The book club in Summer 2005

In Summer of 2005, we, a bunch of then-close friends, had a book-club going on. The idea was Danielle's, I think. I remember, I blurted out, Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain as a book I had been meaning to read. I was buzzed and then lo' and behold the book was adopted by the newly-formed book-club on the other corner of the bar. I picked up Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS recently and it had been twice as fun to read as "Magic Mountain" but I had been also thinking about those summer meets when "we" used to have arguments on Magic Mountain. And it really all came back to me when in DOCTOR FAUSTUS, I came across a character who grew up in Lancaster County, and It reminded me of Emily and Freddy:

"At about the middle of the eighteenth century there had flourished in his native Pennsylvania a German community of pious folk belonging to the Baptist sect. Their leading and spiritually most respected members lived celibate lives and had therefore been honoured with the name of Solitary Brethren and Sisters; but the majority of them reconciled with the married state an exemplary pure and godly manner of life, strictly regulated, hard-working and dietetically sound, full of sacrifice and self-discipline. Their settlements had been two: one called Ephrata, Lancaster County, the other in Franklin County, called Snowhill; and they had all looked up reverently to their head shepherd and spiritual father, the founder of the sect, a man named Beissel, in whose character fervent devotion to God mingled with the qualities of leadership, and fanatic religiosity with a lively and blunt-spoken energy"