There is some big talk in the comment section on the Mann entry. Go see. Now how is that for a bit of self-reflexivity.

As I said from the start, this thing is an experiment in post-post-modern construction, destruction, and perception of the self. The act of writing itself is deconstruction, a term that is misused and misunderstood.

LORD POLONIUS: [Aside] How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a fishmonger: he is far gone, far gone: and truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love; very near this. I'll speak to him again. What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET: Words, words, words.

HAMLET: Slanders, sir: for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams: all which, sir, though I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.

LORD POLONIUS: [Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in 't. Will you walk out of the air, my lord?

HAMLET: Into my grave.

LORD POLONIUS: Indeed, that is out o' the air.

1) How much money does the father of this girl give to politicians?

2) I should move back to my ancestral home of Kanab if all it takes to get a day in your honor is to hold down a job and stay alive. (Oh and by the way, she is related to me six time over, twice removed, four times over.)

Cases of typhoid take the following course:

When the fever is at its height, life calls to the patient: calls out to him as he wanders in his distant dream, and summons him in no uncertain voice. The harsh, imperious call reaches the spirit on that remote path that leads into the shadows, the coolness and peace. He hears the call of life, the clear, fresh, mocking summons to return to that distant scene which he had already left so far behind him, and already forgotten. And there may well up in him something like a feeling of shame for a neglected duty; a sense of renewed energy, courage, and hope; he may recognize a bond existing still between him and that stirring, colourful, callous existence which he thought he had left so far behind him. Then however far he may have wandered on his distant path, he will turn back--and live. But if he shudders when he hears life's voice, if the memory of that vanished scene and the sound of that lusty summons make him shake his head, make him put out his hand to ward off as he flies forward in the way of escape that has opened to him--then it is clear the patient will die. (Mann, Thomas. Buddenbrooks, translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter, New York: Vintage, 600)

I'm struck by the hopefulness of early existentialists represented here in Mann's first novel. There doesn't seem to be any of the gritty despair that appears in the novels of Camus--sure one has one's existence and that is it--sure one's life can be easily snuffed out by disease or the actions of others, but there does seem to be choice. I don't know if later existentialists who lived through the horrors of the twentieth century came out on the other end of the deal with a positive spin on choice. Camus, for example, wrote The Plague where everyone was trapped in a seemingly un-redeemable city. Sartre, of course, has No Exit, where characters are thrown together to torment one another continually in a sisyphean attempt to get out of a badly furnished room. Down to someone like Becket who has the obsessed Krapp in Krapp's Last Tape continually reviewing his life to understand how he got himself into such a situation.

So we're back to early Mann in 1901 writing about life and death and the choice that one can heroically make to live or the weak choice of death. Life, of course, is not described positively. He says it has a "harsh, imperious call" that disrupts the "coolness and peace." Ultimately non-life is easier than life, I suppose one might gather from that, but life is a "colurful, callous existence" that still manages to stir "energy, courage, and hope." Death becomes the only means of escape from the existence one is damned to, but which one at the same time relishes.

The contradictions are blatant: life sucks/life is great; death provides relief/death is a cop-out. There are more, but I wouldn't entertain them without at least three martini's under my belt.