For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.
The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith.
There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind – and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice. its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness. That was the true death on the cross.
Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men.
Begin all over again? It would be no good. It would all turn out the same – all happen again just as it has happened. For certain people are For certain people are bound to go astray because for them no such thing as a right way exists.
Hans Castorp was, for his own person, quite without arrogance; yet a larger arrogance, the pride of caste and tradition, stood written on his brow and in his sleepy-looking eyes, and voiced itself in the conviction of his own superiority, which came over him when he measured Frau Chauchat for what she was.
In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism.
It might well be that getting used to things up here was simply a matter of getting used to not getting used to them – but.
He always knows instantly whether I have chosen the wild or the world, directly I get outside the door.
He may have been waiting a long while, in snow or rain, yet his joy at my final appearance knows no resentment at my faithlessness, though I have neglected him all day and brought his hopes to naught.
We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay –.
Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative’s imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches over light-years.
Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
Art, in its will to live and progress, puts on the mask of these dull-hearted personal traits in order to manifest, objectivize, and fulfill itself in them.
Hans Castorp had found courage up here – if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them.
Greatness! Extraordinariness! Conquest of the world and immortality of the name! What good was all the happiness of people eternally unknown compared with this goal?
Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere!
Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favor of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage. A.
Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.