Since boyhood he had been pressed from all sides to achieve—and to achieve the extraordinary—and thus had never known leisure, the carefree idleness of youth. When in about his thirty-fifth year he was taken ill in Vienna, an astute observer said of him in public, “Here is how Aschenbach has always lived”—and he made a tight fist of his left hand—“not like this”—and he let his open hand dangle freely from the arm of his chair. That rang true, and what made Aschenbach all the more heroic and noble was that he was not robust by nature, that he was merely called to constant industry, not born to
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