Tradition has the Gods living on Mount Olympus, Lao Tzu retreating to Mount Laojun, Mohammed meditating on Mount Hira, and Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. Sinai rises to 1,096 feet in height, but a person less illustrious than Moses, Hans Castorp, the hero of Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” found himself in Alpine Davos, 5,118 feet above sea level thousands of years later, and had his own revelations.
Young Hans was of the German upper classes, disinclined to ponder life’s larger questions, a “simple soul” except for his keen sensitivity to music. “Hans Castorp loved music with all his heart,” the author tells us at the outset. He sings aloud, standing alone in the vast mountainous expanses, and sings quietly to himself while changing for dinner at the lavish sanatorium where he had come to visit his slightly ill cousin.
