The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann | A Reading

Finneran's Wake

“The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain”. It’s positively bewildering. Indeed, the difficulty in explaining it is only increased as one reaches the heights of the Magic Mountain, that strange Alpine crag in which the famed sanatorium is nestled, and the confederacy of the tubercular confined. There, so many miles above the unexalted flatlands of the continent below, and so far beyond the stunted reach of our human imagination, the “temporal” becomes inexplicable, and the time becomes something unreal. Its smallest unit of measurement, after all, is neither the minute, the hour, nor the day, but the month. Yes—atop the Magic Mountain, time is a puzzling thing.