What happened? Had he got old or was it the loss of exotic surroundings that did it? Europe is an old continent and that is where he came from, where he grew up, it was in him. In those days he was on familiar ground, he was strong, he was young. Could it be that this vitality, which otherwise would have died along with his curiosity, in his forties to judge from others, could it have been prolonged by his foreign adventures? Or was it just that he was dying in a dying culture, a bit like the composer in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice?
