Matter Life Consciousness etc.

<p class=ql-align-center><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>What was life? No one knew.</span></p><p class=ql-align-center><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>It was undoubtedly aware of itself</span></p><p class=ql-align-center><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>so soon as it was life;</span></p><p class=ql-align-center><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>but it did not know what it was.</span></p><p class=ql-align-center></p><p class=ql-align-center></p><p class=ql-align-center><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Thomas Mann</span></p><p class=ql-align-center><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Magic Mountain </em></p><p class=ql-align-center><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>(1924) </span></p><p></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>In June 2024 while working my way through Thomas Mann's seemingly interminable novel </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Magic Mountain </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>(a project started six weeks earlier) I encountered his multipage discourse on life. It left me astonished. One hundred years earlier in 1924 Mann eloquently presented the fundamental questions about life that we are confronting 100 years later: the enormity of the chasm between life and inanimate matter the mysteries of the cell the nature of consciousness the source of matter the origin of life as well as the question What is Life? . (For context Irwin Schrödinger's revolutionary small book What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell appeared in 1944.) This got me thinking that I did not do the matter justice in my book I</span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>mportant Things We Don't Know</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> or in the addendum </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Imaginings</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. In addition I had written quite a bit about these issues in my last Wanderings book </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Disappointments</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. So I decided to adapt the relevant essays from </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Disappointments</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> add new material and produce a second addendum organized around some of the more striking excerpts from Mann's dissertation.</span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>This is the result now updated and expanded. </span></p><p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> </span></p>