Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

Where did one go when one wished to travel overnight to a unique, fairy-tale-like location?

“Ah, Venice! A magnificent city! A city irresistible to the man of culture for both its history and its current charms!”

Internationally recognized evening dress, that uniform of civilization, made of the diversity a semblance of homogeneous decency.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

is not nothingness a form of perfection?

whenever the bizarre journey through Venice began to cast its spell upon him the cutpurse mercantilism of the sunken queen did its part to bring him painfully back to his senses.

For beauty, my dear Phaedrus, and beauty alone is at once desirable and visible: it is, mark my words, the only form of the spiritual we can receive through our senses

Like any man whose natural gifts aroused an aristocratic interest in his ancestry, he habitually called to mind his forebears during his periods of achievement and success, assuring himself of their approval, gratification, and ineluctable esteem.

Eliminating the physical distance between performer and genteel audience, pleasurable as it may be, always produces a certain discomfort.

What were art and virtue to him given the advantages of chaos? He said nothing and stayed on.

The truth seemed to have leaked out despite the tenacious solidarity among interested parties in their attempt to ward off panic.