Nietzsche's and Mann's Divergent Views on Wagner

Richard Wagner (Public doain)

I recently finished reading the diaries of Thomas Mann for a second time now. The first was perhapes 30 years ago. (I'd have to serach my own diaries to find the precise year) When I read this volume back then it was a library book. Earlier this summer I found it on the free books discard shelf, a real steal.

The diary entries cover only a portion of Mann's life and career. In part one we read entries from 1918 to 1921. The diary then jumps ahead to 1933 and covers the six year preceding the start of World War II.

A bit of personal trivia: The first entry is September 11, which happens to be my birthday.

There are a number of interesting details here beyond the historical context of these two periods in his life. Throughout Mann records what he is reading--Tolstoy, Cervantes, Proust, etc. He also makes note of what times he goes to bed (nearly always after reading a while), what time he wakens (usually 8 a.m.) and what medicines he is taking. He records whom he is corresponding with, and what writing project or projects he is working on.

There are numerous entries devoted to Richard Wagner, whom he writes about and goes on a lecture tour to discuss. What interested me is how divergent his views on Wagner were from Friedrich Nietzche's.

For both Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche the German composer Richard Wagner was a towering figure in 19th-century European culture. While both thinkers engaged deeply with Wagner’s music and philosophy, their perspectives reflecteddifferent relationships to his legacy and their own evolving philosophies.

* * *

In his early years Nietzsche had been a passionate Wagner enthusiast. Later, however, he became one of Wagner’s most severe critics, devoting a whole book to the guy, The Case of Wagner (1888).

Initially, Nietzsche was captivated by Wagner’s music, seeing in it a revolutionary spirit that resonated with his own philosophical ideals of breaking away from the constraints of bourgeois morality. Nietzsche admired Wagner’s grand operatic visions, particularly the blending of myth, music, and drama to create what Wagner termed the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Nietzsche saw in Wagner’s early operas, like The Ring of the Nibelung, a reflection of the Dionysian spirit—a celebration of primal, life-affirming forces that Nietzsche explored in his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

Friedrich Nietzsche

However, Nietzsche’s view of Wagner dramatically shifted as he began to see Wagner as embodying the very decadence and cultural decline that he despised. Ironically, when I read The Case of Wagner I was flying to "Sin City" on a business trip and back. There is probably no greater symbol of empty decadence than Las Vegas. The book itself is a scathing, personal attack on an artist he once revered.*

By way of contrast Mann admired Wagner and was influenced by his synthesis of music and mythology. Mann appreciated the way Wagner blended Germanic legends with profound philosophical ideas. He saw Wagner's genius and admired his innovations. In his essay The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner (1933), Mann grappled with the duality of Wagner’s genius: the grandeur of his artistic vision alongside his troubling associations with German nationalism and proto-fascist ideas. Mann recognized Wagner's flaws while still appreciating his art.  Mann was concerned that Wagner's work could be exploited by reactionary forces, a hunch that turned out to be right in the 30's.

  

The key difference between Nietzsche and Mann’s views on Wagner lies in the depth of their disillusionment. Nietzsche’s break with Wagner was total and deeply personal, stemming from philosophical disillusionment with Wagner’s later works. Mann, while critical of Wagner’s political and moral implications, maintained a more balanced view, appreciating his artistic genius while recognizing his dangerous cultural influence.  

As you reflect on your lifetime of interests and passions, what have been your greatest disillusionments? What did you learn from these experiences?

Censorship as First Step to Totalitarianism

Last night I finished reading Thomas Mann's Diaries for the second time. The Nobel Prize winner was considered one of the giants of the first half of the 20th century. This volume covers the years 1918-1921 and 1933-1939. The former is post-WWI and the latter highlights the rise of Hitler and the years leading up to WWII.

There are a number of recurring themes that make an appearance in his diaries. I was surprised at how often he took a med to sleep, and how often he mentions being uneasy and anxious. He continually mentions what he's reading (Tolstoy, Cervantes, Proust, etc.) and many of the names of people he is corresponding with.

His concerns regarding the restrictions on speech and free thought get increasingly highlighted in the late 30s. What's discouraging is seeing many of his observations playing out yet again in our own time. Here is the opening to one of Michael Shellenberger's emails from thesubstack Public News:

A little over a year ago, I participated in a public event in London with Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi. While there, I expressed my bewilderment at the censorship we had uncovered. It wasn’t the first time. When Matt and I testified before Congress in February, I also described being disoriented. After all, growing up progressive in the 1980s and 1990s, free speech was a foundational value, both for radical Leftists like myself at the time and for more moderate liberals. To watch liberal and Leftist Democrats demand censorship right in front of me was jarring, to say the least. I wondered aloud, “What is going on?” And I kept wondering until I found some answers.

I believe that my colleagues and I are now much closer to having a unified field theory of contemporary totalitarianism. We have published hundreds of articles so far on the censorship and other totalitarian tactics, including the weaponization of the FBI and CIA and the lawfare aimed at incarcerating Donald Trump, that we’ve been documenting. If I had to sum it up, I would say that there are at least four core drivers, all of which I described in a conversation I had yesterday with Russell...

--Michael Shellenberger

Are Shellenberger and friends being alarmist? How ironic that Gallup polls show that left-leaning Democrats are the ones most in favor of censoring free speech, while simultaneously declaring that Republicans are the ones determined to destroy democracy. Are the former leaders of the Sixties "Free Speech Movement" now its adversaries?

"Say it ain't so, Joe."

12 Powerful Novellas That Spoke To Me When I First Read Them

"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company." --Andre Gide

"We read to know we're not alone." --William Nicholson

* * * *

“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.” --Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

* * * *

As they say, too many books, too little time.

For Christmas yesterday one of the three books I received was Ron Chernow's much ballyhooed Grant, an imposing volume of more than a thousand pages that I've been looking forward to since I learned of its appearance. If you're looking for something shorter before you tackle your next massive volume, here are a dozen suggestions from my personal shelves with which you may temporarily divert yourself...

A Dozen Favorite Novellas

1. The Tenth Man, by Graham Greene

“When you reach a certain age you don't care about the future: it is success enough to be alive: every morning you wake with triumph.”

2. Of Mice and Men, by Steinbeck

“At about 10 o'clock in the morning the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows and in and out of the beam flies shot like rushing stars.”

Par Lagerkvist

3. Barabbas, by Par Lagerkvist

Swedish winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize whose work was introduced to the larger world by French literary giant Andre Gide. Barabbas, the story of a believer without faith, was his first international success.

4. Theseus, by Andre Gide

I became captivated by Gide's journals after discovering him in the early 90's. 1947 Nobel Prize Winner and author of 80 books, Gide stood at the center of the French literary scene from the turn of the century till his death in 1951.

5. A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean

I probably read this book five times (including audio version) and have enjoyed the film based on this story another four or five times. "Eventually, all things merge into one and a river runs through it."

6. Isabelle, by Andre Gide

“Everything's already been said, but since nobody was listening, we have to start again.” Gide is one reason for the expression belles letrtes, the crafting and transformation of words into fine art.

7. Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow

“A person can become tired of looking himself over and trying to fix himself up. You can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.”

1929 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann

8. Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann

“Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.”

9. The Sibyl, by Par Lagerkvist

“Nothing is more foreign than the world of one's childhood when one has truly left it.” The Sibyl is a strange parable of sorts that speaks to the tragic sense of life.

10. The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis

A response to the moral relativism in Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Lewis takes readers on a tour of the Afterlife by means of a bus that leaves England on a dreary afternoon. A rich, insightful read.

11. Mr. Majestyk, by Elmore Leonard

“It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.” I was introduced to Elmore Leonard by Joe Soucheray at a 1985 writer's conference. Joe was trying to write his first novel and lamented at how impressive Leonard was and his own efforts so inferior. This may not be his greatest book, but I found it an enjoyable and memorable read.

12. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”

* * * *

Not Dark Yet: Reflections on Dylan’s Song of Despair

‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. – David Foster Wallace, “Octet”

Something I’ve often wondered is why we’re so fascinated by things that frighten us. When I say “we” I do not mean to suggest that this is universal, but it does seem fairly pervasive. When sitting around a campfire we enjoy ghost stories that succeed in actually scaring us. We get a rush out of the horrors that give us nightmares. It’s a strange thing when we’re forced to choose between competing desires, whether to cover our eyes or to stare.

Sometimes I wonder if Death, or what is euphemistically called the Void or the Grim Reaper, is the real horror behind many of these stories and thereby the thing that fascinates and frightens us most deeply. Just as Victor Frankl identified the search for meaning as man’s ultimate quest, so it is that death renders all our quests meaningless. Meaninglessness is the close companion of Despair.

Despair is a scary matter that has been part of the human condition from the beginning. The Bible addresses this strangely suffocating mindset in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. From the outset the tone is set: "Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” Many of the passages in this book were so devoid of hope that Martin Luther wanted to extract it from the Sacred Scriptures.

And yet, the despair found in Ecclesiastes may well be one of the foundation stones of wisdom.

There's something compelling about despair in a certain sense. It's akin to resignation, a resignation to fate, to a recognition of one's powerlessness and life's futility, a futility that may be the first step toward the humility that gives birth to wisdom. It's the ultimate undercutting of one's sense of self-importance, as Borges lays out in A Yellow Rose.

"Not Dark Yet" speaks directly to this matter.

Shadows are falling and I’ve been here all day 
It’s too hot to sleep, time is running away 
Feel like my soul has turned into steel 
I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal 
There’s not even room enough to be anywhere 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Christopher Ricks in his Dylan’s Visions of Sin begins his fifteen-page discussion of this song with a one-word summation: Apocalypse. I can see this and he easily demonstrates that an apocalyptic theme is a recurring thread throughout Dylan's five decade career, explicit examples a-plenty beginning with "A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall" and "All Along the Watchtower" to "Whatcha Gonna Do When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky", and now here in "Not Dark Yet".

A portion of his segment on this song deals with how much Dylan’s "Not Dark Yet" corresponds with Keats’ "Ode to a Nightingale", a poem that attempts to put into words what one senses when standing on the precipice, at the edge of the abyss.

As Ricks puts it, “'Not Dark Yet' seeks – in the great phrase from Freud – to make friends with the necessity of dying.”

Well, my sense of humanity has gone down the drain 
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain 
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind 
She put down in writing what was in her mind 
I just don’t see why I should even care 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

There’s that written letter again. You may recall it from the last stanza of "Desolation Row". Something about seeing it in writing cuts us more deeply than just hearing it. We hear it, and then somehow alter it so we don’t quite hear it the way it was meant, or in some way we conveniently forget, or soften it, or dismiss it because… well, she was just frustrated and didn’t mean it. Now it’s right there, in ink, and it can’t be denied or ignored.

It’s the reality of the thing that especially hurts, causing us to distrust the beautiful, to recognize the ways in which we deceive ourselves when things seem good, forgetting that nothing ever really lasts. We’re outside the Gates of Eden now.

Well, I’ve been to London and I’ve been to gay Paree 
I’ve followed the river and I got to the sea 
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies 
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes 
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Yes, this is what Camus wrestled in his essay on Sisyphus. “Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear.” And what’s the use in looking for hope in someone else’s eyes at this point of the game. Death will render all my achievements meaningless in the end anyways.

‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’ — this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. – David Foster Wallace, “Octet”

For two years or more one of the websites to which I returned for thought stimulation was The Floating Library, which appeared to be hosted by a man named Dr. Sineokov. I had always assumed this was some elderly Russian philosopher who migrated to the West, something akin to a reclusive Solzhenitsyn in New England. What a surprise, and shock, to one day visit The Floating Library only to find that the caretaker/webmaster of this literary site was a young man of 27 who now committed suicide, at age 27.

The shock hit me more deeply than I expected. In part, because I identified with so many of the quotes he seemed to unearth on such a regular basis. Nevertheless, there were clues here, too, as toward he end they seemed to be especially bleak. Quotes from Orwell, Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Yeats, Louise Glück, Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and E.M. Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born.

In what we have agreed to call “civilization,” there resides, undeniably, a diabolic principle man has become conscious of too late, when it was no longer possible to remedy it. — E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Dylan reflects similar sentiments in the final stanza.

I was born here and I’ll die here against my will 
I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still 
Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb 
I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from 
Don’t even hear a murmur of a prayer 
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

“Suddenly I was alone with . . . I felt, that afternoon of my childhood, that a very serious event had just occurred. It was my first awakening, the first indication, the premonitory sign of consciousness. Before that I had been only a being. From that moment, I was more and less than that. Each self begins with a rift and a revelation.” — E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

For Dylan this rift and revelation occurred early in life. You don’t write songs like "Hard Rain" as a jester.

But Ricks takes a different tack here. He examines this song in a chapter titled Fortitude. In spite of the apparent futility of our life situation, our human condition and circumstances, we press on. Camus concluded that Sisyphus can choose to live for those special moments of relief from eternally rolling that boulder up the hill and utilize his time sauntering down the hill to take in the fragrance of the flowers, to absorb the splendor of the vista before shouldering his burden again.

Despair is a fiercer companion for some than for others. This is why a wise man exhorted us to "be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

Four centuries ago one of the foundation stones of the Reformation was the profound insight that “the just shall live by faith.” That message delivered countless millions from the burden of a crushing works-based medieval Catholicism. But in our modern/postmodern world it would seem to have become an overused coin, and two other “heavenly graces” have become even more necessary and needful: hope and charity.

In a world full of lies, in a world as dark as ours, hope is a miracle whose source is unseen, for what we see is a sinking twilight.

Artwork on this site is produced by ennyman

Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family

Despite the accessibility of so many resources by means of the Internet, libraries remain an invaluable treasure. For many years it would be my habit to mine certain sections and take out piles of books, gleaning all and reading a couple. One of the sections I mined for a while was the literary criticism section, somewhere in the 800s, if I remember correctly. One of these volume was a book devoted to the three highest peaks in the mountain range of literary figures in the first half of the twentieth century. These three authors were Andre Gide, James Joyce and Thomas Mann.

Joyce I had been familiar with because the fellow across the hall from me in my sophomore year in college had a whole shelf of books about Ulysses, including 20 various versions or the original (if my memory is accurate.) I set about to become familiar with Gide and Mann by reading their works and reading the journals. I wanted to get inside these writer's minds, and t was a rewarding experience.

The novel that put Mann on the map and contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize for literature was Buddenbrooks, a novel that outlines the decline of a great family over four generations. Here is a description of the book as presented at Goodreads.

Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.

It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks’ decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and funerals, weddings and divorces, recipes, gossip, and earthy humor.

In its immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modern family chronicles. With remarkable fidelity to the original German text, this superb translation emphasizes the magnificent scale of Mann’s achievement in this riveting, tragic novel.

This novel came to mind as I have been reading three other books about the decline not of a family but of a society. Are declines inevitable?

Historically, all great societies rise and fall. We must ask ourselves, why not America? While reading Charles Murray's Coming Apart, which I will talk more about later this week, the statistical facts are nearly indisputable. The strange thing to me is that he does not have a pessimistic view of the future.

A second book I'm reading is called The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson. The cover photo shows an abandoned house with the roof partially caved in. It's the price of complacency. I'm not far enough along to see if he's optimistic at the end, but the case is well made that there's much to be concerned about.

Then there's Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future. Stiglitz notes that the global economic meltdown that cost us trillions of dollars and from which we have yet to fully recover will repeat itself because the causes have never been addressed. In fact, the one-per-centers were rewarded in the end.

The review for this book includes this: Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz exposes the efforts of well-heeled interests to compound their wealth in ways that have stifled true, dynamic capitalism. Along the way he examines the effect of inequality on our economy, our democracy, and our system of justice.

The decline feels inevitable from where I sit, an attitude that leaves one dangerously complacent about it all. In the end such complacency will destroy us, for it solves nothing. Perhaps that's why so many seem to be on the track of "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die."

Hmmmm. I'll try for something more upbeat tomorrow.

Air

Swiss Miss

In the fall of 1970 I was introduced to the music of the Incredible String Band, unaware that they had been introduced to U.S. audiences by virtue of their appearance at Woodstock the year before. The simple character of their songs expressed a joyful celebration of life and seemed to express that awe-attitude with which children first see the world, unfettered by social games and pre-conceived expectations.

Every now and then this song from their album Wee Tam returns to me in its entirety.

Air

Breathing, all creatures are

Brighter then than brightest star

You are by far

You come right inside of me

Close as you can be

You kiss my blood and the blood kiss me

It's a wonder how the air we breathe goes right inside of us, not simply into our lungs, but all the way into our very beings. The wonderful, incredible way in which oxygen is carried by the blood stream and its tributaries and capillaries to nourish and cleanse every cell in our bodies is a wonder of creation.

Breathing is something we usually take for granted. But until our last breath, it’s the ongoing miracle that sustains us.

At the end of a busy day we can sometimes collapse in our beds so weary and spent we have no energy left for anything, even reading. Yet we go on breathing, replenishing our cells, sustaining our bodies with vital air.

I am reminded of the instructions Tom Hanks gave himself in the film Castaway. “Just keep breathing.”

And I am likewise reminded of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, a book whose opening chapter was initiated by visits to a sanatorium high in the Swiss Alps while his wife was suffering from lung issues. The thin air at high altitudes was likely more accessible to lungs whose passages have been swollen or constricted by asthma or tuberculosis. In other words, breathing is something most of us take for granted, but many can not.

Air is something real that we all believe in yet seldom see. That, I find, is a fascinating concept.

Whatever else you're doing today, please keep breathing