I clearly recall that
he passed from the card-tricks to parlour games – the kind based on certain
powers which in human nature are higher or else lower than human reason: on
intuition and ‘magnetic’ transmission; in short, upon a low type of
manifestation. What I do not remember is
the precise order things came in. And I
will not bore you with a description of these experiments; everybody knows them,
everybody has at one time or another taken part in this finding of hidden
articles, this blind carrying out of a series of acts, directed by a force that
proceeds from organism to organism by unexplored paths …. Cipolla moved with
the bearing typical in these experiments: now groping upon a false start, now
with a quick forward thrust, now pausing as though to listen and by sudden
inspiration correcting his course. The roles seemed reversed, as the artist
himself pointed out. The suffering,
receptive, performing part was now his, the will that he had imposed on others
was shut out, he acted in obedience to a voiceless common will which was in the
air. But he made it perfectly clear that
it all came to the same thing. The
capacity for self-surrender, he said, for becoming a tool, for the most unconditional
and utter self-abnegation, was but the reverse side of that other power to will
and to command.[1]
Thomas Mann, Mario and
the Magician (1929)
[1]
Thomas Mann, Mario and the Magician and
Other Stories, tr. H.T. Lowe Porter (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1975),
pp. 140,141.
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