Rabbit Rabbit #23: “We’re Never Cold”
The Insularity of Illness in Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Haynes’ Safe
Julianne Moore in Safe
In her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf writes, “There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional) a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.” Woolf, who struggled throughout her lifetime with ailments both mental and physical, points out the lack of literature concerning illness and disease. The sick, she argues, possess a quiet potential for insight– “lying recumbent,” they are rendered witnesses to the inner workings of nature and beauty, of the great mystery of our corporeality. “Someone should write to The Times about it,” she muses, aghast.
I decided to revisit Woolf’s essay after engaging with two texts that bookend the twentieth century, one a lengthy German novel and the other a cult-favorite film, that examine illness as a collective experience– the coming together of a group of people who share in their suffering. Woolf was writing from a place of profound isolation, left to her solitary –albeit brilliant– thoughts, and penned this piece fifteen years before her 1941 death by suicide.
Thanks to innovations in medical technology and language as well as shifts in cultural attitudes towards mental health, it’s easier to receive care now than in Woolf’s time, but there is a great mystery at the heart of illness as a state of being that remains even today. Think of chronic illnesses and autoimmune disorders, about which research is perpetually conducted, and yet we know next to nothing. The twenty-first century has seen unprecedented growth in the beauty and wellness industries compounded by the digital age, including the rise of holistic and functional medicine, the emergence of new drugs and supplements (see: Ozempic), and the incorporation of wellness in the workplace. Threading these innovations together is a sense of togetherness, a collective effort towards immaculate health and thus spiritual transcendence, that is simultaneously motivating and deeply chilling.
Health is a privilege, so when we don’t have it, it’s natural to seek answers, and consequently seek out other people with the same questions. In effect, we crave community in sickness equally, if not more than, in health to remind us that we aren’t alone. There is an inherent insularity to communities centered around illness, especially illnesses without a known cure, that can be both instrumental and detrimental to healing. The two texts I have selected analyze this insularity with, I think, curiosity and empathy. They ask, what truths are “blurted out” amongst the ill, especially within a community? Moreover, what does it mean –indeed, what has it always meant– to be sick?
Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain follows the journey of Hans Castorp, a young engineer who visits his sick cousin at a luxury tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. Intending to stay for three weeks, he ends up staying seven years. The sanatorium, called the Berghof, is based on Mann’s real-life experience visiting his wife Katia at the Waldsanatorium in Davos in 1912, where she was treated for a minor lung issue. Throughout his unexpected seven-year stay, which concludes with the onset of the First World War, the impressionable Hans Castorp himself falls ill, at first reluctantly and then agreeably transitioning from visitor to patient. He adopts the Berghof’s regimented lifestyle and fraternizes with its cast of eccentric residents, many of whom represent major ideological shifts that took place in prewar Europe. The novel serves as an allegorical “how did we get here?” tale of recent history, but also as evidence for Woolf’s theory that the literature of illness opens itself up to a discussion about the human condition, our capacity for suffering, and our innate desire for stasis.
Residents at the Hôpital Pourtalès in Neuchâtel, Switzerland
Health resorts were very popular in Europe beginning in the mid-1800s, when the first sanatorium was erected in Germany as a place dedicated to healing from tuberculosis. The word sanatorium stems from the Latin root sanus meaning ‘to heal or make healthy.’ It was thought that exposure to mountain or marine air and a strict schedule of rest and nourishment would expunge the infection from a person’s body. It was also an experiment in disease containment, better known today as quarantine. The Berghof in Mann’s novel is a premier example of this, but at the heart of this sanatorium is a very sinister truth: its residents are at the mercies of time and fortune more than anything, and the Berghof is merely a structural container for their social interactions. Many of the Berghof’s patients cheat, skipping their rest cures to spend days, even entire weekends, out in downtown Davos-Platz. When patients die, which is more often than the administrators let on, it is handled discreetly and distractedly. No one is subjected to any real suffering– above all, it’s a safe place.
In direct conversation with Mann’s novel –foremost as a continuation and update of its most salient arguments– is Todd Haynes’ 1995 aptly-named film Safe. Set in Los Angeles in 1987, the film follows housewife Carol White (played with exquisite and campy frailty by Julianne Moore) as she slowly succumbs to a mysterious illness that disrupts her quality of life and ability to adhere to her homemaker duties. Her increasingly strange symptoms, which include hyperventilation, rash, and bouts of vomiting, eventually send her packing to Wrenwood, a New Age retreat center in the New Mexico desert that blurs the boundaries between community and cult. There, she convalesces amongst a group of folks also suffering from the newly dubbed “environmental disease.”
On the surface, The Magic Mountain’s Berghof and Safe’s Wrenwood seem kind of awesome, like bucolic havens from the harsh realities of everyday life. Mann dedicates multiple chapters to explaining the rules and routines of the Berghof, where five lavish meals are served daily in the dining hall, free lectures are given every Monday, and patients mingle for hours on end when they aren’t living the “horizontal life,” wrapped up “like mummies” in layers of blankets in their private rooms replete with balconies overlooking the Swiss Alps. Nestled high up in the mountains, the Berghof is known for its “famous” air, and the real world, miles below, is dismissively referred to as “the flatlands.” Wrenwood has its own version of this distinction from reality, resembling more of a children’s summer camp. Long-term residents are lovingly referred to as “long-termers,” and live in open-air cabins, attend group workshops, and divvy up chores and meal prep on Sundays for some added responsibility. On Carol’s first day at Wrenwood, we are introduced to the retreat’s signature blessing, spoken by its idolized director, Peter Dunning: “We are one with the power that created us. We are safe, and all is well in our world.” (Emphasis on the “our.”)
Peter Dunning addresses Wrenwood residents in Safe
Peter Dunning has a lot in common with the Berghof’s leader, Dr. Hofrat Behrens, an Austrian physician who conducts all medical examinations and recommends the length of stay for each patient. He has a tendency to change his mind, and frequently extends stays well past their originally promised expiration date, as he does for Hans Castorp’s cousin Joaquim, who was promised a six-month stay, but at the onset of the novel is nearing his one-year anniversary. Behrens is larger than life, marked by his “purple” complexion and big, watery eyes, indicating that he himself is ill. His attitude towards death is callous and cold. “I know death, I’m one of his old employees,” he brags. “He’s overrated, believe me. I can assure you there’s almost nothing to him.”
Early on in The Magic Mountain, the narrator, regarding Behrens, asks, “Can someone truly be the intellectual master of a power to which he himself is enslaved? Can he liberate if he himself is not free?” This question is applied to Peter in Safe, whose charming demeanor attracts the attention and obsession of Wrenwood employees and most of its residents. While today we might associate his expertise (demonstrated by a long line of bestselling books), handsome face, and calm delivery with someone like Dr. Mark Hyman, Peter turns out to be nothing more than a charlatan. Before he even speaks, Carol learns about him from an employee, who leans over and whispers, “Peter is a chemically sensitive person with AIDS, so his perspective is incredibly vast. Have you read any of his books?” It’s an objectively comedic moment. His white McMansion sits ominously above Wrenwood’s grounds. He opens a seminar with the question, “Why are you sick?” and proceeds to coax each patient into unpacking how their illness is their fault. Carol’s answer, which she repeats to her friends and family, always includes the phrase, “I guess I’ve just been stressed out lately.”
Haynes makes a great point here. The proclivity to pathologize –to ask why– is so common. When stress is introduced as a potential factor for illness, pointing fingers becomes a fool’s game. One begins to wonder, “did stress cause my illness, or is my illness making me stressed?” Safe, in its psychological horror framework, argues staunchly in favor of believing people, especially women, about their medical issues. What Haynes and Mann explore more deeply, however, is what happens once we do believe, but getting help isn’t as simple as a CVS prescription.
The Hotel Schatzalp inspired Mann’s depiction of the Berghof
Carol White and Hans Castorp are the perfect moral conduits for this exploration. Mann consistently uses words such as “ordinary” and “mediocre” to characterize Hans as a kind of everyman archetype. He is an orphan, with both of his parents long dead, and at a crossroads in his life, having finished schooling but hesitant to start his shipbuilding apprenticeship. Haynes takes care to establish Carol in the first half of Safe as a traditional and wealthy Californian housewife, sparing the viewer no details about her routine, from aerobics class at the club to her dependence on Fulvia, her housekeeper, to the ordering and arrival of a new teal sofa (which goes awry, perhaps triggering the stress that triggers the sickness.) Haynes opens the film with a haunting sex scene, where Carol lies still and expressionless under her husband Greg’s aggressive thrusts. Both protagonists are vulnerable in their own ways and therefore susceptible to the allures and throes of a place like the Berghod or Wrenwood. They are both in need of a load off.
Certainly, there are moments of release, joy, and togetherness in both texts. One night at Wrenwood, the group surprises Carol with a (allergen-free) cake for her birthday and everyone dances to Kenny Loggins’ “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend.’” Carol finally gets confirmation from fellow residents that she is not going insane and that her symptoms are real. She befriends a kind patient named Lucas and cooks a meal with him. The Magic Mountain, by virtue of its 706 pages, gives the reader no shortage of downtime with many of the Berghof’s residents. The most memorable is Lodovico Settembrini, an Italian humanist and man of letters whose snide quips and passionate monologues brimming with enlightenment ideals brighten every page. For the first time in his life, Hans is encouraged to form his own opinions and cultivate taste. “Illness makes people even more physical, turns them into only a body,” Hans thinks to himself one day. Truths are blurted out, just as Woolf writes.
Still from the 1982 film adaptation of The Magic Mountain
But neither Hans Castorp nor Carol White gets better. One might be more inclined to wonder whether either character was sick in the first place. This is where the texts diverge– Hans Castorp is healthy before arriving at the Berghof, but Behrens convinces him that he is unwell (out of concern? Greed? Jealousy?) and must stay. Hans does not object. There is, on the other hand, something undoubtedly wrong with Carol White. She may not be “allergic to the twentieth century,” as the flier for Wrenwood suggests, but her symptoms are debilitating and life-altering. We leave Carol worse off than when she started, covered in scabs and dragging an oxygen tank. She moves from a cabin to an insulated “safe pod,” which she inherits from a deceased long-termer. This is the horror of Safe: not even Wrenwood can save her, with its pristine infrastructure and total elimination of environmental triggers. Diseases such as AIDS and COVID-19 come to mind. The film is a cultural touchstone for the tragedy and mystery of epidemics. If anything, it sheds light on true suffering.
Halfway through Mann’s novel, after Hans Castorp’s cousin Joaquim makes out for the flatlands to try life as a German soldier against Behrens’ recommendation, his uncle, James Tienappel, comes to visit. The chapter, titled “An Attack Repulsed,” follows Uncle James as he, like Hans at the beginning of the novel, takes in life at the Berghof. This time, Hans is the tour guide. We see Hans for the first time proudly defining terms, introducing characters, and showing off the architecture. He is happy here, we realize, and very much changed. Hans knows the purpose of James’ visit: to persuade him to leave the Berghof and become a contributing member of society. Hans dismisses his uncle’s aims, calling them a “long overdue raid from the flatlands.” A few days into his stay, Uncle James makes an offhand remark about the frigid temperatures and wonders aloud how the patients can stand to take their rest cures outside on their balconies. Hans Castorp coolly replies, “We’re never cold,” and turns away. Uncle James is stunned, and so is the reader. This response marks Hans Castorp’s transition from visitor to patient. He is past the point of no return, much like Carol when Greg comes to visit, and she shirks off his hug because his cologne is triggering a breathing response. She can no longer be around her own family.
Carol and Greg
But one day, suddenly, it’s clear as day that the patients might actually be trapped. Who in their right mind is “never cold” in the dead of winter? Beneath the shiny surface of these collective experiences is a darker truth: they are separate from life on earth, insulated speaking a language all their own. When Peter confronts Carol about her “regrets” of joining Wrenwood, she replies, “No, I know, I just– I’m still learning, um, the words.” Peter replies, “Well, the words are just the way to get to what’s true.” But what’s true in the insular worlds of The Berghof and Wrenwood may not be true in reality. What to make of these otherworldly places, their leaders, and their devotees desperate to get better? Surely, they are not all good or all bad.
What Mann and Haynes managed to do in tandem is draw up a portrait of various approaches to wellness in the twentieth century. As readers and viewers in the twenty-first, we should look to these texts not as instruction manuals, nor as forewarnings, but as reminders that humans will stop at nothing to be well. This has always been true, and there remain countless questions unanswered. We can spend a lifetime digging for them, as three weeks melt into seven years, and short-termers graduate to long-termers, “whiling away the mirthful melancholy of eternity.”
So these texts are, above all, meditations on the nature of time– passing by, escaping us, down to this very second. In his introduction to The Magic Mountain, Mann writes, “Unafraid of the odium of appearing too meticulous, we are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.” I think this approach to storytelling also rings true in our ever-evolving approach to wellness. To entertain the possibility of healing, of a cure, we have no choice but thoroughness, working from the inside out and identifying root causes. There are no definitive heroes in these stories– the Berghof ceases operation when war breaks out, and Hans Castorp must fight in the army like his cousin never could. Only then does he leave the institution. Carol is confined to her solitary pod until death, which appears imminent. Neither of them escapes– where else is there to go?
Our attention is turned instead to the real sick, those who live among us, and the communities we must continue to build to fulfill our right to feel safe. I see The Magic Mountain and Safe as homages to people who learn quickly that to survive in this world is to self-advocate, who forge ahead and dare to leave behind any magic mountain when it no longer serves them.
Someone really should write to The Times about it.
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Note: I owe much of the background information about The Magic Mountain presented in this essay to David Wellbury’s appearance on The Octavian Report podcast.
Recs: This 2024 retrospective by Vinson Cunningham for The New Yorker, Eileen Myles’ novels Inferno and Chelsea Girls, and the quaint, no-frills quarterly newsletter for the perfect bookstore, Three Lives & Company in NYC.
