Thomas Mann

“ His breathing sounds muffled, he ejects his breath in a blast in order to be able to empty his lungs quickly—and to draw in the delicate, acrid, distant, and yet disguised odour of the mice. What emotions must surge through the breast of the little animal down there when it hears this hollow and muffled snorting? Well, that is its own affair, or perhaps God’s affair, who has decreed that Bashan shall be the enemy and persecutor of these earth-mice. And then—is not fear only an intensified feeling for life? If no Bashan existed the little mouse would very likely be bored to death. ”

“ It is a good and fortunate coincidence that the topic on which I want to speak—or, am to speak—is, in itself, a festive topic, not only because all art as such has, or should have, festive character, but because a literary work is to be discussed whose very object is the idea and the nature of the festival: more than that—it is, for its own part, a sort of festive celebration, an observance and visualization, a solemn action which playingly neutralizes time and depicts the past and the future, the tunelessly existing, the myth, is the present. ”

“ She gave a sigh that was already partly a laugh, and mopped her eyes with her handkerchief, looking like a hurt child whom somebody is helping, with a jest, to forget its pain. Then she resolutely cleared her face and put herself to rights, tossing her head with the characteristic gesture and bringing her chin down on her breast.
“Yes, Tom,” she said, and blinked with her tear-reddened eyes, “I’ll be good now; I am already. You must forgive me—and you too, Gerda—for breaking down like that. But it may happen to any one, you know. It is a weakness. But, believe me, it is only outward. ”

“ And when March and April had passed, May came, bringing the great event of Klaus Heinrich's and Imma's marriage. It was a glorious day, with golden clouds in the sky, and its dawn was greeted by a choir from the town-hall tower. The people streamed in on foot and in carts, that fair, thick-set, healthy, reliable stock with blue, meditative eyes and broad, high cheek-bones, dressed in the handsome national dress—the men in red jackets, top-boots, and broad-brimmed black-velvet hats, the women in brightly embroidered bodices, thick, wide skirts, and big black veils as a head-dress. ”

“ You perceive, Ladies and Gentlemen, that I do not visualize as ideal for humanity, a socialism in which the idea of equality completely outweighs that of freedom. So I hardly can be regarded as a champion of communism. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that the panic fear of the Western world of the term communism, this fear by which the fascists have so long maintained themselves, is somewhat superstitions and childish and one of the greatest follies of our epoch. Communism is today die bogeyman of the bourgeoisie, exactly as social democracy was in Germany in 1880. ”

“ Frau Permaneder sank upon the sofa with an impotent sob. “And they will go on; they will go on to the end, Tom.”
“Tony,” he said, and sat down sidewise by his mahogany desk, crossing one leg over the other and leaning his head on his hand, “tell me straight out, do you still have faith in his innocence?”
She sobbed once or twice before she answered, hopelessly: “Oh, no, Tom. How could I? I’ve seen so much evil in the world. I haven’t believed in it from the beginning, even, though I tried my very best. Life makes it so very hard, you know, to believe in any one’s innocence. ”

“ Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.—So, the things he had met with on the trip, the ugly old fop with his twaddle about sweethearts, the lawbreaking gondolier who was cheated of his pay, still left the traveller uneasy. ”

“ Speak openly, Tony. Have you learned to love your husband in these years of marriage?”
Tony wept afresh; and covering her eyes with both hands, in which she held the batiste handkerchief, she sobbed out: “Oh, what are you asking me, Papa? I have never loved him—he has always been repulsive to me. You know that.”
It would be hard to say what went on in Johann Buddenbrook. His eyes looked shocked and sad; but he bit his lips hard together, and great wrinkles came in his cheeks, as they did when he had brought a piece of business to a successful conclusion. ”

“ Did not foreigners with guide-books ask to be taken out to Delphinenort, there to gloat over the sight of Spoelmann's house—many of them before they had seen the Old Schloss?
Were not both Schlosses, the Old and Delphinenort, about equally centres and foci of the city? To what circle of society belonged that human being who had been born Samuel Spoelmann's daughter, that creature without counterpart, without analogy? To whom should she attach herself, with whom have intercourse? Nothing could be less surprising, nothing more obvious and natural than to see Klaus Heinrich at her side. ”

“ The German people should not be prevented but should be helped to shatter forever the domination of these groups; to put through the already overdue agrarian reform, in short, to bring about the real, the honest, the purifying revolution which alone can rehabilitate Germany in the eyes of the world, of history, and in its own eyes, and open for her a path into the future—for this future, for the new world of unity and cooperation for which we hope the German spirit is by no means historically unprepared and unfit. ”

“ And then again there is storm and there is flood, and the everlasting rain comes pouring down. Wrapped in a rubber coat, with wet and streaming face, I brace myself against the stiff west wind along the upper way, a wind that tears the young poplars from their poles and makes it clear why the trees here incline away from the west and have crowns which grow only from one side of the branches. When we go walking in rains such as these, Bashan frequently stands still and shakes himself so that he is the dark centre of a dull, gray flurry of water. ”

“ A moment more of striving, hesitation, suspense, that must become well-nigh intolerable in order to heighten the ultimate moment of joy.—Once more—a last, a final tasting of this striving and yearning, this craving of the entire being, this last forcing of the will to deny oneself the fulfilment and the conclusion, in the knowledge that joy, when it comes, lasts only for the moment. The whole upper part of Hanno’s little body straightened, his eyes grew larger, his closed lips trembled, he breathed short, spasmodic breaths through his nose. ”

“ But when we are distracted we loathe most the thought of retracing our steps. He recalled a white building, ornamented with inscriptions which glistened in the evening and in whose transparent mysticism his mind's eye had lost itself—and then that strange wanderer's form which had awakened in the aging man the roving hankerings of youth after the foreign and the remote. And the thought of return, the thought of prudence and soberness, effort, mastery, disgusted him to such an extent that his face was distorted with an expression of physical nausea. ”

“ She could adjust herself with ease and cheerfulness to any situation. She soon grew charmed with her rôle of the injured wife returned to the house of her fathers; wore dark frocks, dressed her ash-blonde hair primly like a young girl’s, and felt richly repaid for her lack of society by the weight she had acquired in the household, the seriousness and dignity of her new position, and above all by the immense pleasure of being able to talk about Herr Grünlich and her marriage and to make general observations about life and destiny, which she did with the utmost gusto. ”

“ It is good then to go at once and loaf for a little along the Heine or Schiller Street, to draw a breath of fresh air and to anoint myself with Nature. I look up to the heavens, peer into the green depths of the world of tender and delicate leaves, my nerves recover themselves and grow quiet—peace and serenity return to my spirit.
Bashan is always with me on such forays. ”

“ Albrecht sat upright at the table. He held his thin, strangely sensitive-looking hands crossed on the table-edge in front of the tall, half-empty glass of milk, and his eyelids dropped, and he sucked his underlip against his upper. He answered quietly: “I'm not surprised that so popular a prince as you should be contented with his lot. I for my part decline to express somebody else in my own person—I decline to, say, and you may think it's a case of sour grapes as much as you like. The truth is that I care for the ‘Hi!’ of the people just as little as any living soul possibly could care. ”

“ But just then Ida would say, “Come, little Hanno. It’s supper-time. We must go. If you were to sit here and go to sleep, you’d die.” How calm his heart felt, how evenly it beat, after a visit to the sea! Then he had his supper in his room—for his mother ate later, down in the glass verandah—and drank milk or malt extract, and lay down in his little bed, between the soft old linen sheets, and almost at once sleep overcame him, and he slept, to the subdued rhythm of the evening concert and the regular pulsations of his quiet heart. ”

“ But on the grass, which was like a pillow gently sloping to the head, two people were stretched out, in hiding from the heat of the day: an older man and a youth, one ugly and one beautiful, wisdom next to loveliness. And amid gallantries and skilfully engaging banter, Socrates was instructing Phaedrus in matters of desire and virtue. He spoke to him of the hot terror which the initiate suffer when their eyes light on an image of the eternal beauty; spoke of the greed of the impious and the wicked who cannot think beauty when they see its likeness, and who are incapable of reverence ”

“ Tony had gone into the salon to give the polished nut-wood secretary and the curved table-legs her personal attention with the aid of a gay little feather duster. Then she moved slowly through the dining-room into the living-room with dignity and marked self-respect. The Demoiselle Buddenbrook had plainly not grown less important in her own eyes since becoming Madame Grünlich. She held herself very erect, chin in, and looked down at the world from above. She carried in one hand her little lacquered key-basket; the other was in the pocket of her gown, whose soft folds played about her. ”

“ Bashan’s mobile little body, through which life pulsates so swiftly and feverishly, has been, so to speak, exhausted with rest—and there can be no thought of sleep. Up he comes to the terrace in front of my door, drops himself in the gravel with a sob which comes from the very depths of his being, and lays his head upon his paws, turning up his eyes with a martyr’s expression towards heaven. ”

“ Doctor Veit was always dressed in black, and carried a book dangling down his thigh, with his index-finger thrust between its leaves.
Klaus Heinrich felt that Albrecht did not care much for him, and he saw that it was not only because of his inferiority in years. He himself was tender-hearted and prone to tears, that was his nature. He cried, when any body "looked sadly" at him, and when he knocked his forehead against a corner of the nursery table, so that it bled, he howled from sympathy with his forehead. But Albrecht had faced Death, yet never cried on any condition. ”

“ The tired, worried eyes gazed at objects without seeing them; they became red and watery. He made no effort to deceive even himself; and of all the dull, confused, and rambling thoughts that filled his mind he clung to only one: the single, despairing thought that Thomas Buddenbrook, at forty-three years, was an old, worn-out man.
He rubbed his hand over his eyes and forehead, drawing a long, deep breath, mechanically lighted another cigarette, though he knew they were bad for him, and continued to gaze through the smoke-haze into the darkness. ”

“ He had never been so aware that Eros is in the word as during those perilously precious hours when, at his crude table under the canopy, facing the idol and listening to the music of his voice, he followed Tadzio's beauty in the forming of his little tract, a page and a half of choice prose which was soon to excite the admiration of many through its clarity, its poise, and the vigorous curve of its emotion. Certainly it is better for people to know only the beautiful product as finished, and not in its conception, its conditions of origin. ”

“ I think these things and dream these dreams out of a sheer passion for the chase, for what has the rabbit done to me that I should wish him to meet with so terrible an end? It is true that Bashan is closer to me than the long-eared one, and it is quite in order that I should share his feelings and accompany him with my good wishes for his success. But then the rabbit is also a warm, furry, breathing bit of our common life. He has played his trick upon my hunting dog not out of malice, but out of the urgent wish to be able to nibble soft tree-shoots a little longer and to bring forth young. ”

“ Tony, coming back from a walk some days later, met Herr Grünlich at the corner of Meng Street. “I was most grieved to have missed you, Fräulein,” he said. “I took the liberty of paying my respects to your Mother the other day, and I regretted your absence more than I can say. How delightful that I should meet you like this!”
Fräulein Buddenbrook had paused as he began to speak; but her half-shut eyes looked no further up than the height of Herr Grünlich’s chest. On her lips rested the mocking, merciless smile with which a young girl measures and rejects a man. ”

“ Behind the glass and gilded window-frames sat Imma Spoelmann in veil and wreath, with an old Court lady as lady of honour at her side. Her dress of shimmering silk glittered like snow in the sunshine, and on her lap she held the white bouquet which Prince Klaus Heinrich had sent her an hour before. Her strangely childlike face was as pale as an ocean-pearl, and a smooth wisp of dark hair fell across her forehead under the veil, while her big black eyes threw glances of pleading eloquence over the close-packed throng. ”

“ Hermann Hagenström looked the City man to the life: an imposing Stock Exchange figure, in a coat the fur of which seemed a foot long, standing open over an English winter suit of good fuzzy yellow-green tweed. He was so uncommonly fat that not only his chin, but the whole lower part of his face, was double—a fact which his full short-trimmed blond beard could not disguise. When he moved his forehead or eyebrows, deep folds came even in the smoothly shorn skin of his skull. His nose lay flatter upon his upper lip than ever, and breathed down into his moustaches. ”

“ For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once; it is, mark me, the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the senses. Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, should appear to us through the senses? Should we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with Zeus? Thus, beauty is the sensitive man's access to the spirit—but only a road, a means simply, little Phaedrus. ”

“ Who am I? Am I really I?” At the very moment in which the corpse of the duck fell upon the water, Bashan made a leap forward, towards the edge of the escarpment, as though he wished to go down into the river-bed and plunge himself into the water. But then he thought of the current, clamped the brakes upon this sudden impulse, grew ashamed, and once more confined his efforts to staring. ”