Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man

 

Starting with the book review at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/reflections-of-a-nonpolitical-man-thomas-mann-die-fruhen-jahre-book-review-michael-lipkin/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=TLS%202021%2012%2016&utm_term=TLS  The occasion of this book review is the republication (this year) of Mann's Reflections of a Non-Political Man.  It has two additional essays by Mann and an introduction by Mark Lilla: Amazon has it at https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Nonpolitical-Man-Thomas-Mann-ebook/dp/B08BK9Z4CW/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2HO613QCR6J8U&keywords=Reflections+of+a+Nonpolitical+Man&qid=1639694506&s=books&sprefix=reflections+of+a+nonpolitical+man+%2Cstripbooks%2C247&sr=1-1  

I received the book review on-line from TLS.  It was written by Michael Lipkin and entitled "A Non-Political Mann?" in which Mann is first castigated for being an active supporter of Germany in WWI.  I've been reading Margaret Macmillan's War: How Conflict Shaped Us.  Also, inasmuch as we, many of us, can't understand the forces that took the world into that war very clearly, I doubt I'd have a problem with Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, in which he asserts "Germany's rights to defend itself against the aggression of English and French 'civilization.'"

The review goes on to describe Mann as reestablishing himself as a "defender of the fledgling democracy" with his On the German Republic, followed by The Magic Mountain which won him the Nobel prize in 1929.  "Mann was abroad on the lecture circuit when Hitler rose to power in 1933.  "He wisely elected to stay there. . ." 

Lipkin goes on to write, "He famously spent his last active years in California, of all places, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected Communist."

I take the "of all places" to be referring to HUAC's presence.  Many European intellectuals leaned toward Communism after the war in order to emphasize their distance from fascism.  That was understandable in Europe -- not so much in the U.S.  HUAC didn't appreciate that in an American citizen; which Mann had become.  Also, Lipkin's reference to Mann's ". . . last active years in California" seems doubtful.  After experiencing HUAC and the frenetic anti-communism of the time, he let himself be hounded off to Switzerland in 1952 where a Jeffrey Meyers article describes him as being active: "In his last peaceful and greatly honored years, Mann published The Black Swan (1953) and Confessions of Felix Krull (1954). In addition to Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Erich Remarque, Ignazio Silone, Irwin Shaw, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, and Elias Canetti also lived and died there."  Mann died in Zurich in 1955.

The Jeffrey Meyers article can be seen here:  https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0051.419;g=mqrg;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1

Where among other things we learn "Mann, a great movie fan and friend of Charlie Chaplin, preferred the glamour of Hollywood to the dry academic life in Princeton. Most of the German exiles had settled in southern California and gathered in the stimulating salon of Greta Garbo’s screenwriter, Salka Viertel. Mann was then reunited with many old friends: the writers Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Mann’s old political adversary Bertolt Brecht, as well as the film director William Dieterle and, for musical help with Doctor Faustus, Bruno Walter, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schönberg. Mann, who didn’t feel entirely at ease in an English-speaking ambience, remained cocooned in the German colony. (It’s a pity that he never knew the most cultured and intellectual young Austrian directors, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.) Mann did not become close to any American writers but had some contact with three English émigrés: W. H. Auden and through him Christopher Isherwood (both were homosexual and spoke German) and Aldous Huxley. Mann praised Huxley’s novels and essays but roundly condemned the influential but pernicious drug-induced mysticism of The Doors of Perception (1954)."

Falls: as fate or free will

 

I've been reading John le Carre's novel Silverview, published posthumously this year.  I paused 55% through it a few moments ago to read the Wikipedia article about him.  Quite an opinionated fellow, John.  And the writer of the Wikipedia article may have learned about most of these opinions from his novels.  I've gotten a considerable number of them from Silverview.  Be leaving them aside, I've long had the opinion that those of us who don't acquire any of the popular diseases, find ourselves older than we thought we would ever be and have trouble managing getting about.  I, for example, with the collusion of my dogs managed to fling myself from the stairs and have subsequently been attempting, without perfect success, to learn to walk in a new way.  John le Carre seems to have been of my ilk but probably landed on some other part of his body.

Wikipedia tells us "Le Carre died at Royal Cornwall Hospital, Truro, on 12 December 2020, aged 89.  An inquest completed in June 2021 concluded that le Carre died after sustaining a fall at his home."  I could have warned him that when you fall in your old age, try not to fall do it on your head.  I did, as I was committed to hitting the tile at the foot of my stairs with some part of my body, briefly consider my old gymnastic days when I could do a front roll.  In fact I was rather proud of myself, jogging with my dogs back in Garden Grove when I was in my sixties, tripping over a raised part in the sidewalk and instinctively doing a front roll.  I thought, lying there with the dog leashes still in my hand, that I had probably broken something, but was happily surprised upon standing up to learn that I had not.  But twenty years later while I was committed to a tile floor and thinking about a front roll, I chickened out and sacrificed my knee instead of a shoulder, back and if I didn't do it right, my head.  Le Carre probably wasn't a gymnast in his youth and may have simply sprawled from wherever he fell, which is what old people, without proper training, seem to inclined to do. 

You don't think of someone dying from a fall needing an inquest, but le Carre probably had quite a bit of money so the authorities wanted to make sure that the fall was entirely of John's own volition.  In my case there was a benefit from my fall.  In the past Susan would occasionally suggest that my assumption that I would outlive her might not end up being true. I didn't go to doctors or have thoroughgoing tests so I might have some rare disease and die from that.  After my fall, the doctors did run me through thoroughgoing tests and found that I didn't have any thing wrong with me other than the broken knee; so it was good that I no longer had to rely solely upon my optimism. 

In case of diminished capacity

In the monthly report packets from my broker on 1-9-19, I found slips asking who he should contact in case he noticed "diminished capacity."  I had pretty much concluded that there might be no one in easy reach in case I noticed any such thing in the world round about.  It isn't that I blame God for Susan's years of suffering and demise in a wasted-away condition, but I did notice that the church round about seemed in a diminished capacity -- unless it was the other way around which those involved seemed willing to believe -- that is, that any diminishment is in what they saw and not in what they were.

I often think of Ted Kaczynski and how our part of the world thinks of him as a thorough-going nutter.  He was partly right of course.  We have filled up this planet and then some -- not enough to destroy it most likely, but enough to destroy us; which Richard Leakey in Nairobi Kenya wrote about before giving it (writing) up to protect the rhinos and elephants; that is, that our species is unlikely to last any longer than any other species, which he told us was about 200,000 years.  Of course that was before all the work done by geneticists so, not being a geneticist,  it is just as well he gave up writing about it. 

Perhaps we ought to ask who we should contact in case of our species diminished capacity?  Perhaps if provide the evidence of the cave paintings in France and Spain of our species having begin just shy of 200,000 years ago, we are very near Richard Leakey's time limit.  But if as the geneticists say, we have evolved only slightly from the "species," that preceded ours, I don't think that is what Leakey had in mind.  If the Great Ape in Kenya and elsewhere dwindles further and as a species dies, Leakey can count back and pause perhaps in his tracking down of elephant-tusk poachers and say to himself, "yup."  But in our case it is not quite that clear cut.

Kaczynski thought that if he killed a few scientists and got the world to read his manifesto, he could coerce it away from technology and return it to a system of pre-technological villages -- well he was a complete nutter, but he was right about believing that something needed to be done. 

Being privy now to genetic information not available to Richard who predicted our diminished capacity and demise, or Ted who attempted to cause our demise, evolution is continuously at work and "may" cause us to supersede our species in the same way that we superseded homo erectus and his like; thus causing Leakey's 200,000 year clock to begin again (of course the "us" in the above is a matter for ongoing speculation and concern). 

Or . . . if we accept the Koheleth "there is nothing new under the sun" belief that mankind is the same as it has always been and will be the same on into the future however long our future lasts; then, as we can read in NASA and other such organizations' proposals, we can hie ourselves to the moon, Mars, Saturn's moons, and continue on as we have always been for another 200,000 years and etcetera. 

Kaczynski built himself a little ten by ten hut and lived as a hermit before his brother and the law caught up with him.  In my case I had my son build a ten by ten Hobbit House . . . or at least that is what I told him to build, but it looks pretty much like the tool sheds in my neighbor's yards.  And of course it contains tools and not me.  I live mostly upstairs in my study (in case anyone is trying to catch up with me); although I have converted Susan's bedroom to the room in which I do dumbbell exercises.  My main workout area is downstairs in my three-car garage.  Having just one vehicle, I have plenty of room in the other two spots for barbells, and some other workout equipment.  Also, I use all this equipment, and beyond that continue to hike very regularly with my dogs while brandishing a camera.  Thus, despite actuarial criteria to the contrary, at age 84 I am not feeling a need to have anyone else determine when my capacity has diminished.  My portion of 200,000 years is showing no signs of ending any time soon.

As to writing, I still do quite a lot -- nothing poetic recently, of course.   T. S. Eliot, I hasten to remind the inquisitive, gave me permission to write away in all sorts of forms so that when the white-hot heat of whatever it is that inspires me to write poetry is of a sufficient incendiary nature, I shall be able to.  Still not feeling in any way diminished I expect I shall be sufficiently fiery in the not too distant future. 

Hike on 1-1-19 with lots of birds

https://lawrencehelm.smugmug.com/RiverPhotography/Jan-2019/i-Lv6FnKd/A

This was my second outing with the Nikon D800e.  One person wrote me that he also had an 800e, had it for a long time and was planning to upgrade to the D850 – the most advanced Nikon full-frame camera short of the Pro D5.  Maybe one day I’ll want a D850 as well, but for now the D800e suits me.  I like the way it handles.  I’m sure I’ll like it even better once I learn what all the buttons and dials do.  A manual for the D800e was waiting for me when I got home (not the Nikon manual, but one intended to be of use to the user . . . maybe I should say “of more use,” but just barely). 

The lens I used today, the 70-300 is considered a good lightweight lens for the hiker.  It’s only flaw was (I read) soft edges at 300mm, but I discovered that only my left edges were a bit soft, and then not always. 

I took a lot of shots of birds, especially at 300mm and especially birds in flight.  I would think I should be able to do everything I did with the D800e with my full-frame Pentax K1ii, but the shots I got of birds at 300mm seem sharper than anything I’ve managed with my Pentax gear.   And the D800e isn’t supposed to be quite as good as the crop (AFSC) D500 which I have yet to take out on its second outing.  It has been sitting on a shelf for more than a week,  so long in fact that my nephew thought I might want to sell it.  No, no, no!  I will get to it shortly.  I know the D500 will do well.  I wasn’t sure about the older D800e, however, and since I had more questions about the D800e, I wanted to try it first.

Starting with shot 146, I took several shots of ducks in a rather foul-looking pond.   I would certainly not want to spend any time in one of these ponds, but the birds don’t mind.  I've seen them in these ponds every years.  My D800e shutter seemed extremely loud.  In the first two you can see the duck in the foreground watching me.  As we moved along and I took more, the ducks swam further away.  The shutter on my Pentax K1ii isn’t nearly as loud, but at least the ducks didn’t fly off.  A few years ago I was using a camera that made a sort of beep when a shot was in focus, and as soon as the birds heard it they flew up in a huge chaotic panicky-seeming cluster.  I later noticed that the beep sounded very much like the sound a red-tailed hawk makes.    But we didn’t beep today.  In shot 163 and subsequent you can see one of those very hawks.   It wasn’t ducks who flew off after hearing the hawk-sounding beep, but the small white sea-birds you can see in a pond further along.

The dogs nibbled on some of the farming leftovers on the fringes of the fields.  In shot number 173 Ben has something the seems  to be extremely bad-tasting. 

Shot number 183 is a genuine BIF (bird in flight) at 300 mm – not a great picture perhaps but it is fairly sharp, and the bird is flying.  

Shot 191 and subsequent shows three ducks in flight at 300mm.  They weren’t close enough to get great shots, but they too appear to be in focus and sharp. 

Shot 238 is the cute-shot of the day.  Why Jessica likes to rest with her tongue hanging out, I don’t know.

Shot 256 and following shows a three shot rabbit chase – although it could have been a squirrel.  I didn’t actually see what they were chasing. 

The last three shots, 275, 276 and 277, are of a tent containing a young woman and a small dog.  You can see her looking at me through her window in shot 276.  In the right edge you can see my Jeep.  We didn’t see her tent when we started our hike because we went straight down to the river from where my Jeep is.  Although now that I think of it perhaps the dogs saw her then.  I took a bit of time to get my gear on and I don’t know what they were doing while I was doing that.   The woman had a small dog that caused my dogs to run toward the tent, but she called her dog inside before mine got there --- no harm done . . . other than the fact that she is living there; which strikes me as rather harmful thing to be doing.

Hike on a windy day, 1-1-19

https://lawrencehelm.smugmug.com/RiverPhotography/Jan-2019/i-mtG37hc/A

This was the first hike with the Nikon full frame D800e camera as well as the Nikon 180mm f/2.8 lens.  Why did I get a Nikon full-frame camera when I am happy with my Pentax full frame K1ii?   I suppose curiosity would head the list.  I am still enough of an engineer to be curious about comparative technology – at least in regard to photography.  Second on the list would be that I got the 800e with an extremely low shutter count at a very good price.  According to my calculations based on the tests I read about in reviews, the image quality of the 800e is very nearly as good as the present top-in-class D850.  It also has better image quality than any Canon camera as near as I can tell.  Canon of course has a lot more features and the best one, the IDX, can do a lot of things the D800e can’t do, but I am most concerned about image quality and both my Pentax K1ii and this D800e are right up there near the top in all the tests of image quality that I’ve read. 

Jessica was the most excited by the wind and just being there today.  She even did for the first time something Duffy has done on many occasions: come up to me with a happy look and brush against me in a way I interpret as saying “thanks for this.”  Duffy did it as well.  Ben has never done it.  He is instead always on guard (or, more likely, looking for rabbits).

In shot 20 I took my first BIF (Bird in Flight) shot, and I can’t be completely sure since crows are jet black, but the D800e may be better at this than any camera I’ve tried at this thus far.  The Nikon D500 which I have yet to spend much time with is supposed to be even better.  We’ll see. 

Shot 23 of Duffy climbing up the chicken-wire covered levee is my favorite in the cuteness category.

Shot 43 and maybe a couple of others of the mountains to test clarity at infinity came out extremely well. 

Brush hasn’t had much of a chance to get started after our heat spells; so you can’t always see bent-over brush as a sign that the wind is blowing hard.  In shot 50 for example Duffy and Ben are showing the effects of the wind but the brush not so much.

In shot 54, Ben started a rabbit and began to give chase (by jumping up into the air???).  I simply pointed and shot this one and Ben is a bit of a blur.  Also I didn’t have the camera set for this sort of action.  I didn’t upload all of the other blurred shots of the chase.  Shot 58 shows Ben standing still wondering where the rabbit went.  

Beginning with shot 59 I took several shots of Jessica coming toward me to see if I could do some decent tracking if I anticipated the action, and these shots came out mostly okay.  She of course isn’t as fast as a rabbit.  Also, I had the camera set at AF-S (meaning autofocus for still shots).  I would have set it for AF-C (autofocus for continuous shooting) if I anticipated an action sequence.  In AF-C I could just hold the shutter down and presumably (and if I was lucky) get the whole chase.

Shot 104 shows Duffy in the riverbed with some of the weeds bent over by the wind.  Shot 115 shows Ben signaling a left turn thanks to the wind.  And then the last one, shot 116 shows Ben’s ears pinned back by the wind.

As for me, the wind blew my wide-brimmed hat off a couple of times and for the early part of the hike I held it on with my left hand while operating the camera with my right.  Eventually, I took my hat off and stuffed it under my windbreaker.

This was a very good New Year’s day for all of us, although Ben may have been a bit ambivalent about it at times.  I gave them all some roast chicken when we got home and then they all lay down to nap.  Ben apparently went instantly into deep sleep, for when I took his collar off a few minutes later he was startled and leaped up, something he has never done before.   

The camera and lens did pretty well, something that hasn’t been true of all my first-outings with a camera.  The dogs and I had an excellent time, and I didn’t lose my hat.  What could be better than that?