Seeing Past Our Magic Mountains

I live and work on the Atlantic coast. My house is across the street and just a few hundred feet from one of the ocean’s countless bays. The office building where I work is less than a 10-minute walk from Boston Harbor. In short, I spend most of my time near sea level.

The absence of altitude is no stranger to me. I grew up in a flat area just a few miles south of Lake Ontario. My father’s business was located across the street from a fresh-water bay, nestled in marshlands at the bottom of two sizeable hills, one to the west and one to the east.  The low-lying location had its advantages. When I worked for Dad one summer, I brought my 10-speed bike to his building to perform some maintenance on it. I left the bike unattended for a while, only to see three boys in their early teens ride off with it. They were easily caught, as the only way they had to go in any direction was up, and the hills were too steep for a quick get-away.

I did not always dwell in lowlands. The college I attended was situated on a hill, as was my law school.

There is a chapel at the College of Wooster, a concrete structure built partially underground. It is unique among the picturesque buildings on the college’s beautiful campus. I understand it is a form of the Brutalist architecture of the 1960s, much like another building I am familiar with, Boston City Hall. When I was a student, you could easily walk from the lawn behind the chapel right onto the chapel’s roof (the rooftop access is blocked today). When you reached the top, you could look down the hill that led to the small city below. Sometimes I would go there late at night, when the street and city lights were lit, take in the peaceful view, and contemplate whatever issues I was grappling with at the time. The elevated vantage point provided valuable perspective.

After college, I attended Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York. Myron Taylor Hall, the main law school building, is situated at the southern end of campus, almost at the top of the hill “far above Cayuga’s waters.” During my first year, I lived in a dorm connected to the building, named after Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a former Cornell Law professor. At the beginning of my second year, I moved into a six-bedroom house with five of my classmates. The house was at the bottom of the large, steep hill that led to campus. Many weekdays I would walk to campus by climbing up a sometimes slippery and slightly treacherous path that ran along one of the beautiful gorges surrounding the University. When the path was icy, and especially when I walked down the hill to return home, I half-expected that I would lose my footing and disappear into the cascading stream below, never to be heard from again. I sometimes wondered how many of my classmates would notice I was gone.

It seemed fitting to receive both my undergraduate and graduate educations at lofty heights. The rarefied atmosphere of elevated perches somehow symbolized the journey into higher areas of learning and development that we, as students, had undertaken. Where better than a hilltop to contemplate the centuries of human experience described and analyzed by historians, social scientists, natural scientists, philosophers, theologians, poets, playwrights and novelists? Where better than higher ground to wrestle with the heady, complex legal principles that form the infrastructure of Western civilization? The ability to remove oneself for months at a time from the daily demands of ordinary life and find refuge in a proverbial ivory tower magnified the experience and intensified the learning that occurred there.

That is probably why, as a student of literature, I so appreciated Thomas Mann’s novel, The Magic Mountain. The tale of Hans Castorp, who visits his tubercular cousin at a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, only to become a patient there himself, explores the development and education of a young man separated from the path he had planned for himself and exposed to a host of new personalities and ideas far removed from the mundane concerns of the world below. It ends (spoiler alert) with his return to his homeland and his imminent entry as a combatant in the First World War. I remember the novel as my favorite among the many I read while in college, and because it seemed to me to echo our current state of isolation during this pandemic, I have been re-reading it of late. (A bit of advice: if you like fast-paced, plot-driven books with plenty of action, this one is not for you.)

In certain ways, our lives today mirror the lives of the patients at Mann’s fictional place of rest and healing. Like the lung patients on top of the mountain, we have become isolated from our usual surroundings and our normal routines, not to mention our friends, our families, and our co-workers. We have endured repeated lockdowns and quarantines. Many of us have fled from cities to more remote areas. And we have done all of this in defense of our health.

Of course, there are also significant differences. Unlike us, the inhabitants of the magic mountain were not entirely isolated; they were physically surrounded by others who shared their medical conditions. Also, they did not have the benefit of the modern technology that allows us to simulate proximity to our families, friends, and colleagues. We have the Internet, email, Zoom, and television to keep us connected to the outside world; all they had was snail mail and the occasional visitor.

Although the analogy between the experience of Mann’s characters and our present situation is certainly imperfect, it nevertheless seems useful. We have been surviving in our metaphorical magic mountains for nearly a year now. That period of separation should have given us plenty of time to reflect on the causes of our situation, how to prevent or mitigate future outbreaks, and perhaps most important, how we might choose to live differently when it is safe to physically re-engage with the world. In some ways, we have seized the opportunity. In others, we may be squandering it.

Some of the squandering cannot be helped. Despite our isolation, many of us do not have the luxury of mountaintop reflection because, for all practical purposes, we have not shed the lives we led in the bustling valley. Rather than having time to pause and reflect on what we have been doing right, what we have been doing wrong, and how we can do better, many of us are busier than ever just struggling to keep up with our abruptly changed circumstances. Although we may be separated from our normal routines, we have retained our normal cares, all of which loom larger in our current state. Most of us still need to earn a living, to advance in our studies and careers, and, in some cases, the most difficult challenge of all, to raise our homebound children. The world did not stop turning when schools and places of business closed their doors, but navigating it did get harder.

Our ability to use this pandemic moment to review our journey and, where necessary, correct our course is limited by our circumstances. But if we do nothing more than transplant our burdens, routines, prejudices, and mistakes from our familiar lives to our unfamiliar surroundings, we will have missed the opportunity of a lifetime for real, positive change.

It may not be too late. We still can use the time remaining in physical isolation to take stock of our predicament and find a better path forward. We can use our separation from our “normal” routines to gaze beyond our immediate environs and envision a better world. We can come out of this crisis with a new sense of what we need to do as individuals, as a society, and as a species to overcome imminent global challenges, such as future pandemics, nuclear proliferation, and the looming, existential threat of climate change. In short, we can assess where we are and where we are heading, and make whatever adjustments are needed to redirect us towards a better place. The first steps are to stop, breathe, and try to look at the world as if we are seeing all of its beauty, danger, and possibilities for the first time, and to recognize that anything we may hope to achieve can be accomplished only if we work together.

The type of self-sacrifice and collective commitment needed to confront our crises has been conspicuously and dangerously absent from our response to COVID-19, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the end, I hope for nothing less than this: that, when it is time to come down from our magic mountains, we will have begun to learn to work together more cooperatively and with a greater sense of urgency to save the world. A tall and improbable order in these contentious times, no doubt, but can we really afford to settle for less?

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This is the second issue of my newsletter. My current plan is to publish a new issue every Sunday, although that timing may change. At the end of each newsletter, I hope to include links to and recommendations of other articles, blogs, podcasts, and books that I would like to share with you.

If you want to check out Thomas Mann’s famous novel, The Magic Mountain, I have read that the English translation by John E. Woods may be the best. I found that version on Amazon, and it has now replaced the e-book that I was reading. As mentioned in this post, the book is not for everyone, but it is a classic piece of 20th Century world literature by a Nobel Prize winning author, and it continues to capture my imagination.

For those who prefer nonfiction, I recently read a powerful book published last year called Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times, by Jonathan Sacks, the recently deceased Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth of Nations. It is one of the most profound, insightful, and important books I have read about the challenges of our times and the fundamental changes we need to make in our attitudes and approaches if we hope to overcome them. Highly recommended.