A Centenary

Today we have a surprisingly significant literary centenary. If I had prepared myself a little better for the heavier reviews, I would have cleaned up.

In Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain", the hero Hans Castorp, who has originally gone up to the TB sanatorium in Davos to visit his cousin for three weeks and has found himself stuck there, because he has fallen in love with a Russian female inmate, finally gets to go to bed with the latter for the first and only time. He is thus symbolically condemned to seven years in the sanatorium, with an illness he cannot get rid of and, it is suggested, wouldn't even if he could. He only gets out in order to fight in World War I, which it is suggested he does not survive. Apart from the fact that poor old Hans is described as having grown up in the very street in Hamburg in which I used to live, the central seduction is described as occurring on 29th February 1908, which happened coincidentally to be Shrove Tuesday.

Nor sure what the relevance of this is, but feel it ought to be mentioed somewhere. After all, it is almost certain that this very evening someone somewhere is being seduced, to his of her eternal salvation or perdition...