(More extracts from Tonio Kroger by Thomas Mann; translated into English by David Luke)

How it hurt to feel the upsurge of wonderful, sad, creative powers within one, and yet to know that they can mean nothing to those happy people at whom one gazes in love and longing across a gulf of inaccessibility! And yet – alone and excluded though he was, standing hopelessly with his distress in front of a drawn blind pretending to be looking through it – he was nevertheless happy. For his heart was alive in those days. Warmly and sorrowfully it throbbed for you, Ingeborg Holm, and in blissful self-forgetfulness his whole soul embraced your blond, radiant, exuberantly normal little personality.

More than once he stood thus by himself, with flushed cheeks, in out-of-the-way corners where the music, the scent of flowers and the clink of glasses could only faintly be heard, trying to pick out the timbre of your voice from among the other distant festive sounds; he stood there and pined for you, and was nevertheless happy. More than once it mortified him that he should be able to talk to Magdalena Vermehren, the girl who was always falling over – that she should understand him and laugh with him and be serious with him, whereas fair-haired Inge, even when he was sitting beside her, seemed distant and alien and embarrassed by him, for they did not speak the same language. And nevertheless he was happy. For happiness, he told himself, does not consist in being loved; that merely gratifies one’s vanity and is mingled with repugnance. Happiness consists in loving – and perhaps snatching a few little moments of illusory nearness to the beloved. And he inwardly noted down this reflection, thought out all its implications and savoured it to its very depths.

“Fidelity!” thought Tonio Kroger. “I will be faithful and love you, Ingeborg, for the rest of my life.” For he had a well-meaning nature. And nevertheless there was a sad whisper of misgiving within him……………the hateful, pitiable thing was that this soft, slightly mocking voice turned out to be right. Time went by, and the day came when Tonio Kroger was no longer so unreservedly ready as he had once been to lay down his life for blithe Inge……….………

And he hovered watchfully round the sacrificial altar on which his love burned like a pure, chaste flame; he knelt before it and did all he could to fan it and feed it and remain faithful. And he found that after a time, imperceptibly, silently and without fuss, the flame had nevertheless gone out.

But Tonio Kroger stood on for a while before the cold altar, full of astonishment and disillusionment as he realized that in this world fidelity is not possible. Then he shrugged his shoulders and went his way.