Just before my college graduation, all the literary studies majors gathered for a celebratory reception with our professors and families. As I’ve written before, my major was — by today’s standards — slightly unconventional. We were banded together by a central reading list that we all worked through at different paces, in different courses, and with different focuses. The list consisted of important pieces of literature from about a dozen different cultures, ranging from classical Greece and Rome to 19th-century Russia.
The list was assembled by our advisor, who was at this reception. And so one of my classmates asked him that most common question posed by student to instructor: What should I read next?
The recommendation my advisor gave, then, was for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He must’ve listed a couple reasons, but the one that sticks out in my memory is this:
You’ve got a young man who ostensibly has a profession, he’s on the verge of entering the professional world, and yet... he doesn’t seem all that interested in his work.
Cue me — a young woman likewise on the verge of entering the professional world, with a job lined up she felt somewhat ambivalent about — mentally earmarking this novel as a potential future companion.
And so this is where the sense of “should read” arises in my decision to turn my attention to The Magic Mountain. It’s twofold: I was both curious to dip into this last recommendation from my advisor, especially as it’s now been two years since leaving college — a place that seems increasingly strange and unbelievable as it recedes further into memory — and I also wanted to watch another young person grapple with this issue of what to do with one’s life.
In light of that second intention, I discovered something delightful: the protagonist and I share the same age. Mann writes of Hans Castorp, “When he set out on the journey where we met him, he was twenty-three years old.” In the margin I drew a star and wrote, me too.
The novel follows Hans as he leaves Germany to visit his cousin Joachim up at a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the Swiss Alps. The sanatorium, which more closely resembles a hotel than a medical facility, is perched atop a mountain — hence the title. The novel soon sets up a dichotomy between the so-called “flatlands,” where Hans comes from and where “real life” unfolds, and the special domain of the alpine peaks and their tubercular residents.
In particular, Mann takes great care to describe the differences in the quality of time as it’s experienced on the mountain. When hearing of Hans’s plan to stay for only three weeks, Herr Settembrini, a patient of the sanatorium, laughs and tells him: “We do not know the week as a unit of measurement [...] Our smallest unit of time is the month.” In a similar vein, Joachim explains to his cousin the mountain’s odd climate in which the seasons “get all mixed up, so to speak, and pay no attention to the calendar [...] In short, there are winter days and summer days, spring and autumn days, but no real seasons, we don’t actually have those up here.” The novel provides vivid descriptions of time’s most vexing quality: its slipperiness, its lack of uniformity and resistance to comprehension. All this is epitomized in Hans’s “brilliant insight into what time actually is — nothing less than a silent sister, a column of mercury without a scale,” in other words, a thermometer with no markings. That time is real and an essential element of our world is in no doubt, but humans’ capacity to see it clearly or understand its weight is deeply uncertain.
I’ve felt this problem, too. And I’ve cycled through a myriad of methods trying to grapple with it. I have an early memory — probably around age five — of finding my birthday on a calendar and then working backwards, saying to myself, “On this day, my birthday is tomorrow. On this day, my birthday is the day after tomorrow. On this day, my birthday is the day after the day after tomorrow…” All the way till the present day. It felt like a way of orienting myself, of understanding where I was.
Skip ahead to high school, when I would hold up both hands to friends and tell them, “We only have ten weeks left till summer! That’s only this many fingers!” Being able to visualize the portion of time left till summer felt so urgent, like it could give us a lifeline.
Near the end of high school, I downloaded a countdown app to track the days left till graduation. I still have this app, and because it starts counting up after a date arrives and passes, it now houses a collection of past boundaries I’ve long since crossed. I’ve also added some dates retroactively to give them their due places in the timeline. Occasionally I’ll open it to see how the passage of time has changed these dates’ relative locations. For example: I’m now closer to the end of my time in Japan than I am to the beginning of the pandemic here. On a larger scale, I still remain (just barely) closer to my high school graduation (2,203 days ago) than to my 30th birthday (2,263 days from now). But even those large numbers are dwarfed by the one beside the oldest event my app tracks for me: the number of days since I was born, 8,693 and counting.
These are my efforts to gain perspective. A way of adding numbers back to the unmarked thermometer.
The patients in the sanatorium would seem to have even greater motive to wonder about their temporal locations, since they’re lost in a bigger way. Living with an illness that could easily turn fatal, they don’t know how many days they’ve got left. Yet the patients don’t exhibit this anxiety. The exception is Joachim, who in his desire to begin his military career feels acute distress at the thought of time’s passing. Most of the sanatorium’s other patients, however, appear quite apathetic in the face of all their time lost on the mountain.
And that includes Hans, who grows accustomed to life in the sanatorium and becomes a long-term patient beyond his initial three-week visit. His prolonged stay in the sanatorium is intimately connected with his ambivalence toward his career. The narration makes clear he would have left long ago, “if only some sort of satisfactory answer about the meaning and purpose of life had been supplied to his prosaic soul from out of the depths of time.” When faced with the heavy, impossible question of how one is to best use one’s limited time in this life, it’s natural to flee that responsibility in favor of lingering in a place where time seems more abundant, less rigid. The mountain becomes Hans’s refuge from life.
It wasn’t until I set myself on this track of writing this all down that I came to appreciate how much my thoughts about time are wrapped up in my anxieties about myself, my future, my accomplishments, my aspirations.
There’s one other peculiar habit I once maintained to heighten my awareness of time: tracking it. I went through about three different periods between the ages of 19 and 22 when I used (yet another) app to track how I spent the hours in my days. When I was at my most meticulous, I had a category for everything from sleep to exercise to cooking/eating to cleaning, and I started and stopped timers in the app as I switched activities. The result was a pie chart detailing the precise breakdown of an average twenty-four hours in my life. At other times, I limited my focus to measuring just the amount of time I spent reading or writing. All three phases coincided with periods in my life when I had both inordinate amounts of free time and a desire to maximally enrich my literary life: the summer I took an eight-week class at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, my semester abroad in Edinburgh, and my first six months of living in Japan.
I don’t have to think hard to understand the psychological origin of this habit. I wanted to make sure I was using my time to the best of my ability. I was nineteen when I first articulated to myself my ambition to be a writer, and in the wake of that self-discovery I felt an urgency to pursue that passion with all the worldly tools at my disposal — time being the most precious. “How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives,” as Annie Dillard puts it. Even when I was twenty-one, my move to Japan and choice of post-college employment was largely driven by my considerations for what sort of lifestyle would best complement my writing practice (unaware, of course, that a global pandemic would saddle that decision with unforeseen weight). In short: I wanted to know I was doing things right. Hard data outside my flawed, subjective perception confirming that I was truly making a sincere effort toward this ambition that felt so precious to me.
In this way, I was more of Hans Castorp’s opposite than his peer. I had a passion, while Hans displays a great deal of ambivalence toward his chosen career of engineering. I wanted to maintain sharp awareness of time’s value so as to dedicate myself to that passion, while Hans, especially near the end of the novel, seems more than content to allow time to pass swiftly unmarked.
And now?
I’ve decided to relieve myself of this pressure, and I’m glad of it.
I think the major work taking place in my soul during my time in Japan will turn out to be the divestment of my sense of personal worth away from my accomplishments and perceived “productivity.” It’s difficult to express this without sentimentality, but I feel as though the education I’m undergoing here centers on learning how to be happy with myself even when I do nothing except live.
The word “soul” is actually very fitting here — because that’s an important element, too, helping me parse my feelings. This idea that there is a me that exists outside my thoughts, experiences, accomplishments, mistakes, and relationships. Something essential, and yet unrelated to the actual content of my life.
I’ve come to realize that I want to want my creativity. I’ve learned that I’m unsatisfied with writing for the sake of routine, or for my ego. I need to have an idea of what I want to say; I want to feel purposeful, not just yoked to habit. And I would rather have a life lived in balance than one with all my sacrifices laid at one altar.
Above my desk hangs “For One Who is Exhausted, a Blessing,” by the late Catholic priest and poet John O’Donohue. I discovered it in 2019, several months after going through a period of intense burnout during my last semester of college. One of its passages reads:
You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.
“Empty time”: a phrase that resonates both with my process of reshaping my creative practice and with Hans’s stay up on the magic mountain.
And with choices made during the pandemic, too. Like Hans, I arrived in Japan anticipating a shorter stay. I’d only planned on living here for one year, but by the time I leave, I’ll have been here for three.
Yet if my reward for lingering is the receipt of my own self, I’ll count these years as time well spent.
Thank you for taking the time to read. This post was for my third reading category: a book I feel I “should” read. Next, I’ll be reading and writing about Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi as the choice for my fourth category: a recommendation.
Recently, I had the pleasure of being a guest on a friend’s podcast, The Kyodai Brothers. You can find the episode here, where we talk about life in Japan as well as about books, reading, and the crossovers between creativity and teaching.
Thank you again, and stay well.