Passing time with Kastorp

Back from Greenville and Athens, a pretty good few days of driving. I will spare you extensive commentary from my passage through generic Trump country, except to note of course the cancerous predominance of enormous pick-up trucks, the near omni-absence of masks in stores and a high point -- a billboard somewhere in northern South Carolina -- to the extent that that's not an oxymoron -- that proclaimed that Trump got 120 million votes. Out of 157 million, of course.

Mostly I was unable to pay attention to such trifles because my attention was riveted, riveted -- I tell you -- by my book. Something deep within me had told me it was time to take on one of Thomas Mann's longer novels. My office mate David convinced me that if I had to choose, and I did, it should be the 1924 The Magic Mountain rather than Buddenbrooks. I chose the older rather than the newer translation of the book because I liked the voice of the narrator on Audible better -- it is read by a dulcet-toned Scot. The book is 800ish pages long, which translates into 37 hours of narration, so in principle the 11 hour round trip drive should have gotten me a quarter of the way through. It did not. I had to listen to some music.

Which is not to say it is not a good book, engrossing in its own way. In the 7-odd hours I listened to, our hero -- Hans Kastorp -- comes to a sanatorium at Davos to visit his cousin Joachim, who is stricken by tuberculosis. Kastorp is not, or... is he? It's not entirely clear from the first 7 hours. No spoilers, please.

Much thinking and reflection is done in the book, much of it very relevant to both a long road trip and to passing through a pandemic. Considerations of such questions as the passage of time and the perception of the passage of time, and how such concepts as "eventfulness" impact the latter. Does eventfulness make time pass more quickly or more slowly?

Faithful readers of the blog will recall, of course, that we have discussed such questions here on occasion, how our perception of time seems to accelerate as we age and pass milestones, but how the having of children and (dare I say it) grandchildren offers us an opportunity to re-immerse ourselves in the anticipation of milestones that offset this acceleration.

Such as December 15, the date of college Early Decision announcement. And then, after that, Christmas.