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Therefore he had gone outside soon after tea, hoping that fresh air and exertion would regenerate him and reward him with a productive evening.
It was a desire to flee, he had to admit to himself, this yearning for the distant and the novel, this desire for liberty, for being free of burden, for being able to forget the desire to escape his work, the commonplace location of a rigorous, frigid, and ardent duty.
Even on a personal level art is a form of heightened living. It gives greater pleasures, it consumes faster. It stamps the features of its servants with the signs of imaginary and spiritual adventures, and it produces, even in the most cloister-like atmosphere, a certain fastidiousness, an over-refinement, an exhaustion and curiosity of the nerves, in a way even a life of the most outrageous passions and delights could scarcely effect it.
The observations and encounters of the solitary and mute one are at the same time more blurry and more distinctive than those of the more sociable person, his thoughts more substantial, stranger, and never without a trace of sadness. Images and perceptions that would be easy to dismiss with a laugh, a short exchange of words, occupy him excessively and grow deeper and more important in silence, become experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.
So I will stay, Aschenbach thought. Where could it be better? And with his hands folded in his lap he allowed his eyes to wander in the vastness of the sea, his gaze slipping, becoming blurred, and breaking in the monotonous mist of nothingness. He loved the ocean for important reasons: out of the desire for tranquility harbored by the hard-working artist, who seeks to conceal himself from the multitude of possibilities by embracing the simple and immense; out of a forbidden proclivity for the unordered, the immeasurable, the eternal, the void that was made even more attractive by running
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beholds something that mirrors eternal beauty; talked to him about the cravings of the godless and evil one who cannot see the beauty behind its image and who is unable of reverence; talked about the holy terror that strikes the noble upon apparition of a perfect body before him, how he is shocked and does not dare to look at it, and how he would worship the one who is beautiful like a god if that did not make him look silly in the eyes of the others. Because only beauty, he added, is lovely and visible at the same time: it is, nota bene, the only way in which we can receive and bear the
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It is probably better that the world knows only the result, not the conditions under which it was achieved; because knowledge of the artist’s sources of inspiration might bewilder them, drive them away and in that way nullify the effect of the excellent work.
Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.
And leaning back, with hanging arms, overcome and shivering, he whispered the formula of yearning-impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous, and yet sacred and venerable even in this case: “I love you!”
Because passion, like crime, does not like everyday order and well-being and every slight undoing of the bourgeois system, every confusion and infestation of the world is welcome to it, because it can unconditionally expect to find its advantage in it.
