This Saturday morning, November the 23rd, unable to sleep past 3:30 a.m., I sat in a sunlighten sauna in a windowless room downstairs and read a long review. (Note: in the sauna I have a folder of articles removed from magazines and meant to be read later.) Today the review was Philosopher of the Heart: The Restless Life of Soren Kierkegaard, by Clare Carlisle, published in May 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I did not intend to be reading today. I had wanted to write about Thomas Mann. But my right hand was asleep, the one that daily holds a pen and five times a week, a tennis racquet.
It has been a long time since I saw an orthopedic about my hand. I was 63 then and not on Medicare; and Ortho Virginia in Richmond would not take Tri-Care without Medicare. I had with me X-rays from our local hospital but was told they were not good enough. I remember looking at the “new” X-rays on a screen and hearing that my right hand needed surgery to clean it up.” I shook my head. Then I heard that if I did not want surgery, a shot of cortisone might give momentary relief. That’s when I remembered a fine male tennis player, Jim Courier. In an interview he had been asked about his tennis injuries. He said his only injury had been his wrist and a cortisone shot had taken care of the problem. That day I plunked out $285.00 for the x-ray, consult, and shot.
Admittedly my hands are an arthritic mess, and eighteen years later, the overused right one is increasingly numb. As I held the article with my left hand, I read about one of Kierkegaard’s well-known insights, which resonates with me, 211years after his birth.
Life can only be understood backward but must be lived forward.
Thomas Mann had not believed this. He spent the pre- WW1 years, glorifying Wagner’s passion and Nietzsche’s manliness, and somehow the global catastrophe of war remained an abstraction. Then Mann wrote Reflections, which led to his abandonment of Wagner and Nietzsche’s German romanticism.
Curiously, in the book review, I read that Kierkegaard had insisted it was the duty of the poet to preserve the memory of the hero. And what had influenced Mann’s thinking? He read a German translation of the poetry of our very own Walt Whitman, whose mystical notion of democracy helped Mann to regard democracy as inseparable from humanism. According to George Parker in his Atlantic article (see last week’s blog), Mann became the preeminent German spokesman in 1938 against Hitler in U.S. lectures.
This is only to say I will begin reading The Magician this week, which is Colm Tobin’s novel about Thomas Mann. To be continued…
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