Every long-term rich patient meant a steady flow of income for doctors, many of whom could not hope for employment outside of the sanatoria towns because they suffered from tuberculosis themselves. The Berghof sanatorium’s head doctor, Hofrat Behrens—with his bloodshot, watery eyes and bluish cheeks—also seems sickly; indeed, he is suspected to be ‘einer der Ärzte, die Leidensgenossen derjenigen sind, deren Aufenthalt sie überwachen’ (‘one of those physicians who not only supervises people’s stay here, but also shares their sufferings’) (p. 202/p.156). Mann’s novel captured the mercantile aspect of sanatorium life with ruthless precision. Doctors felt attacked; in the 1920s their income was stalling even without the added negative publicity. As Vera Pohland explains in her study of literary sanatoria, the serious reputation of Davos as a high-altitude health resort was changing around 1920 because of the simultaneous development of the town into a winter sports centre. No
wonder doctors wished Mann’s novel away and sought to discredit its author.
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Postmodernism is an intellectual dead end; it’s central premise seems to be derived from a saying of Nietzsche’s, “There are no facts; only interpretations”, which is thought to mean that each one of us views “reality” through our individual perspective. This is true to a degree, but as with so many aphorisms, there are limits to its validity;
"We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred… that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command. He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth; and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped. Don't ask why. I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible."
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"However difficult of attainment this end is, generally not till toward the end of one's life, it must inevitably be sought, because it finally guarantees the certitudo salutis and substitutes a serene confidence for the sullen worry of the Calvinist"
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If the constitutive nature of antagonism is taken for granted, the mode of questioning of the social is completely modified, since contingency radically penetrates the very identity of the social agents. The two antagonistic forces are not the expression of a deeper objective movement that would include both of them; and the course of history cannot be explained in terms of the essential 'objectivity of either. The latter is always an objectivity threatened by a constitutive outside. But as we know, this implies that the conditions of existence of any objectivity that might exist must be sought at the level of a factual history. Moreover, as this objectivity has a merely relational identity with its conditions of existence, it means that the 'essential identity' of the entity in question will always be transgressed and redefined.
Sayfa 22 - Verso, 1990.Kitabı okuyor
It is truly marvelous—when I came here first and looked down into the valley from this hilltop—how the entire region attracted me. There…a little forest land…oh, to lose oneself in its shade…. There, a mountaintop…oh, to see the panorama from it! The rolling hills and enchanting valleys…I yearned to lose myself in them.
I would hurry down, but return home without having found what I had hoped to find. Distance is like the future. A vast twilit entity lies before us, our perception is lost in it and becomes as blurred as our eyesight, and we yearn, ah, we yearn to surrender all of our Self and let ourselves be filled to the brim with a single, tremendous, magnificent emotion, but alas…when we hurry to the spot, when There becomes Here, everything is as it was before and we are left standing in our poverty and constraint, our souls longing for the balm that has eluded us. Thus the most restless vagabond yearns in the end to return to his native land and find in his cottage, in the arms of his wife, with his children around him, and in the occupations that provide for them, the joys he sought vainly elsewhere.
Constantine’s city is conventionally depicted as a purely Christian enterprise. Like Akhenaton, we are invited to believe, he set out to build a pristine new capital on virgin soil. Just as the young pharaoh sought to distance himself from the old gods and goddesses of Egypt, the emperor aspired to create a place that would be wholly free of pagan shrines and statuary that adorned the streets of Rome.
When we were in the school, they surrounded us.
We couldn’t account for it, how they sought us out, seemed to know we were there when we hadn’t given ourselves away. The most we could figure was they remembered places meant people. They didn’t have to know we were there to know that once we were there, that we could be there again, whether they’d ever seen us there before with their own dead eyes. Sloane and I crouch by the window at the end of the hall on the second floor.
We’re surrounded.
That other o’er the body only reigns,
And oft by force—which to a generous mind
So reigning can be no sincere delight.
Besides, to give a kingdom hath been thought
Greater and nobler done, and to lay down
Far more magnanimous, than to assume.
Riches are needless, then, both for themselves,
And for thy reason why they should be sought—
To gain a sceptre, oftest better missed.
THE RAVEN - Edgar Allan Poe
ONCE upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“ ’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly
AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.
love's torments sought a place of rest
where all might drear and lonely be
they found ere long my desert breast
and nestled in its vacancy.
The Future became the locus of the rational perfection that would be. And precisely for that reason, it was no home for proto-SF.
The Romantic wildmen who first developed the materials of science-fiction-literature-to-come were rebels against the Age of Reason. They doubted social progress, rejected perfection, and assiduously sought the irrational. The utopian Future—the heartland of rational perfection—was the last place they would find what they were looking for.
