Death in Venice

by Thomas Mann

monuments for sale formed a second, uninhabited graveyard,

Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.

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.

For now that the city had twice made him ill, now that he had twice been forced to pick up and leave it,

folded in his lap, pleased to be back, but shaking his head in displeasure at his fickle nature, his ignorance of his own wishes.

Aschenbach did not care for pleasure.

men. 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 and tolerate thereby.

Emotions from the past, early, delightful dolors of the heart swallowed up by the strict discipline of his life were now reappearing in the strangest of permutations—

coming needlessly close to him, all but grazing his table or chair—on the way to the family cabana? Was this the result of the attraction, the fascination of a superior emotion on a tender and thoughtless object?

Such was Venice, the wheedling, shady beauty, a city half fairy tale, half tourist trap, in whose foul air the arts had once flourished luxuriantly

but there is nothing so distasteful as being restored to oneself when one is beside oneself.

What were art and virtue to him given the advantages of chaos?

A camera, apparently abandoned, stood on its tripod at the edge of the water, the black cloth draped over it flapping noisily in the chilly wind.