidated me. One of them was The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, published in 1924. That was how my pandemic began.
Even paying for it at a second-hand bookstore near Columbia gave me pause. It’s huge, I thought, as the cashier frantically wiped it down (we didn’t wear masks at this point.) I’m never going to read this. I’m not one of those bores who reads colossal, painful tomes just to feel educated. Why would I do that to myself, just as everything I really enjoyed — bars, friends, flights — had suddenly been taken away from me? On the drive out of the city it kept nagging me. As the world was ending and there were a million new things to process, why did I rush out to buy a Weimar novelist?
For the first weeks in Massachusetts, I sat in the spare room and read tweets and The Magic Mountain. I took screenshots of the death toll: 100 Americans dead from the novel coronavirus, 1,000 Americans, 10,000 Americans. Around 100,000, I gave up. Never quite letting go of my phone, I drifted in and out of the 796-page novel. Der Zauberberg, in German, is about a man called Hans Castorp who spends seven years in a sanatorium, without really doing very much, on the eve of the First World War. It is a strange thing — a Zeitroman or “time-novel” — about the dissolution of time both in the passing of an age and in the loss of one man’s ability to experience its flow in the way he’s used to.
I didn’t enjoy it. I was consumed by it. I was so used to doing the consuming, quickly and easily — Netflix, Sally Rooney — that being consumed was an uncomfortable, odd, experience. I almost couldn’t read it: I’d become so used to skim-reading feeds — and so used to the kind of extractive get-to-the-point reading of novels with nut graph-like points about what they are supposed to represent — that I’d forgotten the experience of a totalising work of art.
For weeks, I felt like I, too, was locked in the sanatorium where people carried little pulmonary x-ray cards around in their pockets and met for splendid dinners in the hall. It was almost too much: the endless arguments between Naphtha and Settembrini — the Polish Jew-turned-Jesuit-turned-Marxist totalitarian and the blinkered Italian libertarian rationalist — seemed to echo too loudly the argument going on around me. “Zero Covid” or let it rip? The whole world had turned into a hospital, in which we were all dwarfed by a figure like Mann’s gargantuan Dutch colonialist, Mynheer Peeperkorn: Donald Trump.
But as I read The Magic Mountain, there was something I didn’t quite understand: how can three weeks have turned into seven years up there — just like that? Why doesn’t Hans Castorp want to come down from the sickbay? In the meantime, I was still panic-scrolling. There was still drama in the air. Things weren’t as slow as they were going to get.
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