I’m still traversing through the pages of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice with the same awe that I had when first starting the novel. Last night as I read through chapter four, I frequently stopped to mark sentences, passages, and pages that are extraordinarily powerful. I just thought I would share a couple of the amazing lines with you:
Cupid truly did as mathematicians do when they show concrete images of pure forms to incompetent pupils: he made the mental visible to us by using the shape and coloration of human youths and turned them into memory’s tool by adorning them with all the luster of beauty and kindling pain and hope in us at the sight of them.
The lover is more divine than the beloved, because the god dwells in the former, not the latter.
Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought.
It is surely as well that the world knows only a beautiful work itself and not its origins, the conditions under which it comes into being, for if people had knowledge of the sources from which the artist derives his inspiration they would oftentimes be confused and alarmed and thus vitiate the effects the artist had achieved.
There is nothing more curious or delicate than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who encounter and observe each other daily–nay, hourly–yet are constrained by convention or personal caprice to keep up the pretense of being strangers, indifferent, avoiding a nod or word.
Language can only praise physical beauty, not reproduce it.
Those lines were taken from the Michael Henry Heim translation (ISBN: 0-06-057605-7) on pages 82, 84, 85, 86, 92, and 95, respectively.
|:| Zach |:|
