de maestros, habla Mann.

Our masterful style is falsehood and folly, out renown and prestige are a farce, the public faith in us is utterly ludicrous, and educating the populace, the younger generation, through art is a hazardous enterprise that should be outlawed. For how can a man be a fit educator if he has an inborn, natural, and incorrigible preference for the abyss? We can certainly shun it and gain our status, but no matter where we turn, we are still drawn to the abyss. And so we renounce knowledge, which disintegrates things, for knowledge, Phaidros, has no dignity or severity; knowledge is all-knowing, understanding, forgiving devoid of composure, of form; it sympathizes with the abyss, it is the abyss. And so we can firmly reject knowledge, and hence forth our sole concern is Beauty—that is, simplicity, grandeur, and new severity, a new innocence and form. But form and innocence, Phaidros, lead to euphoria and desire, may lead the noble person to a horrid emotional blasphemy, which his own beautiful severity will reject as disgraceful—and they lead to the abyss, they, too, lead to abyss. They lead us poets there, I tell you, for we cannot soar, we can only be wanton. And now I shall leave, Phaidros, and you shall remain, and do not leave until you can no longer see me.

Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

beware the smiles, dixit Mr. Mann (otra vez)

The man receiving this smile hurried away with it as with a fateful gift. He was so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee the light of the Terrence, the front gardens, and he hastily sought the darkness of the park behind the hostel. Strangely indignant and affectionate exhortations were wrung from him: “You musn’t smile like that! Listen, you mustn’t smile at anyone like that!” He flung himself on a bench, he was beside himself, he breathed the nocturnal fragrance of the plants. And leaning back, with dangling arms, overwhelmed, and shuddering again and again, he whispered the standard formula of desire—impossible here, absurd, abject, ludicrous and yet sacred, and honorable even here: “I love you!”

Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

el origen de la belleza, dice Mr. Mann

It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation for if people knew the sources of the artist’s inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence.

Death in Venice de Thomas Mann.

urge to flee, dice Mr. Mann

His yearning for new and faraway places, his desire for freedom, relief and oblivion was, as he admitted to himself, an urge to flee—an urge to get away from his work, from the everyday site of a cold, rigid, and passionate servitude. He certainly loved this servitude and almost loved the enervating conflict that recurred every day, the struggle between his proud, tenacious, so often tested willpower and this growing fatigue that one must know about, that was not to betray the results in any way, with any hint of laxity or failure.

"Death in Venice" por Thomas Mann.