Disillusion

Thomas Mann

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I confess that the remarks of the singular gentleman I met in Venice that evening thoroughly mystified me, and I fear I shall not be able, even now, to repeat them so that they will affect others as they did me at the time. Perhaps the effect of his words was due merely to this amazing frankness, coming from a total stranger.

It is now about two months since that autumn morning when the stranger first attracted my attention in the Piazza San Marco. Only a few people were moving about in the wide square. But the banners were fluttering in the light sea breeze before the gorgeous, wonderful building, whose splendid and fantastic contours with their ornament of gold stood out with enchanting clearness against the delicate, light blue sky. In front of the main portal a great flock of doves had gathered around a young girl who was scattering corn for them, while more and more kept flying down from all sides—a vision of incomparably bright and radiant beauty.

It was then that I came upon the stranger, and now, as I write, I still see him before me with extraordinary distinctness. He was rather below middle height and bent forward as he walked quickly along, clasping his stick behind him with both hands. He had on a stiff black hat, a light summer overcoat, and dark striped trousers. For some reason I took him to be an Englishman. He might have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years old. His face, with its rather thick nose and weary gray eyes, was clean shaven, and a baffling and somewhat foolish smile played continually around his mouth. From time to time he would raise his eyebrows and glance searchingly around, then look down at the ground again, mumble a few words to himself, shake his head, and smile. He kept on walking back and forth across the square.

After that I saw him daily, for he seemed to have nothing to do but pace up and down the piazza, from thirty to fifty times every morning and afternoon, in good weather and bad—always alone and always behaving in the same odd manner.

On the evening I have especially in mind there had been a military band concert. I was sitting at one of the Café Florian’s little tables set far out in the square. At the end of the concert, when the crowd, which had been surging about in dense currents, began to scatter, the stranger, smiling as absent-mindedly as ever, sat down at one of the unoccupied tables beside me.

Time passed, it grew more and more quiet around me, and soon all the other tables far and near were empty. Now and then someone would go sauntering by. A majestic peace settled down upon the square; stars spread over the sky, and poised above the gloriously theatrical façade of St. Mark’s a half-moon hung.

I was reading my newspaper with my back to my neighbor and was on the point of leaving him there alone when I was forced to turn towards him; for though up to that moment I hadn’t heard from him the slightest sound, or even movement, now he suddenly began to speak to me.

“Is this your first visit to Venice?” he asked in bad French; and after I had struggled to reply in English, he took up the conversation again in German, without any foreign accent. His voice was low and hoarse, and he tried to clear his throat frequently by a little cough.

“You’re seeing all this for the first time? Does it come up to your expectations?—Does it, perhaps, even exceed them?—You didn’t imagine it would be more beautiful?—That’s the truth?—You’re not saying this merely to appear happy and enviable? Ah, really?”

He leaned back and regarded me with a strange expression, while he blinked his eyes rapidly.

The pause that followed lasted a long time. Not knowing how to continue this strange conversation, I was on the point of rising again when he leaned forward abruptly.

“Do you know, sir, what disillusion is?” he asked in a low, intense tone, as he clasped his stick firmly with both hands. “I don’t mean failure and disappointment in little things or in single instances, but that great, general disillusion, the disillusion that all things, that all life brings to us? Clearly, you don’t know it. But I have gone about under it from my youth, and it has made me lonely, unhappy, and a bit queer. I don’t deny it.

“How could you understand what I mean without further explanation? But you will understand, perhaps, if you’ll be good enough to listen to me a few minutes? For if it can be said at all, it can be said quickly.—

“I should tell you that I grew up in the house of a clergyman, within whose excessively pure walls an air of old-fashioned, pathetic, scholarly optimism prevailed. One breathed there the peculiar atmosphere that recalls pulpit rhetoric—all those fine words about good and evil, about the beautiful and the ugly, that I hate so bitterly, because they, perhaps, are to blame, they alone, for my sorrows.

“Life was made up for me wholly of fine words, for I knew nothing about it but the monstrous, vague presentiments that these words aroused in me. Of people I expected either the divinely good or the diabolically evil; of life I expected the enchantingly beautiful or horrible, and I was filled with a great longing for all this—a deep, anxious longing for some spacious reality, for experience, of whatever sort, for happiness that should be intoxicatingly glorious and for ineffably, unimaginably terrible grief.

I have no sense of actuality; perhaps that tells the whole story.

“I remember, sir, with melancholy distinctness the first great disappointment of my life, and I beg you to note that it did not consist merely in the dashing of a high hope but in the coming of a disaster. I was still almost a child when a fire broke out one night in my father’s house. It had gained headway so quietly and so treacherously that one whole little storey was on fire, up to the very door of my bedroom; and the stairway, too, was about to go up in flames. I was the first to discover it, and I know that I rushed through the house shouting again and again: ‘Now we’re on fire! Now we’re on fire!’ I recall these words with the greatest distinctness, and I understand the feelings that prompted them, though I was probably scarcely conscious of them at the time. This, I felt, is a conflagration; now I’m experiencing it! Isn’t it worse than this? Is this all there is to it?—

“Yet it was not a trifle, heaven knows. The whole house burned down, and we were saved with difficulty from the utmost peril. I myself suffered very severe injuries. It would be wrong, too, to say that it was just my fancy that had run ahead of the events and had painted the destruction of our house by fire as something more terrible. But I had always had a vague presentiment, a shadowy conception of something far more dreadful, and, compared with it, the reality seemed flat. This conflagration was my first great experience; a fearful hope was disappointed by it.

“You need not be afraid that I’m going to keep on recounting my disappointments to you, one by one. It is enough to say that with disastrous eagerness I fed my magnificent expectations of life on a thousand books, on the works of great writers. Oh, how I have learned to hate them—these poets who write their fine words on every wall, who would paint them on the roof of heaven with a brush dipped in Vesuvian fire—while I cannot but feel that every fine word is a mockery or a lie!

“Ecstatic poets have wailed to me that language is poor, alas, so poor! But no, sir, it is quite the contrary! Language, it seems to me, is rich, extravagantly rich compared with the meanness and limitation of life. Even pain has its limits—physical pain, in unconsciousness; spiritual pain, in apathy. And it is not otherwise with happiness! But the human need for communicating joy and sorrow has invented sounds that transcend these limits by lying.

“ls all this because I am as I am? Am I different from others in feeling so? Am I the only one on whom the effect of certain words is so thrilling that they awaken in me anticipations of experiences that do not exist at all?

“I started out in this famous life of ours full of a passionate desire for one experience, if only one, that would come up to my great anticipations. But, God help me, it has never been granted! I have roamed about the world visiting the most celebrated places on earth, standing before works of art before which mankind dances—which it honors with its finest words. I have stood before each of them and said to myself: ‘Yes, it is beautiful. And yet—is it no more beautiful?—Is this all?’

“I have no sense of actuality; perhaps that tells the whole story. Once I was somewhere in the mountains, standing beside a narrow, deep ravine. The steep cliffs were bare and perpendicular, and below, the water rushed along over boulders. I looked down and thought: What if I plunged down now? But I had come to know enough about myself to reply: If this were to happen, I should say to myself as I fell, ‘Now you’re plunging down, now it’s happening! But what does it really amount to?’

“Will you credit me with having seen enough of life to be allowed a word further on the subject? Years ago I loved a girl—a delicate, charming creature. I should have liked to take her by the hand and lead her away under my protection, but she did not love me. That was not strange, and another became her protector. Could there be a more torturing experience? Is there anything more painful in life than that sharp misery cruelly mingled with voluptuousness? I have lain awake over it many a night with my eyes open—and sadder, more tormenting than anything else about it was always the thought: This is my great sorrow! Now I’m experiencing it! But what does it really amount to?

“Need I tell you about my happiness? For I have experienced happiness, too, and happiness, too, has disappointed me.—I won’t go into this, for all I could give you would be clumsy examples. They wouldn’t make it clear to you that it is life in general, the whole of life in its mediocre, uninteresting, dull course, that has brought me disillusion, disillusion, disillusion.

“What is man, so lauded as a demigod? young Werther writes somewhere in ‘The Sorrows of Werther.’ Do his powers not fail him just when he needs them most? When he soars aloft in joy or sinks down in sorrow, is he not always stopped and called back again to dull, cold consciousness at the very moment when he longs to lose himself in the fulness of the infinite?

“I often think of the day when I saw the ocean for the first time. The ocean is mighty, the ocean is wide; and my glance roved far out from the shore, in search of freedom. But there was the horizon. Why must I have a horizon? I expected the infinite of life.

“Perhaps my horizon is narrower than other people’s! I’ve said before that I have no sense of actuality—or is it, perhaps, that I have too much sense of it? Do I come to the end of my powers too soon? Have I done with things too quickly? Do I know happiness and grief only in their lowest gradations, only in a rarefied form?

“I do not believe it; and I do not believe what people say, I believe those least who, as they come face to face with life, chime in with the fine words of the writers—it is all cowardice and sham! Have you noticed, by the way, that there are people so vain and so greedy for the respect and the secret envy of others that they pretend they have experienced only the fine words of happiness—and not those of sorrow?

“It has grown very dark—and you’re scarcely listening to me; so I will confess to myself, again to-day, that I, too, once tried to lie, as other people do—tried to make myself appear happy before myself and others. But it was many years ago that this particular vanity collapsed, and I have become lonely, unhappy, and a bit queer. I don’t deny it.

“Now it is my favorite occupation to watch the starry heavens at night, for that is the best way of looking away from the earth and from life, isn’t it? And perhaps I may be pardoned for trying at least in this way to preserve my anticipations? To dream of a life free from limitations, in which reality will rise to my great anticipations without the torturing residue of disillusion? Of a life in which there will no longer be a horizon?

“So I dream of this, and I wait for death. Oh, I know death so well already, Death, the ultimate disillusion! This is Death, I shall say to myself at the last moment. Now I’m experiencing it!—And what does it really amount to?

“But it has grown cold in the square, sir. I’m capable of feeling that, at any rate, you see!—I must go now. Goodbye.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a German novelist and essayist who earned the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. Among his works are Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, and Doctor Faustus.