One of the great novels on sickness and death is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have been reading it because of a Norfolk-based interest in the Hanseatic League – his novels are set in German Hansa territory – and because of an unwelcome recent knowledge of death. My brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, died suddenly in February and my son Henry’s father, Julian Sands, has been missing on a Los Angeles mountain for many weeks.
Mann writes about the two aspects of death: “In one aspect, death was a holy, a pensive, a spiritual state, possessed of a certain mournful beauty. In another it was quite different. It was precisely the opposite, it was very physical, it was material, it could not possibly be called either holy, or pensive, or beautiful – not even mournful.”
