Just after college, I went to teach English as a Peace Corps volunteer in a small village school in West Africa. To help relieve the loneliness, I packed a shortwave radio, a Sony Walkman, and, among other books, a paperback copy of Thomas Mann's very long novel The Magic Mountain. As soon as I set foot in Togo, something began to change. My pulse kept racing; my mouth went dry and prickly; dizzy spells came on. I developed a dread of the hot silence of the midday hours, and an awareness of each moment of time as a vehicle for mental pain.
It might have helped if I'd known that my weekly antimalarial medicine could have disturbing effects, especially on dreams (mine were frighteningly vivid), or if someone had mentioned the words anxiety and depression to me. At 22, I was a psychological innocent. Without the comfort of a diagnosis, I experienced these changes as a terrifying void of meaning in the universe. I had never noticed the void before, because I had never been moved to ask the questions Who am I? What is life for? Now I couldn't seem to escape them, and I received no answers from an empty sky.
I might have lost my mind if not for The Magic Mountain. By luck or fate, the novel-which was published 100 years ago, in November 1924—seemed to tell a story a little like mine, set not in the West African rainforest but in the Swiss Alps. Hans Castorp, a 23-year-old German engineer, leaves the "flatlands" for a three-week visit to his cousin Joachim, a tuberculosis patient who is taking the cure in one of the high-altitude sanatoriums that flourished in Europe before the First World War. Hans Castorp (Mann's detached and amused, yet sympathetic, narrator always refers to the protagonist by his full name) is "a perfectly ordinary, if engaging young man," a slightly comical young bourgeois.
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The Dark Origins of Impressionism
How the violence and deprivation of war inspired light-filled masterpieces
The Magic Mountain Saved My Life
When I was young and adrift, Thomas Manns novel gave me a sense of purpose. Today, its vision is startlingly relevant.
The Weirdest Hit in History
How Handel's Messiah became Western music's first classic
Culture Critics
Nick Cave Wants to Be Good \"I was just a nasty little guy.\"
ONE FOR THE ROAD
What I ate growing up with the Grateful Dead
Teaching Lucy
She was a superstar of American education. Then she was blamed for the country's literacy crisis. Can Lucy Calkins reclaim her good name?
A BOXER ON DEATH ROW
Iwao Hakamada spent an unprecedented five decades awaiting execution. Each day he woke up unsure whether it would be his last.
HOW THE IVY LEAGUE BROKE AMERICA
THE MERITOCRACY ISN'T WORKING. WE NEED SOMETHING NEW.
Against Type
How Jimmy O Yang became a main character
DISPATCHES
HOW TO BUILD A PALESTINIAN STATE There's still a way.