Escaping life with Thomas Mann

In the vast and spectacular body of work of Thomas Mann, who has been “in the news” lately on account of a fictional biography and a documentary on the making of Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, one of the texts that affected me most was a little-known short story called Disillusionment. Mann wrote it in 1896, as a young man of 21. It is three pages long. It is one of his first published works. I read it when I was also 21, and in the years that followed, it became one of a handful of texts to which I return again and again.

How can I not? Its subject — life’s impenetrable drudgery — will never cease to fascinate.

“Do you know, my dear sir, what disillusionment is?” asks a nameless, ageless character pacing up and down Venice’s Piazza di San Marco as dusk falls, the military band stops playing, and the magnificent square, one of the great wonders of the world, becomes silent and deserted. “Not a miscarriage in small, unimportant matters, but the great and general disappointment which everything, all of life, has in store?”

Ever since he was a young boy, the stranger expected life to bestow on him “a larger reality”, an “experience of no matter what kind.” Alas, it never happened. Venice, this architectural marvel, the miracle of colour and line — he had imagined it more beautiful. Man, the crown of creation, fascinating and complex — he finds him bland and mediocre. Life, our greatest boon, rich and potent, endlessly exciting… Let exalted poets say that, if they wish. To the stranger from the Piazza di San Marco, life is dull, flat and disappointing.

To say that Disillusionment was influenced by the work of Arthur Schopenhauer is an understatement. More likely, the young son of a Lübeck merchant marked by the stigmata of genius set himself a lofty task of putting Schopenhauer’s philosophy into images. Because the nameless, ageless character pacing up and down the Piazza di San Marco is humanity itself: he is you and me, everyone who, driven by Schopenhauer’s “will to live” or simply “will” — the original, primeval instinct begetting our urges and desires — longs for a larger reality, for rich and thrilling experiences, for the spectacular in life… but, instead, is greeted by tedium, ordinariness and the constant, mournful refrain:

“So this is it? Is this all there is to it?”  

A profoundly pessimistic view. Pessimistic, but no less true. The will as a source of perennial dissatisfaction, anguished yearning for something bigger, better and more, makes human condition egoistic, greedy and corrupt. Mann first read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation when he was 20, and its central premise exerted an unrelenting influence on the rest of his life. But so did Schopenhauer’s other perception: his solution, his path to redemption, his way to escape the malignant grip of the will. And that, of course, is the intellect: understood broadly as spiritual pursuits, knowledge, objective contemplation, creative intuition and the aesthetic state.

And in the aesthetic state Mann’s most memorable characters endure. Stoically serves his muse, the mighty Word, Death in Venice’ s Gustav von Aschenbach, subsisting in a state of ascesis, a kind of selfless resignation, free from the torments of the senses, the domination of the will. Aschenbach is a Schopenhauerian saint, his life a sacrifice to art and beauty, to the creation of the perfect form. And it is the perfect form that destroys him: Tadzio, a boy with dusky-grey eyes, the symbol of absolute beauty walking the earth in human shape. Seeing Tadzio, Aschenbach plunges into chaos: the impure, immoral, pathological chaos of Nietzsche, where instinct trumps reason and desire annihilates the mind. We may be forgiven for concluding that, sixteen years after writing Disillusionment , Mann ’s pessimistic view of human condition became even more extreme.  

Except the opposite is true.

“Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide… but there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?” exclaims the nameless, ageless character in Disillusionment.

Gustav von Aschenbach dies looking at the sea — the boundless chasm that glints and foams and murmurs — and the silhouette of Tadzio, who beckons to him from afar. Unmarred by lust, untainted by desire, Tadzio is no longer a boy, but an idea: a Platonic essence, an object of aesthetic contemplation, of a creative state.

Gustav von Aschenbach dies looking at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide… The sea has no horizon. In his final moments, existing in intellect alone, Aschenbach frees himself from the will and finds the infinite in life. Aschenbach dies – but, unlike the stranger from the Piazza di San Marco, he does not die disillusioned.

In a literary climate dominated by political and social narratives, the works of Thomas Mann offer a refreshing alternative and perhaps a much-needed corrective. Mann’s prose is resolutely, unapologetically apolitical: it does not peddle an ideology, does not attempt to give direction to public life, does not show a clash of social forces, does not moralise. Yet by focusing entirely on the eternal subject of the nature and destiny of man and the torments and contradictions of human consciousness, Mann managed to depict the spirit of his epoch better than any litté rature engag ée.  

Perhaps he told us what we had suspected all along: that political and social progress, essential though it is, holds no power over human nature, and even if we lived in a social utopia it would not deliver us from our flaws and fallibilities, the torments of our desires, the endlessness of our requirements, our failed passions, our unsatisfied ambitions, the sinister compulsions of the will.  

Society cannot make us happy. In the quest for meaning and fulfilment, we stand alone. But intellect can.  And here, once again, Mann tells us something that we know already: that a fertile mind can afford us joys and pleasures that reality never will; that our biggest feasts and triumphs come from within; that, through art, we can live a thousand different lives; that the aesthetic state is the closest we will ever get to the eternal; and that in a world which is highly conditioned and where our every single step is a compromise, it is only in the mind that we can be truly free. 

Common wisdom holds that there exist two paths for self-realisation — work and family — and if we manage to find an acceptable balance between the two and a semblance of satisfaction in either or both, we will die contented, perhaps even happy. I have always found this dichotomy shallow. By living solely in the realm of the social, we end up dealing with life’s manifestations, rather than its essences and, to quote Schopenhauer, “the lofty goal of our existence is quite ravished from our sight.” If we forego the intellectual state, “the state where miracles happen”, “the state of the Gods”, disillusionment awaits us — and, like the nameless, ageless character pacing up and down Venice’s Piazza di San Marco as dusk falls, the military band stops playing, and the magnificent square, one of the great wonders of the world, becomes silent and deserted, we will be forever greeted by tedium, ordinariness and the constant, mournful refrain: 

“So this is it? Is this all there is to it?”

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