Death In Venice

That night he had a terrifying dream—if dream be the word for the physical and mental experience which did indeed befall him with a life of its own and a sensuous immediacy while he was in a deep sleep, yet in which he did not see himself present, moving through space, external to the events, its scene being rather his very soul, and the events breaking in from without, violently crushing his resistance, a deep, spiritual resistance, and, having run their course, leaving his entire being, the culture of a lifetime, devasted, obliterated.

Loneliness, the foreign environment, and the joy of a belated and profound exhilaration prompted him, persuaded him to indulge without shame or remorse in the most distasteful behavior, as when returning from Venice late one evening he had paused at the beautiful boy’s door on the second floor of the hotel and pressed his forehead against the hinge in drunken rapture, unable to tear himself away even at the risk of being discovered and caught.

he grew aware of a strange expansion of his inner being, a kind of restive anxiety, a fervent youthful craving for faraway places, a feeling so vivid, so new or else so long outgrown and forgotten that he came to a standstill and—hands behind his back, eyes on the ground, rooted to the spot—examined the nature and purport of the feeling.
It was wanderlust, pure and simple, yet it had come upon him like a seizure and grown into a passion—no, more, an hallucination. His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured forth the earth’s manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw.

quagmire beneath a steamy skysultry, luxuriant, and monstrous-a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora; saw fantastically malformed

The twentieth century gave us Leopold Bloom, Clarissa Dalloway, Humbert Humbert, and Jay Gatsby, among others, and it gave us Gustav von Aschenbach.