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Sitaram · Site Admin Joined: 14 Sep 2005 Posts: 1079

http://www.zen-forum.com/ForumE/showthread.php3?threadid=2200

http://sulekha.com/chpost.asp?for...ilosophy&show=0&cid=43875

Naphta was the Jesuit voice of deep-rooted experience and ontological
terror. (see bottom of page)

http://department.monm.edu/classics/Speel_Festschrift/haywood.htm

The Magic of the Mountain:

A Metaphor for the American College

Bruce Haywood

The great German poet Goethe, always fond of paradox, once proposed
in characteristic fashion his sense of the relationship between
literature and life. Nothing, he said, can so alienate us from life
as literature can. Nothing, he went on, can more firmly bind us to
life than literature.

My forty years in higher education have persuaded me that one can
propose a like paradox for a college education. It can hold us
forever aloof, content to look down on life from the distance;
clinical in our detachment; contemptuous and calculating our
advantage over the unsophisticated. But it can also return us to life
able to live and serve it better, armed with the understanding that
our individual life takes on meaning and worth when it is given to
the larger life of humankind.

It was surely that latter idea of higher education's functioning
which moved Thomas Jefferson to declare that an educated citizenry
would secure the future of the fledgling United States. The scores of
liberal arts colleges which came into being in the early decades of
the new Republic were inspired by the same idea.

Thomas Mann, the twentieth century's Goethe in so many ways, shared
his predecessor's concern that literature and ideas could so engage
people that they would be lost to life forever, dwelling in a private
world of aesthetic pleasures and contempt for ordinary folk. The
tensions of Mann's novels and short stories run between the poles of
deathly intellectualism and the banalities of everyday living. In
Mann's early works, his protagonists seem doomed to be forever
hostile to the workaday world of commerce and industry by their being
devoted to ideas and the arts. Their sensibilities alienate them from
home and parentage, setting them apart from the lives their
schoolmates grow into comfortably and surely.

But in the works of his maturity, the great novels that are among our
century's finest achievements, Thomas Mann explores a Goethean spiral
path which can lead his alienated protagonists back to life--at a
higher level. The novel that is central to his life's work, The Magic
Mountain, parodies the action of Goethe's Faust, as it proposes a
very different path to life from that we see in Goethe's play.
Professor Faust's painful journey to find his humanity begins with
his embracing magic as a way to escape the university where he is the
prisoner of forms and practices that are deathly. It is a very
different notion of magic Mann's novel evokes, at a place of death in
many guises. Yet the sanitarium, in the Swiss village of Davos that
is the story's locale, ultimately affords Hans Castorp an
understanding of life such as he would never have known, had he
remained in his flatland home.

Anybody who reads The Magic Mountain on an American college campus
will at once savor the amusing parallels between the world of the
sanitarium and the world of students in a residential college. For
example, Mann tells us that the patients give up reading the
newspaper and fail to write letters home because they lose themselves
in the gossip of the dining hall, in love affairs, or in the
entertainments the management thoughtfully provides. The sanitarium
is a place where people argue passionately about world events, while
ensuring that they remain at a safe distance from them. The patients
consume huge amounts of food, though they complain about the eternal
sameness of it. Those in charge try to conceal the fact that the
doctors don't really cure anybody, even while they go on charging
very high fees and insisting that the patients, just by being in
residence for a few years, will go home someday thinking themselves
much better than they were when they arrived.

But as readers work their way into Mann's novel, they see deeper
parallels. They come to understand that Mann's central interest,
amidst his account of the diseased persons in the place, is in the
processes of his protagonist's growth and change which we can call
Castorp's liberal education. Readers come to see, too, that the
tuberculosis which has brought the patients to Davos is the physical
partner of their spiritual diseases: self-indulgence, apathy,
chauvinism. Mann thought these the sicknesses of all Europe before
World War I, even as TB was the international physical ailment. They
are the sicknesses which beset our campuses today.

High above the world of healthful life, in the place of death, Mann's
hero comes to understanding. Davos educates him as he had not been
educated in the flatland, graduate engineer though he is. Mann
celebrates Davos as a place of magic because its effect on his
protagonist is so extraordinary, so complete, as to defy rational
explanation. Reasonable interpretation cannot account for the
transformation Hans Castorp undergoes or for the influence certain
persons and experiences have upon him. Mann calls it magic, a sort of
alchemy, a lovely mystery. Yet, in his meticulously composed preface
to his novel, Mann is at some pains to stress that, while Hans
Castorp is an altogether typical young man, his experiences on the
mountain are peculiarly and privately his. Castorp's story, as Mann
puts it, doesn't happen to everybody. Indeed, to some extent the
magic of the mountain is of the hero's making. He is the catalyst,
bringing the elements of the Davos world into an alchemical union
with one another, creating gold out of what for others is only dross.

Is Castorp's education, then, reserved only for his hero or at best a
very special few? Surely Mann would not spend 700 pages to propose
that. Rather, I believe, he wishes us to understand that Castorp's
education is available to anybody who has his hero's essential
characteristics--his willingness to open himself to experience of the
unfamiliar, his insistence on knowing, his love for his origins--and
who can learn from his circumstances. As we follow Castorp to the
mountain and live his seven years there with him, we must remember
that, while Mann emphasizes that the journey is uniquely Castorp's,
he would have us see that those characteristics of Castorp which
redeem him are those of uncorrupted youth everywhere.

When first we meet Hans Castorp, on the novel's opening page, he is
on his way to visit a sick cousin. He is traveling by train across
the heartland of Europe, where in earlier times Caesar's legions,
Napoleon's citizens army, and Bismarck's Prussians had marched. Yet,
as though to impress upon us that his hero is no giant of history,
Mann at once tells us that his Hans Castorp is a very average fellow
indeed, a youth with no special gifts and no claim at all to
distinction. He is an altogether characteristic representative of the
middle class, more concerned with creature comforts than with what he
might make of his life, more given to relaxation than hard work.

We travel with Castorp along ravines and precipices as the train
struggles up into the mountains of Switzerland. Eventually he alights
in Davos expecting to find only a sort of hotel for invalids, where
he will spend a few weeks being pleasantly pampered. He doesn't at
all appreciate his cousin's casual remark: "Your ideas really get
changed here!" He doesn't suspect that he has entered a drastically
different world, separated from his home by psychological and
spiritual distances far greater than miles or altitude might account
for.

The sanitarium has its own calendar and celebrates its own holidays.
The standards of the flatland--in language, manners, social
relationships--are consciously abandoned and often mocked at. Davos
is a self-contained microcosm where the days and weeks take on
uniform character, their passage marked only by mealtimes and the
ritual exercises imposed on the patients. We must count it a first
instance of magic in the place, then, that Hans Castorp, so much the
child of his bourgeois parentage, eagerly embraces his new
circumstances and unreasonably turns his back on the flatland,
wondering that he had wanted no more from life than to make a
comfortable living.

We must take it that it is Castorp's very naiveté and middle class
blandness that attract to him persons who are intent on becoming his
teachers. In his first months on the mountain he is exposed to minds
so much more sophisticated than his own that he can only gasp at
their brilliance. They show him new worlds beyond his imagining,
seeming to conjure up the marvels of the universe and the glories of
humanity's achievement before his eyes, new worlds which begin to
demand his full attention and energy. Yet, with time, Castorp begins
to see that these "teachers" cannot resist turning the unwritten page
that he is into their own text. They are so convinced of the
superiority of their own convictions that they cannot imagine his
wishing to embrace any other. Though they insist they want only to
free him from the fetters of his middle class prejudices, their
behavior argues that they wish to make him the captive of their
particular philosophy. But Castorp, having learned only since he came
to the mountain that he can think independently, resists them. He
senses that there can be no single way to understand life in all its
complexity. Very quickly, through another seemingly magical process,
Castorp grasps that the sanitarium, a place deliberately isolated
from the flatland, can grant him an understanding of himself such as
he would never have known, had he remained caught up in the dance of
life down below. The detachment affords a view of the world that is
sometimes telescopic, sometimes panoramic, sometimes microscopic.

So, as his teachers turn more and more to arguing with one another
the superiority of their particular positions, Castorp seeks the
truth of his existence through private reading, observing, and
thinking. And what he comes increasingly to understand, is that
learning, when it is carried on for its own sake, moves people
farther and farther away from the world and the concerns of ordinary
humanity. Yet it is to that everyday world, he recognizes eventually,
that he must owe his allegiance. For Thomas Mann finds ways to let
his hero see, sometimes shocking him harshly with the recognition,
that he and all the others on the mountain owe their advantaged
position to the labors of those who toil down there in the flatland.
It is not enough, Castorp recognizes in a magic moment, to view life
through the peepholes created by biology, chemistry, history,
economics, psychology and all. He must accomplish a synthesis of
those separate modes and then put his comprehensive understanding
into the service of humanity.

That realization comes to Castorp in one of the most remarkable
episodes in the novel, in a chapter called "Snow."

Until this moment Castorp has been overwhelmed by a chaos of
information, blown this way and that by the strong winds of vigorous
intellectual debate. He has lacked a center of belief about which to
organize his understandings. He has had no compelling faith upon
which to stand firm against efforts to overpower him with argument.
Determined now to think his way through his confusion, he seeks utter
solitude on the snow-covered heights above Davos, where he can be
certain he will have nobody's company. Up there he soon finds himself
caught in a violent blizzard and unable, despite his best efforts, to
find his way. Sinking into the deep snow, surrounded by the elemental
powers of nature gone mad, he lies at death's door.

And then there comes to him a dream, a vision of a sun-lit
Mediterranean shore, a locale he is able to identify as the cradle of
Western civilization. Even as he dreams, he recognizes that he is
composing his vision out of the elements of his experience on the
mountain. The synthesis of his dream-vision becomes the vehicle for
his triumphant recognition that the vital forms of our civilization--
social, political, artistic--came into being in response to the cruel
destructiveness of death.

It is out of love for life, love for the human potential we glimpse
in every child, that civilization has developed. And we best express
our love for humankind, Castorp concludes, in the creating and
recreating of those forms which support and enhance life. In that
recognition, succinctly, is Mann's definition of the purposes of
education.

That inspiring recognition rouses Castorp and he struggles up, out of
the blanketing snow that threatens his little existence. Fully awake,
he declares the central significance of his dream: It is love, not
reason, that is stronger than death. Only in the forms that love
creates does life triumph over death and take on importance.

That faith Castorp exuberantly voices, but by the time he returns to
the sanitarium the details of the dream have already begun to fade.
It is as though Mann wished to say that Castorp's vision had been the
product of a state not to be realized in daily living. It was a dream
at the very edge of life, in an exalted state of simultaneous terror
and reckless courage, born of the will to push to human limits in
defiance of chaos.

What Castorp must now do--all that remains for him to do on the
mountain, the action of the novel seems to say--is to find a way to
translate the essential elements of his vision into a metaphor, a way
of organizing all he has learned so that he may carry it with him
always, in capsule form so to speak. He needs a symbol that will
inspire him afresh whenever he faces death's agents--cynicism,
nihilism, and barbarism--in the flatland.

So, in the next magic moment of the novel, we find Castorp standing
before a new discovery: music, specifically music on phonograph
records, an ingenious wedding of the forms of art and technology that
Mann calls "the German soul brought up to date." Out of the host of
musical selections the management has provided, Castorp chooses a
half dozen pieces which have a special significance for him, making
them the distillation of his life on the mountain. One record evokes
a particular person; another a special mood; a third a crucial
experience. But there is one record, a well-known ballad, which
itself becomes the summation of the others, a magical representation
of all that his dream revealed to him. The song is simple love given
permanent beauty by death-denying form and it is simultaneously the
expression of his deep feeling of belonging to both the mountain and
the flatland. In that song Castorp finds realized the essential
paradox of the magic mountain: that he has learned the closest
affection for life at the greatest distance from it.

With Castorp having put Davos into his favorite song and made it
portable, there is nothing left for him to learn or to dream upon the
mountain. There is nobody to hold him there, no reason for him to
remain. And yet he stays on. The mountain cannot show him a reason he
should leave it. At this point magic seems to have no say (any more
than it does at the end of Faust). It is life, rushing along down
below, that finally calls him home.

His reason to go is the outbreak of World War I, for, as that
explodes, Castorp recognizes that all he has learned to cherish in
the name of life is threatened by the mad outburst of the elemental
passions in mankind. All that he has come to celebrate in the simple
word "goodness"--home, family, decency, love of beauty, and innocent
happiness--seems about to be overrun, its fragile structures
destroyed by tyrants and vandals. And now Castorp thinks on the words
of the man who has been dearest to him among those who have tried to
teach him: "Whoever is unable to offer his person, his arm, his
blood, in the service of the ideal is unworthy of it."

So Castorp goes home to the service of life, back to the flatland
where once again
the warring legions rage: destroying churches, closing colleges,
burning books, and smashing phonographs. We last see him in the
uniform of his country's army, taking the place of his cousin, a
professional soldier whom death claimed on the mountain. Castor takes
the role of Pollux. Bullets fly and shells explode, the products of a
perverted creativity, and with many of his companions Castorp falls
into the mud. But, as once before in the snow, he refuses to lie
there and let death claim him. With the song on his lips that he has
brought from the mountain, he gets up and charges the enemy, in the
name of hope for a better world, of faith in love that is stronger
than death. I quote Thomas Mann for the last time: "Up he gets and
staggers on, limping on his earthbound feet, all unconsciously
singing."

With that we come to the end of Hans Castorp's story. Here his
creator parts company with him, certain that, whatever befalls him,
he will always fight for what Mann has chosen simply to
call "goodness." There is in the end, The Magic Mountain says,
something worth giving one's life for.

Mann has shown us the ultimate magic of the mountain: the
transformation of the naive youth he calls "the still unwritten page"
into the man his creator thinks a hero for his time. We have seen the
processes of his education which have prepared him to be that hero,
letting him become one who can carry into life all that he has
learned and translate it into the service of his less fortunate
fellows. He has become a man willing to give his life for the ideal.
He has become Jefferson's educated citizen.

Thomas Jefferson and those pioneering educators who followed him in
the creation of uniquely American colleges believed that liberal
education would equip their graduates to combat successfully the
cynicism, the nihilism, and the barbarism which would inevitably
threaten a democracy. They believed the colleges would provide
students with a vision which would inspire them to give their lives
to those ideals proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. Their
colleges would celebrate those values which sustain and enhance the
lives of ordinary humanity, Castorp's "goodness." Students in those
colleges, given the advantage of being distanced for a time from the
demands of making a living, would understand their moral obligation
to the society which afforded them that advantage. Having stood for a
time apart from the dance of life, they would return to it knowing
its larger patterns and movements, and thus able to lead their
fellows through it.

Such was the magic mountain character of America's colleges in their
beginnings. For many generations of students they provided vision and
celebrated the best of American values. But in recent decades they
have been overwhelmed by the consequences of an alien doctrine: the
pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. At first the justification for
the research-driven graduate school, this has become the ruling
doctrine of higher education. It is the source of the self-centered
behavior of our campuses and of the cynicism among our students. Our
colleges must recapture the magic mountain metaphor, if they are not
to be lost altogether, snowed under in the chaos of little interests,
passionately argued.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/programmes/centurions/mann/manninfo.shtml

The Magic Mountain

Thomas Mann's portrayal of sanatorium life in the Magic Mountain was
inspired largely by his own experiences. In 1912, his wife was
suffering from a lung complaint, and had to spend several months in a
sanatorium at Davos in Switzerland.

Mann spent three weeks visiting his wife at Davis, during which time
he became troubled with a bronchial condition - and was advised by
the physician to become an in-patient for six months. He declined;
but the impressions gathered from his three week stay formed the
basis of the Magic Mountain.

The Swiss mountain community was Mann's symbol of capitalist society
in pre-war Europe, with each of the characters representing a
particular strain of thought. The characters were derived from the
patients he met and conversed with, exchanging ideas about life; both
spiritual and physical.

The main character in the story, Hans Castorp is visiting his
tubercular cousin in the sanatorium. Whilst there, he gets drawn into
the social life, and in particular the discussions on life, death and
religion initiated by Herr Settembrini, an Italian patient. He also
develops a romantic obsession with a married female patient Madame
Chauchat who reminds him of a childhood friend.

Nearing the end of his stay, Hans develops a bad cold; and on
examination is found to have tuberculosis himself. He seems almost
relieved to have an excuse to stay at the sanatorium so that he can
carry on his investigations into the meaning of life. He ends up
staying for seven years - at the end of which he feels he has reached
some level of understanding.

http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-
db/webdocs/webdescrips/mann162-des-.html

Hans Castorp makes a visit to the International Sanitarium Berghof in
the Swiss Alps to rest and visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen. There
he meets other patients from around Europe, all with different
opinions about life and its meaning. Before his three week visit is
up, Hans develops tuberculosis and ends up staying seven years. He
leaves only when the Sanitarium gets news of the assassination of the
Archduke that will begin World War One.

Each of the characters Hans meets is a symbol for a strain of thought
prevalent in pre-war Germany. Castorp himself is fascinated with
ideas of death. Claudia Chauchat is a hedonist. Settembrini is an
Italian humanist, secure in his belief that man can be improved
through reason. Mann makes all these characters seem effete and sick--
their tuberculosis is a sign of social illness. The start of the war
is symbol that such aesthetic wanderings must come to an end. The
novel provides a look at treatment for tuberculosis at the turn of
the century. It is a fairly intimate, if fictional, look at one of
the famed mountain spots for recovery. The disease is nearly a
character itself, coming and going from the lives of the other
characters

http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-
db/webdocs/webdescrips/mann313-des-.html

This great literate novel is the tale of Hans Castorp, the "delicate
child of life" whom we first meet at age 23, ambivalently embarking
on a career as a ship-building engineer in his home city of Hamburg,
Germany. Before beginning his professional work, however, he journeys
on what is intended to be a vacation and a pro forma visit to see his
tubercular cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, at a sanatorium in the mountain
town of Davos, Switzerland. Yet as the train pursues its course
through the alpine scenery, Hans and the reader become aware that
this is no ordinary journey. The impressionable Hans is transported
away from the life and obligations he has known, to the rarefied
mountain environment and insular community of the sanatorium.

At first uneasy, he soon becomes fascinated with and drawn to the
routine established for the "consumptives" and to the social scene
which flourishes there. Ordinary life seems increasingly unreal to
him; his perceptions are heightened and he becomes aware of his
physical, spiritual, and emotional vulnerability, as well as of his
own sexuality. He is greatly attracted to one of the patients, a
married woman of Slavic background, Madame Clavdia Chauchat. She
reminds him of a schoolboy to whom he had been strangely drawn as a
child. The turmoil brought on by this romantic obsession seems even
to be reflected in his physical state, which is unstable and
feverish.

As his intended stay of three weeks nears its close, the director of
the sanatorium advises Hans to stay on to recuperate from a heavy
cold, which appears to reveal an underlying case of tuberculosis.
Hans is almost relieved at this news, for it provides him with a
reason for remaining near Madame Chauchat as well as the opportunity
to continue intriguing, profound discussions and cogitation about
illness, life, time, death, religion and world view initiated by
another patient, Herr Settembrini.

Settembrini is an Italian man of letters and humanist who believes
that reason and the intellect must and will prevail, in daily life as
well as in world affairs. He is contemptuous of the foolish
flirtations and empty talk in which most of the sanatorium
inhabitants indulge, and warns Hans repeatedly of the dangers
inherent in cutting off all ties to real life and responsibility.

Nevertheless, Hans remains at the sanatorium for seven years, freeing
himself from the constraints and conventions of life "in the
flatlands" and instead engaging in a prolonged "questioning of the
universe." This questioning includes a critical flirtation with
death, stunningly described in the chapter, "Snow." Hans does not
return home until the outbreak of World War I, in which he fights and
survives.

The depiction of sanatorium life was triggered by Mann's own
experience when his wife was confined for several months. He began
writing The Magic Mountain in 1912, in a humorous vein. His work was
interrupted by the first World War and took 12 years to complete. The
intervening events led Mann to a major examination of human nature,
European history and politics and to ponder the great questions
surrounding life and death.

His description of institutional life is of interest in itself;
allusions to the dark and irrational forces that lurk within the
human psyche at a time when psychoanalysis was just beginning are of
interest; considerations of the human condition and of the human
spirit make worthwhile reading for any thoughtful person, and for
anyone entering a profession centered on illness. In the informative
afterword written retrospectively, Mann states that "what [Hans] came
to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of
sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health . . . ."

==================

Biography of Thomas Mann

"Literature is death and I shall never understand how one can be a
slave to it without hating it".
- Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875, where his family had been
merchants and senators of the Hansa city for generations and where
his father was a grain exporter. At the age of 18, three years after
his father's death, Thomas moved to Munich. At first he worked in a
fire insurance office and attended university lectures. Then he went
to Rome.

In 1901, his first novel Buddenbrooks was published. It contained
autobiographical features.

Although he was to remember his friendship with painter Paul
Ehrenberg as the love of his life, in 1905 he married Katia
Pingsheim, who came from a well-to-do Munich Jewish family. He
remained married to her until his death 50 years later. In marrying
her, he sacrified his natural inclinations for social convention.

Mann found very young men beautiful, but his homosexuality remained
hidden for 50 years after his death, when his diaries were released.
These revealed that he was prone to fits of nausea, nervous trembling
and convulsive sobbing quite at odds with his public image of
elegant, self-assured aloofness. He was fortunate that the Nazis
never discovered his secret.

During the First World War he was a patriot but wondered whether pre-
War Europe was worth preserving. He volunteered for active service
but was turned down. Ironically, like many writers, he benefitted
from the demand for cheap paperbacks from the soldiers.

In 1924, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) was finally completed
and published, ten years after he began it as a short story. It
confirmed his reputation as the outstanding German novelist of his
time.

After the War, he was hostile to America's anti-communism and
tolerant of Stalin's regime in Eastern Europe. He loathed Hitler and
became the leading practitioner and spokesman for that German culture
that had nothing to do with Nazism - which he attacked in 1928 in a
public speech.

In 1929, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1933, he and Katia went to Switzerland and were warned by their
elder children (he had six children) not to return to Germany as the
Nazis had denounced him. In 1935, en route to the States, the family
arrived in Britain, where his daughter Erika married W.H.Auden (who
had never met her) in order to give her British citizenship and
prevent her being repatriated by the Nazis.

Mann and his wife settled in America after the fall of Austria and in
1944 became US citizens. From America, he recorded monthly broadcasts
for the BBC to transmit to the German people during World War Two.

He died in 1955.

==========

http://www.webdelsol.com/AGNI/ag3-sk.htm

The Magic Mountain was a nine-hundred-page depiction of a life
outside of life, a life, as Mann kept repeating, without
responsibility, inhibition, shape, ambition, or even a sense of time.

The saddest part of this final reading is the other admission I'm
forced to make: I will never write The Magic Mountain. That was what
I wanted all along. It sounds ridiculous, and I don't mean it
literally. But it was the template for my ideal of both Novel and
Writer. My books are anthills compared to this one, and with the
resignation of middle age I've stopped even making such hopeless
comparisons.

But I do sometimes sit at my desk and stare with delight at the wall,
thrilled with some perfection I can, for those moments, imagine. It
never gets onto the page. All my study of Mann couldn't teach me to
be a great writer. But I learned my pleasure in the effort from him.

http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/mann.htm

I felt that I understood the century a little better by the time I
finished reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It took many
pages, though, for it to have that effect. The detailed description
of Hans Castorp's life at a fashionable tuberculosis sanitarium high
in the Alps almost put me off. Only gradually did I see that Mann was
constructing the sensibility of European culture at just that moment
before it disintegrated into World War I.

Mann's strategy was to immerse himself and us in the seemingly
narcissistic regimen of patients up on the mountain, far removed from
the flatland. By stages I came to see that he was planning all along
to close the distance between a hermetic world of personal illness
and the panorama of all Europe in its last seven years before 1914.

The small band on the mountain finally did come to represent the
conflicting world below. The arguments between Hans's intellectual
friends gave voice to the clashing ideologies of Europe as the 20th
century began. Settembrini was the militant man of reason and
progress. Naphta was the Jesuit voice of deep-rooted experience and
ontological terror.

In their climactic duel, Settembrini lacked the conviction to shoot;
Naphta, wanting to die by the gun of his adversary, had to shoot
himself instead. Their resort to bloody action climaxed the insanity
of their final arguments. All reason and all logic failed. In short
order, Hans left the mountain, responding to the mobilization of
troops for the war.

I heard from the mountain the 20th century message: Neither
progressive reason nor conservative traditionalism had the persuasive
coherence to save the world from war. The Enlightenment foundations
from the eighteenth century, the Romanticism of the nineteenth
century, the older organizing threads from the Middle Ages--nothing
was conceptually powerful enough to prevent the destruction. So the
European powers blundered mindlessly into the great "unnecessary" war-
-the war that "destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the
European continent," in the words of John Keegan, author of the new
book, The First World War (Knopf, 1999).

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