{"id":1125,"date":"2020-06-22T16:29:29","date_gmt":"2020-06-22T23:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/?p=1125"},"modified":"2020-06-22T16:30:55","modified_gmt":"2020-06-22T23:30:55","slug":"reading-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/reading-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"More Reading Matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

On the advice of one of Threepenny<\/em>‘s long-term subscribers, I have started reading The Magic Mountain<\/em>. I would say re-reading, but I never managed to make it through this massive Thomas Mann novel before. Though I am an immense fan of Buddenbrooks<\/em> and (more recently) Doctor Faustus<\/em>, this one always struck me as too tedious. But now I find that its splendid considerations of tedium are precisely what’s called for in our present life.<\/p>\n

Here, for instance, is a passage\u00a0from a larger section\u00a0called “Excursus on the Sense of Time”:<\/p>\n

“Many false conceptions are held concerning the nature of tedium. In general it is thought that the interestingness and novelty of the time-content are what ‘make the time pass’; that is to say, shorten it; whereas monotony and emptiness check and restrain its flow. This is only true with reservations. Vacuity, monotony, have, indeed, the property of lingering out the moment and the hour and of making them tiresome. But they are capable of contracting and dissipating the larger, the very large time-units, to the point of reducing them to nothing at all… Great spaces of time passed in unbroken uniformity tend to shrink together in a way to make the heart stop beating for fear; when one day is like the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares… We are aware that the intercalations of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene…”<\/p>\n

Pretty great, eh? \u00a0As always, I recommend the H. H. Lowe-Porter translations. She is my Constance Garnett of Mann translators, possibly inaccurate but eternally compelling as a stylist, and I prefer her to all newcomers thus far.<\/p>\n

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On the advice of one of Threepenny‘s long-term subscribers, I have started reading The Magic Mountain. I would say re-reading, but I never managed to make it through this massive Thomas Mann novel before. Though I am an immense fan … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[643,642,645,641,644],"class_list":["post-1125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-lesser-blog","tag-h-h-lowe-porter","tag-magic-mountain","tag-tedium","tag-thomas-mann","tag-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1125"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1127,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1125\/revisions\/1127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threepennyreview.com\/lesserblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}