“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

— Thomas Mann , book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

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Thomas Mann 159

German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate 1875–1955

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