The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann & the Natures of Love & Death
“Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death.”
Where Books and Readers Come Together
“Death and love—no, I cannot make a poem of them, they don’t go together. Love stands opposed to death.”
“Suppose a vast number of civilizations are distributed throughout the universe, on the order of the number of detectable stars. Lots and lots of them. Those civilizations make up the body of a cosmic society. Cosmic sociology is the study of the nature of this super-society” (p 12).
Captain Beatty, in Fahrenheit 451, imagines how fire is much like censorship, both eradicated knowledge: “‘It’s perpetual motion…. What is fire? It’s a mystery… Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences.’”
Writers write to feed that demon-babe who cries out from the misery the world has inflicted upon it. Hemingway and Orwell wanted to use their gifts to help change the world for the better. And the world, I believe, is glad they did.



