Introducing The Concept Of Automatic Survival: Reflections on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain

At risk of making myself sound really unlikable, eight or so years ago I was in a used record store in Cambridge, Massachusetts when I realized I needed something new to read. There were a few shelves of used books, and, after turning my attention to them for less than half a minute, the spine for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain leapt out at me. With my attention caught, I pulled the book from the shelf, gazed at the cover, and then read the description. The description was short, maybe even first generation Twitter length. Hans Castorp goes to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps to visit his sick cousin, and ends up staying eleven years.

Now, if this description resonated with you as much as it did with me at the time, then read on. This book is a hard one. It’s dense. It’s one long work of irony, with every interaction and meaning having an allusion or symbolic relationship to the history of Europe and to the European continent itself. While I’ve not gotten to the bottom of all of the allusions to European history, I did get a lot of enjoyment out of reading this book. In fact, I loved this book. Sometimes a book comes into your life, like a person, and meets you where you are, and enthralls you in a way that no piece of art ever has before. That was this book for me. For me at the time, my struggle with substance abuse issues and a surgery gone wrong that had left me in chronic agonizing pain caused me to resonate deeply with Hans Castorp’s existence. Hans was a highly functional alcoholic with a nervous disposition. So was I. He liked luxury and lived a very oblivious, vaguely serious life. I also could say the same. He had some awareness of the history of his nation’s past. That I probably also shared. When Hans goes to the sanatorium and meets with the doctors there, it also mirrored my spiritual condition at that time. I had fallen into a comfortably pragmatic atheism, enabled by what I would also come to learn from the book was the product of what was not only a comfortable existence, but a relatively automatic one. If I were to re-read the novel today, the experience would be completely different, of course, as it’s been years, and we grow and change over time. But I’ve also rediscovered and reaffirmed my faith in God since then, so I’m sure the doctor characters, their dialogue and behavior would also appear completely differently to me now. At the time, though, what I remember is how powerfully the doctor characters were written, and how much I yearned for them to appear in my own life. I, too, was ill in ways I couldn’t exactly place. There was something wrong with me, of course, inside, but I didn’t know what. At the time, that was true in many senses, and in some ways still is. Now I would say, spiritually speaking, what’s wrong is that I’m a sinner, and physically, after rehab I’m much improved, but have accepted most likely I’ll continue to live with pain for the rest of my life. But at the time, I was completely bewildered, totally self-absorbed, aware of a need for self-transcendence, but knowing on a deep level, instinctually, primordially, that it was literally an impossible feat. A self cannot transcend itself under its own power, as this would be a tautology. Only someone without with the power to enable that process can choose to bestow it upon you. But let’s stay on topic.

One of the parts of the book that has stuck with me, haunting me, really, since I read it almost eight years ago, was the section in the beginning of the book on the balcony. Hans, taking a mandated rest cure on the balcony of his new room, goes on a phantasmagoric flight of fancy. In the sky he visualizes the atomic matter of the world. He watches, like a movie, the origins of life as described by evolutionists. He watches man evolving from the muck and murk. And in this passage, Mann makes extremely profound observations on the nature of political ideology. Mann observes, through Castorp’s experience, that the miracle of life and our continued, daily struggle for survival, exists always. Throughout the ages, and through the most recent ideological inventions of communism and socialism, through endless pages of intellectual pondering from dozens of philosophically minded thinkers, all along, the human species is united by one common need to survive. Material conditions, the labor theory of value, all of it are constructs built upon a system that is ultimately what every civilization has always been about, the feeding, watering, and sheltering of a humanity comprised of individuals that all share the same common experience of having to participate in ensuring each their own continued existence. As a group, but even more so as individuals, which the group is comprised of.

This section of the book, and Mann’s insight on political and socio-economic ideological thought, especially those most prevalent at the time, ruined me in a way. I’ve never been able to engage with any of them quite the same since. Mann’s idea is really very simple, but, as St. Paul says, it’s like looking through a glass darkly. Thomas Mann, who lived through both world wars, dying in the 1950s in Zurich, understood the economic philosophies of communism and socialism deeply. I’m not sure he understood capitalism as an abstraction, but in a way, his observations about pondering the origins of life, the miracle of unbroken existence up to the present day, the inherent mystery of why life exists, and why it needs to constantly feed and re-edify itself, these facts, which are even sympathetic, are the real driving factors behind all human forms of existence, and therefore can be used as a comment on capitalism all the same. They can be used to explain a vast swath of human behavior, as well as the strange behaviors exhibited by organized human society that ideologies like communism and socialism were equally trying to diagnose and explain.

Now, I as a Christian accept the Bible’s account of the world and the origins of man. And my faith, being Catholic, can complete a kind of synthesis with scientific concepts like evolution, allowing for possible integration between ensoulment and the evolutionary development of the human species on earth. However, I allow for mysticism that an enlightenment thinker simply couldn’t tolerate.

What is interesting, but not covered in The Magic Mountain, is what an explanation for what the exact ultimate goal of humanity might look like. What is the goal of industrialization? Of scientific progress? Of social progress? Communism, socialism? In all of their treatises and dogmas, what are they really trying to achieve? Building on Mann’s observations, I have since come to be convinced that what every system shares is a common human dream of automatic survival. The concept is this: survival takes work, but what if it could just be automatic? Instead of shivering, what if you just had heat and enough clothes? Instead of being hungry, what if edible food just appeared? What if drinkable water was always available in your home? Is any of this sounding familiar?

We’re living in that era now, and the reason we’ve ended up here is very simple. It’s impossible to ever know God fully, and in a Catholic view it would be doubtful that God would be creating these worldly systems that contradict the teachings of Christ, who explicitly told us not to worry about what to eat, or wear. Of course, I’m a worldly person to some extent, my faith isn’t strong enough for this yet, but it illustrates how Mann’s simple ideology of the mystery of life's origin (an ever present question without a scientifically provable answer), and the mystery of the need for survival (why do living beings need to ceaselessly integrate the world into their physical bodies to continue their survival), seems to be able to give a sane answer that explains why people would want a complicated system like communism in the first place.

Now, my ideas on automatic survival are very much intertwined currently with my thoughts on our petroleum age, our gasoline era. Did any of those questions above resonate with you? Gasoline and it’s caloric power has enabled it.

I still marvel at how much this book has stayed with me. And I continue to ponder the insight I gained from Mann. I’m not sure I would put a name to it, as it was more an observation of reality than any kind of personal political treatise, but it’s had a deep effect on my view of reality since. How close are you to automatic survival? There’s so much implication behind achieving it. It’s a concept that I’ll hopefully continue to expound upon in further articles.