Death in Venice

"Odors crowded the senses, the biting smell of the bucks, the scent of groaning bodies and the stench of putrid waters, also another familiar one: of wounds and sickness making its rounds. His heart was booming with the drumbeats, his brain was gyrating, anger gripped him, blindness, deadening sexual lust and his soul desired to join the god's dance...with frothing lips they were clamoring, inciting each other with lusty gestures and straying hands, laughing and moaning-hitting each other with spiked rods and licking the blood from their limbs. And with them, obedient to their god Dionysus, was the dreamer. ... From these dreams the stricken one awakened, unnerved, shattered, and limply addicted to the demon. He no longer feared the watchful eye of the other people; their suspicion was no longer important to him. ... and Aschenbach sometimes thought that through departure or death everyone else could be removed so that he could remain alone with the beautiful boy on the island when in the morning his looks rested heavily, irresponsibly, and continually on the desired one, when he followed him unworthily through the stinking streets with their air of death, this monstrosity seemed promising to him, and moral laws no longer applicable. ... in view of that sweet youth that infatuated him, his worn-out body disgusted him, his gray hair, the sharp features of his face caused him to feel shame and despair. He felt compelled to rejuvenate himself." "Do you believe, my dear Phaedo, that the one who reaches the intellectual through the senses can ever achieve wisdom and human dignity? Or do you believe that it is a lovely but dangerous road that leads nowhere? Because you have to realize that we artists cannot take the path of beauty without Eros joining us and becoming our leader; we may be heroes in our own way, but we are still like women, because passion is what elevates us, and our desire is love--that is our lust and our disgrace. Do you see that poets can be neither sage nor dignified? That we always stray, adventurer in our emotions? The appearance of mastery in our style is a lie and foolishness, our fame a falsehood, the trust the public places in us is highly ridiculous, education of the young through art something that should be forbidden? How can someone be a good teacher when he has an inborn drive towards the abyss? We may deny it and gain dignity, but it still attracts us. We do not like final knowledge, because knowledge, Phaedo, has no dignity or severity: it knows, understands, forgives, without an attitude; it is sympathetic to the abyss, it is the abyss. Therefore we deny it and instead seek beauty, simplicity, greatness and severity, of objectivity and form. But objectivity and form, Phaedo, lead the noble one to intoxication and desire, to horrible emotional transgressions rejected by his beautiful severity, lead to the abyss. Us poets, I say, it leads there, for we are unable to elevate ourselves, instead we can only transgress."

“That was intoxication. Without hesitation, even eagerly, the artist welcomed it. His mind was flying, his learning surged up, his memory revived ancient notions from his youth that he had been taught but never thought about himself. Was it not written that the Sun shifted our attention from the intellectual to the corporeal? It confused and enchanted, it was said, the mind and the memory, so that the soul forgot its own disposition out of sheer joy and with stunned admiration attached itself to the most appealing of the lit objects: that it was then only able to reach higher spheres while beholding a body. Eros mimicked mathematicians who showed dull children concrete models of abstract shapes: That way also the god liked to use the form and color of human youth to make the conceptual visible, decorating it with all the reflections of beauty whose sight made us burn with pain and hope." "because only beauty, he added, is lovely and visible at the same time: it is, nota bene, the only way in which we can receive and bear the intellect. Or what would become of us when the divine in general, reason, virtue, and truth would be available like this to our senses? Would we not burn and die from love, like Semele before Zeus? Thus beauty is the only way of that feeling reaches the mind....the happiness of writers is the thought that can be entirely emotion and the emotion that can be entirely thought...the mind of the afflicted was set on production." "formula of yearning--impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous, and yet sacred and venerable even in this case"