For Christmas this year a friend of mine sent me a beautiful Everyman edition of Buddenbrooks and a collection of short stories, both by Thomas Mann. I have known Mann for quite some time--I read Doctor Faustus many years ago--but I didn't realize just how great a writer he is. One of the short stories is Tonio Kröger and the last chapter (it is quite a long short story) contains this remarkable paragraph:
I stand between two worlds, I am at home in neither, and this makes things a little difficult for me. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois feel they ought to arrest me... I don't know which of the two hurts me more bitterly. The bourgeois are fools; but you worshippers of beauty, you who say I am phlegmatic and have no longing in my soul, you should remember that there is a kind of artist so profoundly, so primordially fated to be an artist that no longing seems sweeter and more precious to him than his longing for the bliss of the commonplace.
2 comments:
"Tonio Kruger" is one of my favourite short(-ish) stories. So beautifully done.
As of now, mine too!
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