Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

Author:Thomas Mann [Mann, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061828171
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-10-27T10:25:39+00:00

Four

Day after day now the god with the flaming cheeks soared upward naked, driving his team of four fire-breathing horses through heaven’s acres, his yellow ringlets fluttering wild in the gale of the east wind. A silky white sheen overlay the expanse of slow-swelling Pontos. The sand fairly glowed. Beneath the quivering silvery blue of the ether, rust-colored canvas awnings jutted out before each cabana, and mornings were spent on the sharply outlined patch of shade they created. But evenings were lovely as well, the plants in the park exuding their balm, the heavenly bodies dancing their round, the soft sighs of the night-shrouded sea rising up, casting spells on the soul. Evenings like these bore the joyful promise of a new sunny day of loosely ordered leisure and ornamented with countless and closely packed prospects of pleasant encounters.

The guest detained by so obliging a mishap was far from regarding the recovery of his property as grounds for a new departure. For two days he had had to make do without a few necessities and show up for meals in the main dining room in his traveling clothes. When the errant item was finally deposited in his room, he unpacked completely and filled the wardrobes and drawers with his belongings, resolved to remain for an as yet unspecified period and pleased to be able to spend his beach hours in a silk suit and appear again for dinner at his table in proper evening attire.

The soothing regularity of this existence quickly cast a spell over him: he was charmed by the soft, resplendent benignancy of it all. What a place indeed, combining as it did the appeal of a refined southern seaside resort with a strange, wondrous city in intimate proximity! Aschenbach did not care for pleasure. Whenever and wherever he was called upon to let his hair down, take things easy, enjoy himself, he soon—especially in his younger years—felt restless and ill at ease and could not wait to return to his noble travail, the sober sanctuary of his daily routine. It was the only place that could enchant him, relax his will, make him happy. There were times when in the morning, gazing dreamily at the blue of the southern sea from under the awning of his cabana, or on a halcyon night, reclining on the cushion of the gondola taking him home to the Lido from Saint Mark’s Square beneath the vast, starry firmament—the colorful lights, the mellifluous strains of the serenade fading into the distance—he would recall his house in the mountains, scene of his summer labors, where clouds drifted low through the garden, violent storms blew out the evening house lights, and the ravens, which he fed, soared to the tops of the spruces. Then he would feel he had indeed been whisked off to the land of Elysium, to the ends of the earth, where man is granted a life of ease, where there is no snow nor yet winter, no tempest, no pouring

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