We have already devoted a pill or two to the question of science, mathematics and sex (see Sex, Lies and Videotape (by G. Allaire y P.-L. Lions), Sexual connotations of Eureka (by S. Hawking) o Science and sex (by Saint Augustine)). On this occasion, I bring to you what the great Thomas Mann, in his extraordinary novel The Magic Mountain, has one of the secondary protagonists say. It is Dr. Behrens, who runs the Berghof sanatorium for lung diseases in Davos, where the action of the novel takes place. On one occasion, he has to throw three patients out of the sanatorium because two of them have been caught in the throes by a third who, in the throes of insane jealousy, screams until half the sanatorium is awakened – a scandal that in the demure years before the First World War could not be decided otherwise than by expulsion. While examining Hans Castorp, the protagonist of the novel, the doctor opens up to him about the incident: “You still find these stories amusing, what do you care… But a sanatorium director like me becomes more than fed up… Believe me, what do you want me to do if tuberculosis is linked to a certain concupiscence…? It was not I who arranged it this way, but when I am careless, it seems as if I had a little hotel in the mountains instead of a sanatorium. We count on analysis, on confession… The more this bunch of hooligans confesses, the more lascivious they get!” And so Behrens writes down his anti-lasciviousness recipe:
I believe in mathematics. Mathematics is the best remedy against lust.
He gives an example: “Solicitor Paravant, for example, who suffered great temptations, turned to mathematics, is now working on squaring the circle and has calmed down a lot”.
We will not deny that squaring the circle was a libido inhibitor for this procurator Paravant, but we could just as easily list a few examples for the opposite.
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