Be quiet, I'm thinking

No particular reason for the title, except that a Facebook friend had announced that they were thinking and I was recalling that for many philosophers thinking is a rare act, maybe an anti-Cartesian thought ...

I picked up my old school copy of Thomas Mann's Tonio Kroeger in translation and started to read one of the other stories in it, Tristan. Slightly chilling to realise that these two were published in 1902 and 1903 respectively, and that Death in Venice was published in 1912, all before the Great War. My Irish grandmother would have been a schoolgirl in Ballybricken and her brother Paddy would not have known of course that he was to die quite soon. There was also a cousin Paddy, who fell from a railway bridge and died aged 14, and my mother had superstitious feelings about the name, otherwise my brother would have been christened Patrick. As it is she still calls him Paddy. Anyway, where is this all going. I saw a documentary about VW, Vaughan Williams, and the voice-over recalled that his first wife never quite recovered from the death of her brother in WWI. A similar event caused my grandmother to leave Ireland:

Oh yes, I turned and looked back towards the train,
leaning at Heuston against a pillar,
and wept for your young, slight, long-coated ghost:
'well, Katie Grant, ma’am, so you’re twenty four ...'
the same age as my eldest daughter now,
unable to live in the small cramped house

crowded with sisters, parents and your grief
you left Ireland, wept as the steam train screamed
as it tore apart wildly clutching hands
and fled from Paddy’s death to Liverpool.
Did Mary sadly take you in her arms
for comfort, or did you stand there, stiffly
forbidden to grieve, unless by cold nods
and absences, of mind and in your words?

Was that the task you set me when you died
and I lay in bed terrified you’d come
to break back into my protected world:
to recall the source of your stern-set jaw
lament your bitter, unhealed wound of war?

Tonio Kroeger was an important text for me, reading it in German in the VIth form, the only pupil, sitting with Laz over his exiguous fire. It seemed to give a sense to my adolesccent alienation, to see that my sensibility was after all acceptable in its unacceptability, that there were others ... But, reading Tristan now, I only mention it because it is has a nice image of how we seek to swindle conscience: but it gnaws away at us till we are simply one wound. Well, a touch of the vapours there, but I liked the use of 'swindle'. ...