Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice"

In Europa I ping-ponged between Mann's short stories and Gombrowicz's Diary (Ok, admittedly, I hit Mann harder than Gombrowicz). When I got to Niederegger's I thought maybe I should be reading Buddenbrooks (they'd turned the novel into a candy box). Still, both Tonio Kroger and Aschenbach hail from northern cities (I believe Aschenbach is from the city of L...).

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     Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight -- who encounter and observe each other daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled by the constraint of convention or by their own temperament to keep up the pretense of being indifferent strangers, neither greeting nor speaking to each other. Between them is uneasiness and overestimated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate; and above all, too, a kind of strained respect. For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not yet in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge.