Without Lifting A Finger

As he beheld the sweet youthful creature who had so entranced him he felt disgust at his own aging body, the sight of his gray hair and sharp features filled him with a sense of shame and hopelessness. He felt a compulsive need to refresh and restore himself physically; he paid frequent visits to the hotel barber. Cloaked in a hairdressing gown, leaning back in the chair as the chatterer’s hands tended him, he stared in dismay at his reflection in the looking glass. “Gray,” he remarked with a wry grimace. “A little,” the man replied. “And the reason? A slight neglect, a slight lack of interest in outward appearances, very understandable in persons of distinction, but not altogether to be commended, especially as one would expect those very persons to be free from prejudice about such matters as the natural and the artificial. If certain people who profess moral disapproval of cosmetics were to be logical enough to extend such rigorous principles to their teeth, the result would be rath...

They answered, repeatedly shouting his name or a diminutive of his name, and Aschenbach listened for this with a certain curiosity, unable to pick up anything more precise than two melodious syllables that sounded something like “Adgio” or still oftener “Adgiu,” called out with a long u at the end. The sound pleased him, he found its euphony befitting to its object, repeated it quietly to himself and turned again with satisfaction to his letters and papers.

For a significant intellectual product to make a broad and deep immediate appeal, there must be a hidden affinity, indeed a congruence, between the personal destiny of the author and the wider destiny of his generation.

I'm still walking, though the venues have narrowed a bit. And yes, like all good Long Beachers, I'm practicing "social distancing." * Reading-wise, I've finished The Fall (went for weeks playing the judge-penitent), but probably won't, at least anytime soon, reread The Plague . Last time out I found it somewhat boring. Instead I've been thinking about rereading Death in Venice . We'll see. ***

Re-reading "Death in Venice" (umpteenth time), the other came to mind: I died for beauty, but was scarce Adjusted in the tomb, When one who died for truth was lain In an adjoining room. He questioned softly why I failed? "For beauty," I replied. "And I for truth,--the two are one; We brethren are," he said. And so, as kinsmen met a night, We talked between the rooms. Until the moss had reached our lips, And covered up our names.

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...). *      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 ...