I admire those proud, cold spirits who venture out along the paths of grandiose, demonic beauty and despise 'humanity' - but I do not envy them. For if there is anything that can turn a littérateur into a true writer, then it is this bourgeois love of mind for the human and the living and the ordinary. It is the source of all warmth, of all kind heartedness and of all humor. and I am almost persuaded it is that very love without which, as we are told, one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet to be a sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.
What I have achieved so far is nothing, not much, as good as nothing. I shall improve on it, Lisaveta - this I promise you. As I write this, I can hear below me the roar of the sea, and I close my eyes. I gaze into an unborn, un embodied world that demands to be ordered and shaped, I see before me a host of shadowy human figures whose gestures implore me to cast upon them the spell that shall be their deliverance: tragic and comic figures, and some that are both at once - and to these I am strongly drawn. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
Do not disparage this love, Lisaveta; it is good and fruiful. In it there is longing, and sad envy, and just a touch of contempt, and a whole world of innocent delight.
- Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger, translated by David Luke
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