Thomas Mann, anniversary of his birth was yesterday

[Monte Davis]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacrimae_rerum

On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 6:45 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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