Death in Venice

A sweetish smell of disinfectant drifts over the canals, and no one in Venice will say why. Gustav von Aschenbach, a German writer who has spent decades converting every impulse into prose of marble severity, has come here to rest, and instead finds his whole disciplined self coming apart over the face of a Polish boy at his hotel on the Lido. Tadzio never speaks to him. The longing lives entirely inside Aschenbach's skull, swelling as the city, quietly filling with cholera, keeps its own fever secret from its guests. Thomas Mann's terrible insight is that the artist's lifelong austerity and this final degradation are not opposites but the same hunger, routed differently. He even gives the obsession Socrates' own words on beauty, the dialogue of the Phaedrus rising through the heat. And all of it moves in sentences of perfect composure toward the loss of all composure, a man dyeing his hair young while the boy he worships walks out into the gray-green sea.