Why am I rereading The Magic Mountain now? How long did it take me to write this short essay? Let me restate the obvious: motivations or inspirations are often random. They almost always arise guided by chance. Not for causal reasons that generally do not repeat themselves, except for functional illiterates who use leitmotifs—central elements that are repeated, recurring themes—as if they meant motive.
Motives, moreover, do not correspond to the times of creation or reading. They have little to do with each other, although kind professors insist on certain but inconclusive demands. Furthermore, as motives are random, they do not usually determine the quality of the reception or the writing, except for childish people imbued with the chimera that a muse—they declare without batting an eyelid—brought them the poem.
I repeat: the motive is random. And those who don’t believe it, well, as my grandfather used to say, “Go cry in the park!” Because let’s be honest, there are no rules. Although, of course, consolations and blackboard recommendations are not excluded: “May inspiration surprise me while I’m working,” among other clichés. Nor are inferences that go beyond the biography—real or often adulterated—of this or that intellectual, from Proust to Churchill, from Kafka to Rubén Darío… Which, by singling itself out, claims to avoid any pretentious, normative generalization.
The annoyance we feel when texts begin with little bits of literary theory before getting to the point is similar to that we experience when faced with writings that reveal laziness, apathy, and basic lack of professionalism. But these calamities—many of which refer to not putting in enough hours—do not invalidate the fact that motivation and chance are not the main catalysts for the actions of reading and writing, always in the service of talent, of course.
An illustration, a memory, and a heretical note on what drives us to read will conclude these notes. Always questioning the survival of objective journalism or prosperity for Cuba—of so many “truths”—I maintain my agnosticism toward any reality, of which the actions of reading and writing, of feeling literature, are obviously an integral part.
I have read The Magic Mountain four times. Three times when I lived in Cuba, the first when I was a teenager and I took it from the bookcase in the hall of my godmother Dore Álvarez’s apartment in the Focsa building; in a translation whose quality I do not remember, published by the uneven Editorial Aguilar, in those blue and gold volumes, on Bible paper, dedicated to the Nobel Prize winners. She recommended it to me as a coming-of-age novel, good for rejecting fanaticism of any kind.
The second time I read it was in the Cuban Colección Arte y Literatura. I bought it—books were cheap—because it had a prologue by Alejo Carpentier. I soon discovered that he had read and admired Thomas Mann as few Spanish-speaking authors had, whose poetics taught the talented Cuban author, born in Lausanne, Switzerland, not far from the Alpine sanatorium where Hans Castorp, that young engineer, learns to hear—the novel is considered a bildungsroman—about human beings and their philosophical and political disquisitions, in the singular voices of the humanist Settembrini and the fanatic Naphta.
What prompted me to read that same copy for the third time happened on my return to Cuba from a trip to Europe, when one night Hans Castorp’s sanatorium and his cousin became linked in my mind with the times I had been skiing. The closest was after a lecture I had given in Bern, when a friend of the professor and German translator José Manuel López de Abiada invited me to go skiing in nearby Adelboden-Lenk, one of Switzerland’s most outstanding ski regions, with slopes suitable for Caribbean people like me, I had barely skied before near Freiburg in the Black Forest with Ottmar Ette, then a student, and his girlfriend Doris; and on the outskirts of Oslo, frozen even in thermal underwear, after icy hills that required a shot from a bottle of Linie Aquavit, a spirit stronger than Bacardi’s sugarcane rum.
The fourth and most recent reading was in Mexico. Having lost my Cuban library after my exile in 2003, I was browsing with my wife María del R. García Estrada—as so often—through the generously stocked and chaotic second-hand bookstores near the Zócalo in Mexico City. In one of them, I remember that next to a coffee roaster that was brewing a coffee that was not at all watery—not at all Mexican—I found a fairly well-preserved Spanish edition at an affordable price. That same night I began rereading it. What better motivation to feel that neither Castro-communism nor the almanac had been able to take Hans Castorp and Thomas Mann out of my head?
It’s true that if I hadn’t been at my godmother’s house, if Editorial Arte y Literatura hadn’t published it, if I hadn’t gone skiing in Switzerland, if I hadn’t found that bookshelf on Donceles Street in Mexico City… the four readings would have been governed by other chance events, other locations, and other times. Perhaps last year—2024—when the world celebrated the first centenary of this wonderful novel, I should have reread it for the fifth time. But I know that chance—I have it on a bookshelf in my current apartment in Aventura, northeast of Miami—will create a new reason, now according to Mario Verdaguer’s translation for Plaza & Janés Editores.
The memory is a story by Luis Rogelio Nogueras. Wichi told me that he wrote his poem “Ama al cisne salvaje” (Love the Wild Swan) in one sitting. And it is—as I argued at the time—one of his best, superior in expressive intensity to others that he “worked on” for exhausting weeks. This does not exclude other poems of his where stylistic revisions improved on the initial version; a curious theme that I developed in an essay in homage to my friend, already ill, in 1984, a few months before he died of aggressive cancer, aged just 41.
And here comes the heretical note: According to the Orphics and the pre-Socratic philosophers, motive and chance concur mysteriously, in an ineffable way, without known reasons. At that time, the magical thinking of the East and the rationalist thinking of the West had not yet separated; they converged, coexisted without borders, named only according to the predominance of one or the other. For them, they formed El azar concurrente (Concurrent Chance), so studied and taught by José Lezama Lima in his Delphic Course.
El azar concurrente departs from those who have tried to separate logical thinking from thinking through images, to forget Giabattista Vico and his Scienza Nuova (1725). He maintains—we maintain—that a totally causalist notion of destiny does not take precedence over the adventures and misadventures of chance as a motivational source of events, of life and its metaphors. Motives simply concur. They arrive at the act of reading and writing. At the actions of existence.
