Together, we took trips to Wales and York and Scotland, listening to books in the car, attuned to the literature of our destination: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and Elizabeth George’s Payment in Blood as we waited for goats to pass across the narrow streets on the Isle of Skye. On vacation in the States, we listened to adventure stories en route to Nantucket: Into Thin Air and Into the Wild and The Perfect Storm. Like me, he was an enthusiast, and when we discovered something new we seized on it together, almost gasping with pleasure over dramatic scenes. Whenever one of us introduced an old favorite, we savored the other’s first delight like a shared meal eaten with a newly acquired gusto, as if we’d never truly tasted it before.
There was only one literary challenge left to overcome: poetry, which he of course appreciated instinctively, and memorized with ease. It was time. I needed to as well because we needed to find a poem. Every couple, after all, recited one at their wedding. It was basically a matrimonial requirement, like a purification ritual in the face of nuptial excess. And lo, miraculously and yet as if foreordained, we found our poem.
On a perfectly sun-dappled September afternoon, in front of friends and family in a flower-strewn copse in upstate New York, I hardly noticed anyone else was there as he read to me Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Love Song”:
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.
I loved and even understood the poem.
CHAPTER 14
The Magic Mountain
Different Interpretations
It turned out the relationship wasn’t all mutual appreciation and understanding. Our fight over The Magic Mountain was prolonged and bitter and, in all likelihood, entirely in my head. Nevertheless, my husband had started it.
He was the one who had introduced me to Thomas Mann. I’d read his copy of Buddenbrooks in a swoon, and we immediately decided to take turns with The Magic Mountain, considered by many to be Mann’s masterpiece. That much we agreed on. Yet somehow, every time we talked about what was in the novel itself, things got testy. The Magic Mountain, with its complex geopolitics and layers of meaning, struck a discord.
Mann originally wrote The Magic Mountain after visiting his wife in a swanky sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where she was trying to recover her health. In the novel, Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, in his early twenties and about to embark on a career in shipbuilding, similarly travels to Davos, but to visit his cousin; he ends up staying on for years. There were certain eerie parallels at work. My husband and I had recently decamped to Europe. We, too, were isolated from our friends at home. We, too, weren’t quite sure what we were doing there.
Worse, we soon turned against each other. The Magic Mountain is by most accounts a deliberately ambiguous book, part satire, part social critique, part prophetic history. A good chunk of the novel is taken up by philosophical debates between two characters, Settembrini and Naphtha, curdled by the snide insinuations they volley back and forth. Naphtha: “‘What Herr Settembrini neglects to add is that the Rousseauian idyll is merely a rationalist’s bastardization of the Church’s doctrine…’” And from Settembrini: “‘Even war, my dear sir, has on occasion been forced to serve progress—as you yourself must grant me…’”
Somehow their endless quarrels became our own. We argued over who Settembrini and Naphtha were and what they were meant to symbolize and what they were arguing about. We could agree on nothing other than that we disagreed with everything the other person said. All the while, I wondered whether we were really arguing about Settembrini and Naphtha, or whether we were standins for these characters—and if so, which one was I? The secular humanist Lodovico Settembrini, I’d like to have thought, even though he is considered by many to be a caricature of Weimar-era liberalism. Then again, I couldn’t be his adversary Leo Naphtha either, and anyone insinuating as much could just fuck off. Naphtha was a radical and a Marxist, and I despised the things he stood for. But then, who the hell was supposed to be Naphtha? We couldn’t both be Settembrini.
It didn’t matter. We’d ended up on opposite sides of the book, and this was only the bad beginning. Why were we even fighting about these imagined people? Why were we fighting at all? We had only just run off to London to embark on the rest of our lives. It couldn’t possibly have gone wrong already.
Obviously, two people in a relationship can’t always love the same things or understand why someone loves something you hate or reads it in a different way. We all know this, even if we don’t always entirely believe or abide by it, especially if we’re twenty-six and fully persuaded that true love means that disagreements are meaningless. Or that where there is True Love, disagreements naturally evolve into something adorable, to be laughed over in rom-com montage with a tender embrace and exhilarating makeup sex at the end. Or that two people in love must love everything about the other, even the things one person hates.
But it became clear that the minute a subject veered from the fictional world, the private world, the secluded, just-us-on-top-of-the-mountain world, into the greater, grittier territory below, the nonfictional world, my husband and I had serious differences. Even when we each happily read those same books about the perfidy of man, we read them in opposite ways. For me, a book like The Magic Mountain contested my essentially optimistic take on the world rather than overturned it; by forcing me to reexamine my convictions, it strengthened and reaffirmed them. Whereas for him, the world really was that bleak, and books proved it.
I found that I liked to read books that challenged my point of view; he seemed to prefer to read books that confirmed his. He probably thought the same thing of me, only the opposite. In an essay called “Why Readers Disagree,” the critic Tim Parks theorizes that two people may see the same book differently in much the way misunderstandings occur within newly formed couples, because “people have grown up with quite different criteria for assessing behavior and establishing a position in relation to it.” It was as if our fundamental differences became manifest in how we read, slicing through the fog of infatuation. Who were we, and how exactly had we ended up together, the words on the page seemed to be asking.