Short Fiction quotes

But he choked it down and carried himself resolutely erect, as well as he could. “Very well,” he said to himself, “that is the end of that. I’ll never again trouble myself about all this.

It brings joy and happiness to others, but to me always only pain and sorrow.

I am done with it. It is all over for me. Never again.”

He enjoyed this sorrow, he abandoned himself to it, just as one abandons oneself to a great happiness; he cultivated it with a thousand childhood memories and exploited it as his first deep experience.

Is not life in itself something good, whether or not it takes that form which one calls “happy”?

Johannes Friedemann felt that and he loved life. No one can realize with what circumspection he, who had renounced the greatest happiness which life can offer us, knew how to enjoy the pleasures which lay open to him.

he knew how to savour the rhythmic charm of a poem, knew how to let the intimate spirit of an exquisitely written short story work on him—oh! one might almost say that he was an epicurean.

He learned to comprehend that all things are worthy of enjoyment and that it is almost foolish to distinguish between happy and unhappy experiences.

He accepted willingly all his feelings and moods and cultivated them, the sombre as well as the gay, and no less the wishes unfulfilled—his longings. He loved them for their own sakes and told himself that the best was lost through fulfilment.

He accepted willingly all his feelings and moods and cultivated them, the sombre as well as the gay, and no less the wishes unfulfilled—his longings. He loved them for their own sakes and told himself that the best was lost through fulfilment.

Is not the sweet, poignant, vague yearning and hoping of quiet evenings in spring more enjoyable than all the fulfilment which summer is able to bring?

—Yes, he was an epicurean, was little Herr Friedemann!

A minute went by. Only the crickets chirped, and behind them the trees rustled very softly.

“I understand a little about unhappiness,” she then said. “Such summer nights along the water are the best thing for it.”

He did not reply to this, but pointed with a feeble gesture to the other bank, which lay peacefully in the dark.

There are marriages the origin of which not even the most practised literary imagination could possibly conceive.

One must accept them as one accepts adventurous combinations of contrary qualities in the theatre—such as old and stupid with beautiful and vivacious—which are given as assumptions and serve as the basis for the mathematical composition of a farce.

but though one did not speak of it, perhaps, one felt that his over-friendly and flattering attitude was for one reason or another forced, that it was based upon timidity and lack of inner poise, and this affected one disagreeably.

No spectacle is more unlovely than that of a man who despises himself, but who nevertheless out of cowardice and vanity would like to be amiable and to please

; and, in my opinion, it was not otherwise with the counsellor-at-law, who went too far in his almost grovelling self-deprecation, so that he was utterly unable to keep the necessary amount of personal dignity.

“Amra,” he would whisper, “my dear Amra! I am not disturbing you? You were not sleeping yet?

Great God, I have thought the whole day long how beautiful you are and how I love you!

—Listen to what I want to tell you; it is so difficult to express it—I love you so much that my heart sometimes contracts with pain and I don’t know where to go; I love you beyond my powers!

God knows what tricks Fate has played upon him.

He looks as though Life had laughed contemptuously as it gave him a blow full in the face.

It is also possible that he has not suffered any great disasters at the hands of destiny and is simply not fitted to cope with it.

… is evoked by a standstill after a long journey, the silencing of the rhythmic rolling thud, the stillness which affords such a marked contrast to the noises without, the calls and signals.—This condition is like coming to out of a state of intoxication, of insensibility.

Our nerves are suddenly deprived of the support, the rhythm, to which they had surrendered; now they feel themselves utterly disturbed and abandoned.

And this is all the more pronounced when simultaneously we awake out of the dull sleep of a railway journey.

“And here I am walking right among them,” he thought, “and am more alone and strange than apparently any other human being has ever been. I have no business and no goal. I have not even a walking-stick for a support.

No one could be less attached, freer, less interested.

No one owes anything to me; I owe no one anything. God has never extended His hand over me; He does not know me at all. A good faithful misfortune without alms is a good thing; one may then say to oneself:

Ripples of her long, brown hair rested upon her childlike shoulders, which breathed forth a beauty which could be answered only by sobs. Her long, black eyes mirrored the light of the candle.—

Her mouth was a trifle wide, but its expression was as sweet as the lips of sleep when they touch our forehead after days of suffering.

She kept her heels close together, and her slender legs caressed each other.

There is a strange and dreadful concatenation of cause and effect here. There is no use in a man’s protesting his own innocence; in most cases he will despise himself for his misfortune.

But self-contempt and vice have a strange and horrible interrelationship; they feed each other, they play into each other’s hands, in a way to make one’s blood run cold.

And that is the way it was with Piepsam. He drank because he did not respect himself, and he respected himself less and less because the continual shameful defeats of all his good resolutions devoured all his self-confidence.

But self-contempt and vice have a strange and horrible interrelationship; they feed each other, they play into each other’s hands, in a way to make one’s blood run cold. And that is the way it was with Piepsam.

He drank because he did not respect himself, and he respected himself less and less because the continual shameful defeats of all his good resolutions devoured all his self-confidence.

In a wardrobe in his home there usually stood a bottle containing a poisonous yellow fluid, a most pernicious fluid—we must be cautious and not mention its name. Lobgott Piepsam had literally knelt before this wardrobe and almost bitten his tongue in two;

And from under this cap a thick mop of blond hair welled forth and stood up above his forehead. His eyes were of a lightning-blue.

He came on like Life itself and tinkled his bell, but Piepsam did not move a hair’s breadth out of the way.

He stood there and looked at Life with a rigid stare.

People do not know themselves whether they really believe this. Perhaps they know better and nevertheless believe it, as they are so often wont to do.

A bit of falsehood, they think, belongs to beauty.

What, they think, would become of recreation and edification after the day’s work if they did not come with a bit of goodwill, and let two and two make five? And they are quite right, with that collective mind of theirs!

People do not know themselves whether they really believe this. Perhaps they know better and nevertheless believe it, as they are so often wont to do. A bit of falsehood, they think, belongs to beauty.

What, they think, would become of recreation and edification after the day’s work if they did not come with a bit of goodwill, and let two and two make five?

And they are quite right, with that collective mind of theirs!

“Art—” thinks the business man with the parrot-like nose. “Of course!

Art brings a bit of a gleam into life, a little tinkle, a touch of white silk.

And the deal furthermore is not a bad one. There are at least fifty seats at twelve marks apiece sold; that alone makes six hundred marks—and then all the incidentals.

Were he to kiss me, it would seem as though my little brother kissed me—it would not be a kiss at all. Can it be that there is a passion that is disconnected from all earthy things, pure passion, something that is only passionate child’s-play?—

Well, if I should say that aloud, they would dose me with cod-liver oil. That is the way of the world.

”

An officer leans against a pillar. He surveys the successful Bibi and thinks: “

You are somebody and I am somebody, each in his own way.

” He draws his heels together and pays the infant prodigy that homage which he pays to all existent powers.

He carries in him the majesty of the artist as well as his lack of dignity, his charlatanism and his sacred spark, his contempt and his secret rapture. But I must not write that—it is really too good.

Ah, yes, believe me, I might have become an artist myself if I had not seen through it all so clearly.

”

But the ageing critic thinks: “Of course, that national hymn was bound to come. One plays the whole affair into another sphere, no means of rousing enthusiasm is left untried. I’ll write that such things are inartistic. But perhaps it is artistic after all.

What is the artist? A clown.

Criticism is the highest of all functions. But I cannot write that.” And then he removes himself with his bespattered trousers.

“A child!” thinks a girl with unkempt hair who walks with dangling arms behind them, in the company of a solemn-looking youth. “A most lovable child! In there everything was full of reverence—” Then with a loud, monotonous voice she says:

“We are all infant prodigies, we creators!”

“Well,” thinks the old gentleman who has never been able to get beyond “Three Huntsmen from the Palatinate,” and whose excrescence is now covered by a top hat, “what does she mean? A kind of Pythia, it seems to me.”

I and those of my ilk spend all their time in a struggle with their own lives, and they are kept more than busy trying to deceive life here and there and to procure for it a sly little bit of self-complacency.

We are useless creatures, I and those of my ilk, and with the exception of a good hour now and then we are burdened to death with the knowledge of our uselessness.

We detest the useful, we know that it is common and unlovely, and we defend this truth the way one defends only a truth which is inevitably necessary to him.

“

Hypocrisy or self-mastery! It is a choice between one word and the other.

But I happen to be so broodingly honest that I …”

“Since I am not a painter.

We become more introspective without the sun.

… It is one thick grey mass of cloud. Perhaps that means thawing for tomorrow. In any case, I should not advise you to keep looking at your fancy work there, if I may say so.”

“Herr Klöterjahn,” Dr. Müller spoke softly, “in the first place, the trachea is an important organ …”

He incorrectly said “in the first place,” since no “in the second place” followed.

But at the same time as Herr Klöterjahn, a plump person dressed in red, plaid, and gold had arrived at Einfried, and she it was who carried in her arms Anton Klöterjahn, Jr., the small, sturdy Anton.

… At bottom Hans Hansen cared for him a bit when they were alone; he knew it. But when a third person came, then he was ashamed of him and threw him over. And he was alone again.

He thought of King Philip. The king had cried.

“Oh, Lord!” Erwin Jimmerthal said. “But now I must really go back to town. Goodbye, you two, and thanks for the fruit candy!” Then he leaped to a bench standing by the road, ran along it with his bowed legs, and went trotting away.

How peacefully, how well beyond confusion, Herr Knaak’s eyes looked at things! They did not penetrate to those depths where things became complicated and sad; they knew nothing except that they were brown and beautiful. But for that reason his bearing was so proud!

Yes, a person must be stupid to be able to walk like him; and then a person was liked, since he deserved it.

He understood it so well that Inge, blonde sweet Inge, looked at Herr Knaak the way she did. But why would a girl never look at himself like that?

it did not occur to him that absolutely nothing could be seen through this blind and that it was ridiculous therefore to stand in front of it and act as though you were looking out.

But he was looking into himself, where there were so many sorrows and longings.

Why, why was he here? Why was he not sitting by the window in his room, and reading Storm’s Immensee, and looking out now and then into the half-dark garden where the old walnut-tree was groaning cumbrously? That was his place.

“Come in with us, be gay, I love you.” And he listened behind him and waited in unreasoning suspense for her to come.

But she came by no means. Such things never happened on this earth.

Had she laughed at him too, like all the others? Yes, she had done that, though he would gladly have denied it for her sake and his own.

… Magdalena Vermehren who always fell down, that she understood him and laughed with him and was serious, while blonde Inge, although he sat next to her, seemed distant and foreign and estranged from him, for his language was not her language—and he was happy nevertheless.

For happiness, he told himself, is not to be loved; that is a gratification of vanity, mixed with repugnance. Happiness is to love, and perhaps to snatch deceitful little moments of nearness to the object of love.

And he wrote this thought down inside him, thought it out completely, and felt it to the very roots.

And he moved warily about the sacrificial altar on which the pure chaste flame of his love was burning, he knelt before it and fanned and fed it in every way, since he wanted to be faithful.

And yet after a while, unnoticeably, without excitement or noise, it was out.

But Tonio stood for a long time before the cold altar, filled with astonishment and disillusion over the fact that faithfulness was impossible on this earth. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.

And yet after a while, unnoticeably, without excitement or noise, it was out.

But Tonio stood for a long time before the cold altar, filled with astonishment and disillusion over the fact that faithfulness was impossible on this earth.

Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.

The gift for style, form, and expression already presupposes this cool and critical relationship with the human, even a certain human poverty and desolation. For the strong and healthy emotion—there is no getting around it—is without taste.

It is all over with the artist as soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel.

Adalbet knew that, and so he went into the café, into the ‘cloistered sphere,’ indeed!”

“Don’t speak of a ‘calling,’ Lisaweta Iwanowna!

Literature is not a calling at all, but a curse, and that ends it.

When does it begin to show itself, this curse? Early, frightfully early. At a time when one by rights should still be living in peace and accord with God and the world.

And you want seriously to defend this cold and vain charlatan? Whatever has been expressed—his credo runs—has been discharged.

If the whole world is expressed, then it is discharged, solved, done with.

… Very good! Yet I am no nihilist …”

… Begin again! But it would do no good. Everything would turn out again as it did before.

For often people go astray because there simply is no right path for them.

”

climb into cheap and imposingly decorated studios, where lonely, rebel artists, consumed from within, hungry yet proud, contend with their latest and wildest ideals in clouds of cigarette smoke.

Here is the end of things, here is ice, purity, and nothingness.

Here no contract is valid, no concession, no consideration, no measure, and no value. Here the air has grown so thin, so chaste, that the miasmata of life can no longer thrive.

The short-story writer had for a long time been seeking in vain some adequate support for his aching back.

At ten o’clock he was visited by the vision of a ham sandwich, but he shied this off manfully.

About half past ten one saw that the disciple held the last folio sheet in his red and trembling right hand. He had finished. “Soldiers!”

“Thanks!” said he, and a whirl of hope bewildered him. “And now I’ll eat supper like a wolf!”

He had a certain relationship to life.

This, to be sure, was not the result of a fixed principle, and yet it was a simple fact.

Frau Bishop also contributed to my own education, even at a distance, in that she taught me that in order to be respected by others it is only necessary to respect oneself.

Though deprived of its masculine head, the little family showed none of the stigmata of neglect and decline which so often arouse middle-class suspicion in similar cases.

And finally, after all, they were well-behaved boys and not ancient gladiators.

Calm reason surely induces a human reluctance to pummel somebody’s sound body to pieces with one’s fists.

Such were my thoughts and such, no doubt, was the truth.

All eyes were sharply turned upon Herr Knaak. Was I not right in saying that he had ventured upon dangerous ground, that he was in peril of being forced to undergo an ordeal, a test of heart, lights, and liver? But he merely replied:

“Oh, thanks! I got enough lickings when I was a boy!”

He was saved.

If the summer was to be endurable and productive, he must attempt something out of his usual orbit; he must relax, get a change of air, bring an element of freshness into the blood. To travel, then—that much was settled.

Not far, not all the way to the tigers.

But one night on the sleeper, and a rest of three or four weeks at some pleasant popular resort in the South. …

the overburdened, the used-up, the clingers-on, in short all those moralists of production who, delicately built and destitute of means, can rely for a time at least on willpower and the shrewd husbandry of their resources to secure the effects of greatness.

There are many such: they are the heroes of the period.

And they all found themselves in his works; here they were indeed, upheld, intensified, applauded; they were grateful to him, they acclaimed him.

Behind this brow the brilliant repartee of the dialogue on war between Voltaire and the king had been born; these eyes, peering steadily and wearily from behind their glasses, had seen the bloody inferno of the lazaret in the Seven Years’ War.

Even as it applies to the individual, art is a heightened mode of existence. It gives deeper pleasures, it consumes more quickly.

It carves into its servants’ faces the marks of imaginary and spiritual adventures, and though their external activities may be as quiet as a cloister, it produces a lasting voluptuousness, overrefinement, fatigue, and curiosity of the nerves such as can barely result from a life …

Bundled up in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveller rested, and the hours passed unnoticed. It stopped raining; the canvas awning was removed. The horizon was unbroken. The sea, empty, like an enormous disk, lay stretched under the curve of the sky.

But in empty inarticulate space our senses lose also the dimensions of time, and we slip into the incommensurate.

As he rested, strange shadowy figures, the old dandy, the goatee from the inside cabin, passed through his mind, with vague gestures, muddled dream-words—and he was asleep.

… entirely unaltered survival from the times of balladry, with that peculiar blackness which is found elsewhere only in coffins—it suggests silent, criminal adventures in the rippling night, it suggests even more strongly death itself, the bier and the mournful funeral, and the last silent journey.

And has it been observed that the seat of such a barque, this armchair of coffin-black veneer and dull black upholstery, is the softest, most luxuriant, most lulling seat in the world?

Aschenbach noted this when he had relaxed at the feet of the gondolier, opposite his luggage, which lay neatly assembled on the prow. The rowers were still wrangling, harshly, incomprehensibly, with threatening gestures.

And besides, how softly he could rest, if only he did not become excited! Hadn’t he wanted the trip to go on and on forever? It was wisest to let things take their course, and the main thing was that he was comfortable.

The poison of inertia seemed to be issuing from the seat, from this low, black-upholstered armchair, so gently cradled by the oar strokes of the imperious gondolier behind him.

The notion that he had fallen into the hands of a criminal passed dreamily across Aschenbach’s mind—without the ability to summon his thoughts to an active defence. The possibility that it was all simply a plan for cheating him seemed more abhorrent.

That is so, Aschenbach thought, and relaxed. That is so; you are rowing me well.

Even if you do have designs on my cash, and send me down to Pluto with a blow of your oar from behind, you will have rowed me well.

But nothing like that happened. They were even joined by others: a boatload of musical brigands, men and women, who sang to guitar and mandolin, riding persistently side by side with the gondola and filling the silence over the water with their covetous foreign poetry.

… up and placed in the room behind him, he looked down on the beach (it was comparatively deserted in the afternoon) and on the sunless ocean which was at flood tide and was sending long low waves against the bank in a calm regular rhythm.

The experiences of a man who lives alone and in silence are both vaguer and more penetrating than those of people in society; his thoughts are heavier, more odd, and touched always with melancholy.

Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion.

Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion.

Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit.

—So, the things he had met with on the trip, the ugly old fop with his twaddle about sweethearts, the lawbreaking gondolier who was cheated of his pay, still left the traveller uneasy.

Did he have some illness? For his skin stood out as white as ivory against the golden darkness of the surrounding curls. Or was he simply a pampered favourite child, made this way by a doting and moody love? Aschenbach inclined to believe the latter.

Almost every artist is born with a rich and treacherous tendency to recognize injustices which have created beauty, and to meet aristocratic distinction with sympathy and reverence.

A waiter passed through and announced in English that the meal was ready. Gradually the guests disappeared through the glass door into the dining hall. Stragglers crossed, coming from the entrance, or the lifts.

and because of a forbidden hankering—seductive, by virtue of its being directly opposed to his obligations—after the incommunicable, the incommensurate, the eternal, the nonexistent.

To be at rest in the face of perfection is the hunger of everyone who is aiming at excellence; and what is the nonexistent but a form of perfection?

But now, just as his dreams were so far out in vacancy, suddenly the horizontal fringe of the sea was broken by a human figure;

they tremble and grow distracted, and hardly dare to raise their eyes, and they honour the man who possesses this beauty, yes, if they were not afraid of being thought downright madmen they would sacrifice to the beloved as to the image of a god.

For beauty, my Phaedrus, beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once; it is, mark me, the only form of the spiritual which we can receive through the senses.

Else what would become of us if the divine, if reason and virtue and truth, should appear to us through the senses? Should we not perish and be consumed with love, as Semele once was with Zeus?

… is more divine than the beloved, since the god is in the one, but not in the other—perhaps the most delicate, the most derisive thought which has ever been framed, and the one from which spring all the cunning and the profoundest pleasures of desire.

Writers are happiest with an idea which can become all emotion, and an emotion all idea.

Just such a pulsating idea, such a precise emotion, belonged to the lonely man at this moment, was at his call. Nature, it ran, shivers with ecstasy when the spirit bows in homage before beauty. Suddenly he wanted to write.

… the music of his voice, he followed Tadzio’s beauty in the forming of his little tract, a page and a half of choice prose which was soon to excite the admiration of many through its clarity, its poise, and the vigorous curve of its emotion.

Certainly it is better for people to know only the beautiful product as finished, and not in its conception, its conditions of origin.

For knowledge of the sources from which the artist derives his inspiration would often confuse and alienate, and in this way detract from the effects of his mastery. Strange hours! Strangely enervating efforts! Rare creative intercourse between the spirit and a body!

But the fact was that Aschenbach did not want soberness: his intoxication was too precious.

Who can explain the stamp and the nature of the artist! Who can understand this deep instinctive welding of discipline and licence?

For to be unable to want wholesome soberness, is licence. Aschenbach was no longer given to self-criticism.

But the fact was that Aschenbach did not want soberness: his intoxication was too precious. Who can explain the stamp and the nature of the artist! Who can understand this deep instinctive welding of discipline and licence?

For to be unable to want wholesome soberness, is licence.

Aschenbach was no longer given to self-criticism. His tastes, the mental caliber of his years, his self-respect, ripeness, and a belated simplicity made him unwilling to dismember his motives and to debate whether his impulses were the result of conscientiousness or of dissolution and weakness.

There is a restlessness and a surcharged curiosity existing between them, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally repressed desire for acquaintanceship and intercourse; and especially there is a kind of tense respect.

For one person loves and honours another so long as he cannot judge him, and desire is an evidence of incomplete knowledge.

Some kind of familiarity had necessarily to form itself between Aschenbach and young Tadzio; and it gave the elderly man keen pleasure to see that his sympathies and interests were not left completely unanswered.

his skin still had the same yellow marble colour as at first. It even seemed paler today than usual, whether from the coolness or from the blanching moonlight of the lamps. His regular eyebrows showed up more sharply, the darkness of his eyes was deeper.

It is hard to say how beautiful he was; and Aschenbach was distressed, as he had often been before, by the thought that words can only evaluate sensuous beauty, but not re-give it.

He had not been prepared for this rich spectacle; it came unhoped for. He had no time to entrench himself behind an expression of repose and dignity.

“To keep it quiet!” Aschenbach thought angrily, as he threw the papers back on the table. “To keep that quiet!” But at the same moment he was filled with satisfaction over the adventure that was to befall the world about him.

For passion, like crime, is not suited to the secure daily rounds of order and well-being; and every slackening in the bourgeois structure, every disorder and affliction of the world, must be held welcome, since they bring with them a vague promise of advantage.

So Aschenbach felt a dark contentment with what was taking place, under cover of the authorities, in the dirty alleys of Venice. This wicked secret of the city was welded with his own secret, and he too was involved in keeping it hidden.

But he felt at the same time that he was very far from seriously desiring such a move. He would retract it, would disengage himself from it. …

But when we are distracted we loathe most the thought of retracing our steps.

He recalled a white building, ornamented with inscriptions which glistened in the evening and in whose transparent mysticism his mind’s eye had lost itself—and then that strange wanderer’s form which had awakened in the aging man the roving hankerings of youth after the foreign and …

The picture of the diseased and neglected city hovering desolately before him aroused vague hopes beyond the bounds of reason, but with an egregious sweetness. What was the scant happiness he had dreamed of a moment ago, compared with these expectations?

What were art and virtue worth to him, over against the advantages of chaos?

He kept silent, and remained in Venice.

What was the scant happiness he had dreamed of a moment ago, compared with these expectations? What were art and virtue worth to him, over against the advantages of chaos?

He kept silent, and remained in Venice.

This same night he had a frightful dream, if one can designate as a dream a bodily and mental experience which occurred to him in the deepest sleep, completely independent of him, and with a physical realness, although he never saw himself present or moving …

He added bright youthful details to his dress, he put on jewels, and used perfumes. During the day he often spent much time over his toilet, and came to the table strikingly dressed, excited, and in suspense.

In the light of the sweet youthfulness which had done this to him, he detested his aging body.

The sight of his grey hair, his sharp features, plunged him into shame and hopelessness. It induced him to attempt rejuvenating his body and appearance. He often visited the hotel barber.

With a knocking heart he beheld a blossoming youth. Finally the beauty specialist declared himself content, after the manner of such people, by obsequiously thanking the man he had been serving. “A trifling assistance,” he said, as he applied one parting touch. “

Now the gentleman can fall in love unhesitatingly.

” He walked away, fascinated; he was happy as in a dream, timid and bewildered. His necktie was red, his broad-brimmed straw hat was trimmed with a variegated band.

… bird with a roaring voice, now swelling, and now softly ebbing away, steers its independent way across land and river, and Bashan delights my eye with beautiful leaps at full length to and fro across the low fence of the grass plot to the left.

Bashan is jumping because he actually knows that I take pleasure in his jumping.

Often by means of calls and knockings upon the fence, have I encouraged him in it and praised him when he had fulfilled my wishes.

… before you, regard it with strong, serene confidence, but you hesitate lazily to begin it—you are master of an unusually free and unburdened span of time lying between the dream and the day, your reward for the good use you have made of your time.

The illusion that you are leading a life that is constant, simple, undissipated and benignly introspective, the illusion that you belong utterly to yourself, renders you happy.

Man is disposed to regard his case or condition of the moment, be this glad or troubled, peaceful or passionate, for the true, essential, and permanent aspect of his life, and above all is in fancy inclined to elevate every happy extempore to a radiant …

Obduracy may finally be broken, yes, it even demands to be broken, but Bashan would seal his refusal to perform a trick or feat with his very life.

A wondrous soul! So friendly and intimate and yet so alien in certain traits, so alien that our language is incapable of doing justice to this canine logic.

What relation has this, for instance, with that terrible circumstantiality, always so unnerving for the spectator, with which the meeting, the acquaintance or the mere recognition of dog and dog fulfil themselves?

And every time, as long as the scene lasted, his usually transparent behaviour became inscrutable to me—I found it impossible to effect a sympathetic penetration into the feelings, laws, and tribal customs which form the basis of his behaviour.

In reality the meeting in the open of two dogs strange to each other, belongs to the most poignant, arresting, and pathetic of conceivable happenings.

It takes place in an atmosphere of daemonry and strangeness. An inhibition operates here for which there is no exacter term—the two cannot pass each other—a terrible embarrassment prevails.

Out of this chaos of undergrowth and ground thicket the wild vine and the wild hop-plant go gyrating up in spirals, draping broad-leaved garlands upon the trees and even in winter clinging to the trunks with tendrils which resemble hard and unbreakable wire.

This domain is neither forest nor park⁠—it is an enchanted garden⁠—nothing less.

I will stoutly defend this term—even though it refers to a poor, limited, and even crippled bit of nature, the glories of which may be exhausted with a few simple botanical names. The ground is undulant; it rises and falls in regular waves.

These signboards befit the streets which justify their metallic existence, and these streets the signboards which give them a local habitation and a name.

Both of them are dreamily and wonderfully lapped in forgetfulness and decay.

They pursue their way through the wood which they have invaded—but the wood refuses to rest. It refuses to leave these streets inviolate for a decade or more until settlers choose to pitch their tents or villas here.

The whole is enclosed by a wooden fence with an ornamental gateway. No one, however, except the small amateur gardeners, is permitted to have admittance through this wooden grille.

At times I see some bare-armed man there digging up his little vegetable garden, a square rod or so in size, and always it seems to me as though he were digging his own grave.

Beyond these gardens lie open meadows which are covered with molehills and which extend to the edge of the central wooded region.

Who, being free to make his choice, would not follow the course of the waters on his wanderings? The attraction which water exercises upon the normal man is natural and mystically sympathetic.

Man is a child of water. Our bodies are nine-tenths water, and during a stage of our prenatal development, we even have gills.

As for myself, I gladly confess that the contemplation of water in every shape and form is for me the most immediate and poignant joy in nature—yes, I will even go so far as to say that true abstractedness, true self-forgetfulness, the real merging of …

The vigour with which he shakes himself causes a thin spray of water and mud to fly my way. It is no use warding him off with flourished stick and intense objurgations.

Under no conditions will he tolerate any interference with anything that appears to him natural, inevitable, and according to the fitness of things.

Farther on the brook, in pursuing its course towards the setting sun, reaches a small hamlet which commands a view towards the north—between the woods and the slope—and at the entrance to this hamlet lies the tavern.

The job of the ferryman is an easy one and requires no special capacity or training. Surely he is a lucky man, this ferrymaster, in having such a job and being able to live in the neat dwarf villa.

Any fool would at once be able to step into his place, and the knowledge of this keeps him modest and grateful.

On the way back to his house he greets me very politely (with Grüss Gott) as I sit there on the wooden bench between the dog and the rooster. It is clear that he wishes to remain on a good footing with everyone.

What emotions must surge through the breast of the little animal down there when it hears this hollow and muffled snorting? Well, that is its own affair, or perhaps God’s affair, who has decreed that Bashan shall be the enemy and persecutor of these earth-mice.

And then⁠—is not fear only an intensified feeling for life?

If no Bashan existed the little mouse would very likely be bored to death.

All that is noble, genuine, and fine in Bashan is driven to the surface and achieves a glorious efflorescence in such hours as these. That is why he pants for these hours with such intensity and why he suffers so poignantly when they pass unused.

Bashan is no toy spaniel; he is the veritable woodsman and pathfinder, such as figure heroically in books.

A great joy in himself, in his own existence cries from every one of the martial, masculine, and striking poses which he assumes and which succeed one another with almost cinematographic rapidity.

He was broken in body and in soul.

Animals are more unrestrained and primitive, less subject to inhibitions of all kinds, and therefore in a certain sense more human in the physical expression of their moods than we.

Forms and figures of speech which survive among us only in a kind of mental or moral translation, or as metaphors, are still true and valid when applied to them.

I might say, for example, that he was thunderstruck. But this term does not please me, and I do not wish to use it.

Big words, the big, well-worn words, are not very suitable for expressing the extraordinary. One may best achieve this by intensifying the small words and forcing them to ascend to the very acme of their meaning.

So I will say no more than that Bashan started at the report of the gun and the accompanying phenomena—and that this starting was the same as that which is peculiar to him when confronted with something striking, and that all this was well known …

But all this happened long ago—more than half a year ago. And the same thing occurred as in the matter of the clinical interim.

Time and oblivion have buried it deep, and upon the floating surface of these⁠—which constitute the base of all life⁠—we continue to live on.

Bashan, to be sure, appeared to be rather contemplative for a few days, but he has long ago recovered his full and undiminished joy in hunting mice, pheasants, rabbits, and waterfowl, and our return home means to him merely attendance upon the next going forth.

… before dinner, he was wont to confess to himself that the spirit of the timeless and the eternal lay over the past, and that this spirit was much more congenial to the nerves of a professor of history than all the insolence of the present.

The past is perpetuated⁠—that is to say, it is dead; and death is the source of all seemliness and permanent significance.

The doctor was secretly convinced of this, when he went walking alone in the dark.

But it was impossible to reproach young Hergesell for that, for it would have implied an insane imputation.

Lorie’s grief was incurable and without rights and should have hidden itself.

But as it was a grief without understanding, it was also a grief without inhibition, and this produced a great pain. Blue Anna and Xavier were not at all concerned about this pain;

But it was impossible to reproach young Hergesell for that, for it would have implied an insane imputation. Lorie’s grief was incurable and without rights and should have hidden itself.

But as it was a grief without understanding, it was also a grief without inhibition, and this produced a great pain.

Blue Anna and Xavier were not at all concerned about this pain; they showed that they were impervious to it, either out of stupidity or a matter-of-fact naturalness.

She refused to listen to any of this, refused to consider all admonitions to lie down and go to sleep.

She did not want to go to sleep, she wanted to sit up and suffer.

—And then both of them, Abel as well as Lorie, suddenly caught themselves listening to something wonderful that was now happening, something that was approaching the nursery step by step, double step by double step, and which then overpoweringly put in appearance.

But the usual history of such places repeated itself: peace has had to retire further along the coast, to Marina Petriera and dear knows where else.

We all know how the world at once seeks peace and puts her to flight⁠—rushing upon her in the fond idea that they two will wed, and where she is, there it can be at home.

It will even set up its Vanity Fair in a spot and be capable of thinking that peace is still by its side.

And wherefore? Gradually we realized the political implications and understood that we were in the presence of a national ideal. The beach, in fact, was alive with patriotic children—a phenomenon as unnatural as it was depressing.

Children are a human species and a society apart, a nation of their own, so to speak.

On the basis of their common form of life, they find each other out with the greatest ease, no matter how different their small vocabularies. Ours soon played with natives and foreigners alike. Yet they were plainly both puzzled and disappointed at times.

Shall we strike sail, avoid a certain experience so soon as it seems not expressly calculated to increase our enjoyment or our self-esteem?

Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying?

No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn. We stayed on and reaped as the awful reward of our constancy the unholy and staggering experience with Cipolla.

If we only had! We should thus have escaped that fatal Cipolla. But circumstances combined to prevent us from making up our minds to a change.

A certain poet says that it is indolence that makes us endure uncomfortable situations.

The aperçu may serve as an explanation for our inaction. Anyhow, one dislikes voiding the field immediately upon such an event. Especially if sympathy from other quarters encourages one to defy it.

“Parla benissimo,” asserted somebody in our neighbourhood. So far, the man had done nothing; but what he had said was accepted as an achievement, by means of that he had made an impression.

Among southern peoples speech is a constituent part of the pleasure of living, it enjoys far livelier social esteem than in the north.

That national cement, the mother tongue, is paid symbolic honours down here, and there is something blithely symbolical in the pleasure people take in their respect for its forms and phonetics. They enjoy speaking, they enjoy listening; and they listen with discrimination.

That national cement, the mother tongue, is paid symbolic honours down here, and there is something blithely symbolical in the pleasure people take in their respect for its forms and phonetics. They enjoy speaking, they enjoy listening; and they listen with discrimination.

For the way a man speaks serves as a measure of his personal rank; carelessness and clumsiness are greeted with scorn, elegance and mastery are rewarded with social éclat.

Wherefore the small man too, where it is a question of getting his effect, chooses his phrase nicely and turns it with care. On this count, then, at least, Cipolla had won his audience;