Shedding a Light

Posted on July 21, 2025 by Lee

In the third part of Les Misérables, Victor Hugo describes the street-urchin of 19th century Paris in a sweeping, comic-philosophical style that Henry Miller must have admired, leaping from one pithy aphorism to the next to give us a portrait of the type:

“[The street-urchin of Paris] has bad teeth because he is underfed, and fine eyes because he has sharp wits.”

“He fights with both hands and feet.”

“He has two consuming ambitions, never achieved: to overthrow the government and to get his trousers mended.”

And so on. And it might seem for a moment that Hugo is romanticising poverty here, turning child poverty into something that makes its victims heroic and adds colour to the tapestry of life. But then Hugo strikes home with the line:

“In a word, [the street-urchin] amuses himself because he is unhappy.”

And from this point the tone shifts. Hugo writes about “light” and the importance of shedding it upon poverty. The implication seems to be: if only enough light can be shed upon the situation then the mass of people will see how bad their situation really is and some kind of revolution will be inevitable. Without this light, people will continue to suffer in the dark, perhaps believing their problems to be uniquely theirs and unaware that their troubles belong not just to themselves but to humanity as a whole.

But if light leads to social change, and Hugo shed his light so well, why are there still people unhoused and underfed? I think the answer is that poverty looks different now. Many of the problems of the past have been solved, the street-urchin of this particular historical type can no longer be found in Paris, and so it’s easy to get the impression that poverty is behind us. And the irony is that we are now able to romanticise the poverty of the 19th century in our adaptations and re-readings of Hugo and Dickens, since the particular character of poverty in those books now belongs to another world.

But what Hugo is reminding us in these pages is the importance of shedding light on the problems of every generation; in other words, that the work is never done. Poverty still exists, and so art is still necessary. This is why those who want to dominate the poor by keeping them poor will so often do their utmost to crush the arts: they fear the light that art can shed and the new visions for humanity that arise from the dreams of philosophers.

(I’ve been reading Norman Denny’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.)

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Victor Hugo Takes His Time

Posted on July 14, 2025 by Lee

I’m reading Les Misérables for the first time and I really enjoy the way Victor Hugo takes his time telling a story. The battle of Waterloo is discussed at length, and many details of it described, just so that a single scene can be played out at the end of the battle in which a man, left on the battlefield for dead, is come across by chance and saved so that he can later play a part in Hugo’s story.

The scene feels real because of all that has until this point been described: Hugo has described the crush of horses and men that led to the pile of corpses under which the man is buried and so we can vividly imagine the horror of it; the historical significance of the battle has been pressed upon us, lending the scene a kind of ominous weight, the meeting of two men aligning with the fall of Napoleon. In other words: the action is placed into a real context and so it feels all the more real than it might have done.

Was it necessary to go into so many details of the battle before describing this scene? No, but then again nothing in literature is strictly necessary. A work of art has its effect, and there is no denying that if the artist had proceeded differently, the effect would have been different. Hugo might have told his story with the barest bones: we all know the battle of Waterloo happened, and it was on this battlefield that this man was found by this other man, and it was because of this chance occurrence that a connection was formed between them. This would be if all Hugo wanted was to tell the story. But Hugo writes so that his readers can immerse themselves in a world, and given that the book is 1200 or more pages long, they have plenty of time to do that.

Literature is a product of choices on the part of the author, rather than their having some divine insight into the right or the wrong way of doing things. Some will criticise Hugo for being long-winded, while others (like me) are glad that there are and have been souls in the world who see the value in taking their time.

(I’ve been reading Norman Denny’s translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Denny’s introduction contains an interesting discussion of Hugo’s “extravagance” as a writer due to his being “incapable of leaving anything out”; Denny is one of those who thinks Hugo too long-winded, calling the inclusion in the novel of the detailed account of the battle of Waterloo “indefensible.”)

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Rules for Writing

Posted on April 3, 2025 by Lee

I’m trying to write something for my Substack, which I haven’t updated in months, and it’s got me realising how much I still have to learn about the business of writing.

I’m reading Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and thinking about the art of story-telling.

As you probably know, The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories, framed as tales told by a bunch of pilgrims to entertain each other as they travel to Canterbury.

Chaucer was, of course, one of the greatest writers of all time, so it’s not surprising he knows how to make these stories riveting and memorable. It’s made me realise that there’s at least two things you have to do when writing a story: take your time but don’t be boring.

Take your time because however long or short your story is, you mustn’t rush past any details that might make the story more enjoyable for your reader. One of my favourite writers is Lydia Davis, who famously writes very short stories indeed, but I would argue even she follows this rule. To make a short story truly good, the reader shouldn’t feel that anything is missing from it. The author didn’t rush the job, but took her time making sure the story is told as well as it needs to be.

I suppose it’s a bit like the art of writing haiku: the authors of these little poems take their time making sure that every relevant sensation is captured in just a few lines.

And I suppose the other rule is obvious: when making sure to paint a full picture for your reader, it can be easy to include unnecessary details, and your readers’ attention will start to wander.

There’s obviously a bit of a balance to be struck if you’re going to follow both rules at once.

One of the ways Chaucer achieves this balance, holding the readers’ attention while filling out his stories with vivid detail, is by making his characters so interesting, by which I mean in his descriptions of the people who tell the stories. The General Prologue gives a little portrait of each one, and when it comes time to tell their tale, we can see why they in particular have chosen to tell it. For example, the Miller tells his own bawdy tale of adultery as a kind of rebuttal to the knight’s tale of courtly love.

So maybe there’s another rule that underlies the two I’ve already mentioned: write with purpose. Each narrator in The Canterbury Tales knows exactly why they’re telling the tale they’ve chosen to tell, and this is what makes sure they take the time and find enjoyment in telling their tale as it needs to be told.

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Solitude and Struggle

Posted on March 28, 2025 by Lee
Photo by Valentin Kremer on Unsplash

Haven’t blogged for a while. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write, why write, why share what I write.

I write almost every day and I know at least why I do that: it’s for myself, to get my thoughts in order, which is part of the process of generating new ideas and forms. Writing down ideas the struggle is often to express them clearly, and it’s in this struggle and I find myself expanding upon them, developing those thoughts and imagining new things. It gets the brain whirring, makes you feel alive.

Henry David Thoreau apologises for writing in the first person but then says: all writing is essentially in the first person. The writer is always writing from their own point of view. You can try to disguise it however you want.

Thoreau’s instruction to writers is: write your own truth, your own experience, your own thoughts. Every individual has their own unique perspective to share. What a waste to follow others, to write only what ideas seem acceptable to others, and let your own unique perspective be forgotten. You have something to say, so say it.

If you don’t feel like you have something to say then write anyway because it will emerge in the process of writing.

Perhaps I’m being too general assuming everyone can get it out by writing. But there are other ways to express yourself. The point is: don’t hide your truth; express yourself in whatever you do.

Perhaps I’m an idealist but I can’t help thinking if more people not only spoke their minds but actually did what was in their hearts instead of doing what they think their “duty” or what “common sense” dictates, or acting out of fear, then we might have built ourselves a better world by now and the latest news wouldn’t be every day that we’re once again on the brink of Armageddon.

Thoreau writes in the first person, but he doesn’t only write about himself. The book is really advice to the reader on how to live. Nevertheless it’s a personal work, because he has learned what he’s learned from his own experience. He writes about the “factitious cares and superfluously coarse labours” that make many lives a burden and he urges us to simplify our lives and free ourselves from those cares. The goal of life is to care for oneself and for other human beings, and that is often forgotten in the daily struggle.

I’m currently writing a story based on a tale in the One Thousand and One Nights. It’s about a woman who goes to sea and is blown off course to a strange shore, and ends up discovering a city where everyone has been turned into stone. The short version of the story is: she finds one survivor in the city who escaped the curse, falls in love with him, and persuades him to sail away with her and her crew. But the crew have by then piled the ship up with treasure from the cursed city, and are jealous of their share of the loot, and throw both the woman and the man overboard. The man drowns, while the woman is saved and, with the aid of the spirit who saved her, gets her revenge…

I think about this man who remained in a city filled with statues of the people of his past, alone for seven years with only memories and grim reminders of those memories, and I realise he must have been a writer. Most people would have left the city long before that ship arrived, to find living people to be around, but a writer can do a lot with memories and a bit of peace and quiet.

It’s not surprising that Thoreau has to remind himself and his like-minded readers how important is love for oneself and for one’s fellow human beings; the lonesome struggle can be so all-consuming that we forget why we were put here in the first place.

(I’ve been reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau.)

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Angels and Alchemists

Posted on December 3, 2024 by Lee

There are lots of tantalising ideas in Gary Lachman’s The Quest for Hermes Trismegistus. For one, the notion of a prisca theologia (“ancient theology”) or “perennial philosophy” that was handed to humankind at the dawn of time but has since been forgotten.

Imagine the human beings of the dawn of time. They have not invented writing, agriculture, or anything really, and yet they are able to hold in their minds the simple answer to “life, the universe, and everything…” It suggests that anyone could do it; any one of us could suddenly have the answer just strike us and life would become meaningful and everything would slot into place.

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer is built to provide a definitive answer to the question of the meaning of life. Famously, the simple answer is “42”… unfortunately this answer is useless unless you know what the question is, but the implication is that the question would be something equally simple which, slotted together with the answer, would miraculously solve all life’s problems.

Lachman makes a distinction between episteme and gnosis. Both terms mean “knowledge,” but while the former is the concept of knowledge as arrived at through reason and experience, “gnosis” means direct, intuited knowledge. In other words: revealed truth. Or to put it yet another way: God just directly whispers the truth into your ear and now you know the answer.

Lachman draws on Carl Jung to illustrate what gnosis looks like: when asked whether he believed in God, Jung famously said perhaps not: he knew that God existed and so had no need for belief. “Belief” suggests a mediated, indirect, and conditional relationship to the thing you believe you know. If the evidence changed, you would cease to believe. (Think Bertrand Russell reaching the gates of Heaven and asking: “Where was the evidence?” The angel replies: that’s not how faith works. God wants his followers to be faithful. If your faith is conditional then it’s not faith.)

But if the answer to the question of the meaning of life is really as simple as “42,” how would human beings have come to forget it? Lachman writes about Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to have spoken with angels. Swedenborg wrote that angelic language “has nothing in common with human language” and that angels can “set down in a few words the contents of many written pages.” If an angel speaks to you, you suddenly know deep complicated truths that would have taken much longer for a human being to explain. The problem is that you, being human, can’t articulate what you’ve just learned. You just know.

To the angel, the answer is as simple as “42.” To the human listening, the answer is an explosion of earth-shattering visions which, even half-remembered, change their perspective on life forever.

So according to the story of prisca theologia, ancient human beings would have heard the truth from angels, known that truth, and then been unable to pass that truth on except in fragments. Unless visited by angels again, humanity would gradually lose that original knowledge. Or even if a few of us were visited by angels from time to time since then — as people sometimes claim to be — we’d be hard pushed to pass on what we’d learned to everyone else.

The concept of prisca theologia suggests that fragments of the original truth are contained in the many religions that have existed since the beginning of time; every religious text is a human, all too human attempt to put down in language at least part of the truth once revealed in an explosive angelic vision. So perhaps the thing to do, if you want to discover true wisdom by means of episteme, is study and learn what the world’s religions and philosophies have in common, without ever being foolish enough to think that the whole truth is found in a fragment, in just one religion or point of view.

Or you could opt for the way of gnosis and just sit quietly and wait for an angel to whisper the answer to you. I feel like this is what I am doing when I sit down to read poetry. What else does good poetry do than attempt to express in language what is expressible only in visions? While philosophy and theology will try to break down big ideas into human language, poetry makes language anew, experimenting with meaning for the special purpose of expressing a truth subtly felt. Could it be that it is the poets who are doing the real work of the philosophers, bringing us closer to truth by forcing human language to evolve into the language of the angels?

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The Politics of Eternal Winter

Posted on November 8, 2024 by Lee

Sometimes things can happen that make you think: the world has become a terrible place. But I think it’s refreshing to remind yourself that things got really bad a long time ago.

We’re all familiar with some version of the “Ages of Man” from ancient Greek mythology: there was a golden age in which people were happy and free and never aged; then came a silver age worse then the golden; then came bronze, which was worse still; then iron.

In Robert Graves’ retelling of the myth, the golden human beings personally knew the gods, to the extent that Alalcomeneus, the first man, was tutor to Athena and marriage counsellor to Zeus and Hera. That’s how great the first human beings were: made in the gods’ image, they were more or less gods themselves, having powers enough to lend the gods assistance.

Ovid tells us that what characterises the golden age is that people did what was right and just without being forced to do so; there was no need for law. There was also no need for moats and fortifications, city walls, armed guards… What was it allowed this peaceful coexistence? It was the fact that there was plenty to go around. No one could feel any need to fight for land or resources, there being plenty of fruit falling from the trees, clear water to drink… And it was always spring, meaning there was never any bitter cold to shelter from.

Ovid has it that it was the fall of the Titans and the new reign of the Olympian gods that ended the golden age. For some reason, Zeus decided to divide the year into four seasons, which forced human beings to seek places to shelter for part of the year, and created the need to store up supplies to get through the winter months. Demeter had to teach mortals the secrets of agriculture so that they could produce enough food to store away through the unforgiving months.

Photo by Minna Autio on Unsplash

It seems odd that Zeus would just decide to divide up the year and make things worse. Bad PR for Zeus, but perhaps the true story makes him look even shoddier. In truth, the seasons came into being because Zeus allowed his brother, Hades, to kidnap Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, and take her down to Hell. Demeter went to Zeus for help but Zeus pretended not to know where Persephone was, and so Demeter had to search on her own. All the while she searched, she did not attend to her divine duty of making sure the trees produced fruit and that mortals had enough to eat, and that was the first winter on Earth. Too late, Zeus realised he had to step in and help Demeter, else her misery would cause human beings to be wiped out forever.

So Zeus tells her that Hades has Persephone and Demeter goes and gets her daughter back. Only, Persephone is by now enchanted by Hades’ magic, and in love with him, and though she returns to earth with her mother, for half of every year she goes back down to Hell to be with her husband. And all the while Persephone is gone, Demeter mourns and there is winter on Earth.

So winter exists because Zeus allowed his brother to commit a terrible crime, and he tries to spin it to look like it was an executive decision.

In monotheistic religions, believers sometimes like to say that any evil that occurs is part of “God’s plan.” Well we see Zeus is trying to pull that one too, by pretending there is some great divine wisdom behind the concept of winter. But no: he made a mistake. And being the world’s first politician, he’ll never apologise for a mistake.

And since he won’t admit a mistake was made, and instead he’s pretending that winter was a great idea of his, he’ll never try to fix the situation either.

As human beings we’re in the same position now as the gods were back then. We see around us winter: misery, poverty, war… And we pretend that this is somehow the best of all possible worlds rather than a situation we’ve fallen into through a series of cosmic errors. We pretend that wars are justified, and that poverty for half the world is just the way of things. Sound economics, or all part of God’s plan. Instead of making excuses for the winter which we’ve made for ourselves, why not decide it’s time for spring? There’s plenty to go around and there’s never any excuse to provoke violence. But the PR folks will always try to spin it that somehow destruction and scarcity are all for the best.

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Rushing Ahead

Posted on August 28, 2024 by Lee

A paradox: standing around waiting is a kind of rushing ahead. Though the queue barely crawls forward, your mind is rushing ahead to the future, consuming every present moment greedily as if to move more quickly towards the anticipated event. The queue is of no interest to you; you just want to go in and enjoy the concert. And of course the future event, when it arrives, will become just another present moment, to be greedily consumed as fast as all the previous ones were. The concert turned out to be just a pleasant blur of sights and sounds, becoming one long moment to be consumed in one bite.

Hans Castorp is in love, and so of course he is happy to consume every present moment that isn’t spent with her, in his hurry to see her again. And then their meeting is over in a flash. It’s a foolish way to live, because all anyone has is the present moment. It’s foolish to squander everyting you have. But love makes a person foolish.

The narrator of The Magic Mountain tells us that a person who is awake is more moral than one who dreams. Thomas Mann means this literally; we do wild things in our dreams that we would never contemplate in real life. But it also reflects the “reality” of the magic mountain itself, a dreamlike reality where ordinary morals seem suspended, as people carry on their affairs and become indifferent to the deaths of other patients. Hans Castorp takes advantage of this dreamlike looseness of the mountain as he pursues his affair; the only person who can break the spell is the rationalist Settembrini, who questions Hans’s ideas. Hans is beginning to find Settembrini’s clarity of thought to be a real source of discomfort.

Hans talks to Settembrini about getting “used in time to not getting used,” which means getting used to the fact that a situation is intolerable. A paradoxical way to describe a sensible idea: if you can’t change something you feel is intolerable, what are you going to do but eventually accept it? Perhaps Hans is talking about his own affair when he says this; if every present moment is intolerable, perhaps it makes some kind of sense to gobble them all up quickly to arrive at the one moment of peace every week that love brings. Hans has found a solution to the problem of the intolerability of the moment. Settembrini shakes his head at Hans’s carelessness of time, but Mann makes sure that his readers can see the logic of it.

(I’ve been reading H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)

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Time to Think Things Over

Posted on August 21, 2024 by Lee

Now that Hans himself has fallen ill, time moves differently. Every day is the same and it’s as if a single day has stretched out to become one impossibly long day. There’s not much difference between day and night when you are forced to spend all of your time resting in bed.

Photo by Gabriel Tenan on Unsplash

He has a lot of time to think. He’s always taken a serious attitude towards life but now he’s rethinking all that. What seemed important “down there” in “the flatland” doesn’t seem so important here. His fellow resident Settembrini still holds on to, and speaks at length about, notions of “progress” and “freedom,” but Hans seems to have been lulled somehow by the magic of the mountain, causing him to question the importance of these things. Settembrini is a windbag who takes himself too seriously.

Joachim points out that they just can’t know when they will be well enough again to return to life below. Hans sees that his cousin means this in a pessimistic sense, but “I don’t know” is really a neutral thing to say; if we really don’t know then it might be sooner than we expect. Hans is beginning to embrace neutrality towards things as everything in life seems to become less and less serious. You might say he’s becoming more cheerful.

It’s not just that he’s neutral in his expectations; he’s neutral towards the outcome too. He’s starting to take a neutral stance towards time itself, so that whether it’s seven weeks, months, or years that he spends up here, it will be all the same.

The magic of the mountain has the same effect on Hans as a disease; the mountain is a place of both magic and disease. Hans has granted himself all the time in the world to think things over, to reassess his life, and if external factors don’t eventually intervene, perhaps he’ll spend the rest of his life just contemplating the various possibilities of the life he might have lived below.

(I’ve been reading H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)

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Magic and Reason on the Mountain

Posted on August 14, 2024 by Lee

Here on the magic mountain, the seasons get all mixed up. Hans can’t believe that on the third day of his visit, after days of hot sun, suddenly there is cold and snow. Joachim explains to him: yes the seasons work differently here; every month, January to December, has a bit of snow, a bit of summer sunshine. You get all the seasons here, but not in the usual order.

Image by chriszwettler from Pixabay

Rather than making things exciting, not knowing what the weather will be like one day to the next in fact creates a kind of monotony; every month, with its identical mixture of summer and winter days, is the same as every other. All this adds to the illusion that time passes strangely up here, or doesn’t pass at all.

Hans is still resisting the pressure to take up the ways of the inmates here. He will get himself some extra blankets to help fend off the cold, but he won’t get one of the “sacks” that everyone else has here. If he buys some blankets he can always take them home with him, but a fur sleeping sack would be a strange thing to have down below, being an item that seems uniquely fit for the purpose of living up here on the mountain.

It’s not just Hans who resists the magic of the mountain. Settembrini, a resident here, is always complaining about the strange rules and practices of this place. He openly defies the doctors here, doing as he pleases in many regards. For example, he skips the doctor’s Sunday lectures; Settembrini doesn’t need instruction from someone like him. While the doctor engages in bizarre, occult theories, Settembrini is a rationalist who believes in science and progress.

But it’s the doctor who thinks himself the practical one and the man of science. His lecture is all about conscious drives and what happens when they are suppressed; it sounds like it is very much informed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Of course, a lot of people today are very sceptical about Freud, his ideas being no longer at the cutting edge, and so perhaps Settembrini is ahead of his time.

Another character, a brewer who Settembrini happens to talk to, says literature is just about “beautiful characters.” Settembrini, a man of letters, cannot agree. If literature were just about making pretty stories then a rationalist like Settembrini would have no interest in it. For Settembrini, art is a serious pursuit in direct opposition to the foggy-mindedness encouraged on the magic mountain, as he will explain at length if you’ll let him. After their conversation, Hans is still confused about what Settembrini thinks the point of literature is if not “beautiful characters”; he thinks it must be “beautiful words.” But I think it’s clear to us, as readers, that this can’t be true either; that would still be too shallow a concept of literature. The clue to Settembrini’s actual belief can be found in what Hans says next, when he calls Settembrini a “born objector,” in other words a complainer; the whole point, not just of literature but of a rational existence of any kind, is to question things, to tear holes in reality and make the world new and better by revealing what possibilities lie beyond, through the gaps that we create. Why passively accept things as they are? In an imperfect world, we should be open to new possibilities, and so it’s rational to make the attempt to create new stories for ourselves.

(I’ve been reading H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)

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A Cigar is Just a Cigar

Posted on August 7, 2024 by Lee

On the “magic mountain,” what once seemed serious to you will become trivial. Death, for example: Joachim thinks that illness and death might “just be a sort of loafing about” and nothing really to worry about. We’re born, we live our lives, and then we get eternity to just lie around. And what’s eternity, here on the magic mountain? If “time” doesn’t mean anything here then neither does “eternity.”

Hans Castorp says: first you are interested in something, and then comes understanding of it. The people here on the mountain become uninterested in time and death; it’s engineered that way, since when a person dies at the clinic it’s all kept very quiet so as not to shock anyone. Losing interest in these big themes, understanding of them dies off too; the anxieties of life “down there” become incomprehensible to those of us up here on the mountain. But a lack of interest in one thing means that attention is focused on something else. As interest is drawn away from the bigger things, it becomes directed towards the trivial. Hans is thinking about his cigars and the meal he just ate and perhaps soon he’ll come to some interesting conclusions.

Cigars don’t taste good up here, says Hans. That bothers him. A trivial concern but we get the sensation that it points to something bigger, and we’ve got another 600 pages to learn what it is. Hans will surely soon learn to live without his cigars; just one of the many changes that can occur up here. A trivial change, but important and serious enough to Hans. Though his focus is on a plain old cigar, he’s pondering the meaning of it, of this change in his appetite. He is still clinging on to the notion that something big and essential lies behind mere appearances.

Image by Erwin from Pixabay

Isn’t this a lot like how it feels to be a writer? The big themes are pushed aside once you get to the business of actually trying to tell a story. The writer tends to focus on the everyday and the ordinary. If it’s not ordinary then who will relate to it? The trick of good writing seems to be to make the big themes shine through the little things.

Joachim says: “lately” to refer to a thing that happened eight weeks ago. He mocks Hans for his fussy precision when it comes to talking about time. It seems to me that Joachim is far from where an artist would want to be: he is wholly focused on the ordinary and immediate, and the big themes are lost to him. It is Hans who is more the artist at this point, though by profession he is an engineer; it’s through his artist’s eye that we see the events of the story; as a new guest at the mountain, as an outsider, he still stands between the serious and the trivial, seeming almost to find the secret of time, transformation, and death – all in the strange taste of a once familiar cigar.

(I’ve been reading H.T. Lowe-Porter’s translation of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.)

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