Thomas Mann, anniversary of his birth was yesterday

[Mark Kohut]

I want to suggest that Mann's perspective below, and he was not, of course,
alone in articulating it,  as more than a few thinkers and writers share
the notion, is also Pynchon's as 'buried' but shimmeringly clear, kinda
beautifully in his works.

Answering in the 1950s — decades after his touching correspondence with
young Hermann Hesse
<https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/10/08/hermann-hesse-thomas-mann-appreciation-letters/>
and
a few years before his death — Mann writes:

What I believe, what I value most, is transitoriness.

But is not transitoriness — the perishableness of life — something very
sad? No! It is the very soul of existence. It imparts value, dignity,
interest to life. Transitoriness creates *time* — and “time is the
essence.” Potentially at least, time is the supreme, most useful gift.

Time is related to — yes, identical with — everything creative and active,
with every progress toward a higher goal. Without transitoriness, without
beginning or end, birth or death, there is no time, either. Timelessness —
in the sense of time never ending, never beginning — is a stagnant nothing.
It is absolutely uninteresting.
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