was alive. But what had there been during all the time in which he had become what he now was?—Stupefaction; desolation; ice; and intellect. And art!…
He undressed, lay down to rest, and put out the light. He whispered two names into the pillow, these few chaste Norse syllables which designated for him the real and original type of his love, suffering, and happiness, which meant life, simple and intimate emotion, home. He looked back upon the years elapsed from that time to this. He thought of the wild adventures his senses, nerves, and intellect had gone through, saw himself devoured by irony and brilliance, made stagnant and lame by knowledge, half worn out by the fevers and frosts of creative work, unstable and in torments of conscience between crass extremes, cast back and forth between sanctity and passion, exquisite, impoverished, exhausted by frigid and artificially selected exaltations, astray, laid waste, tortured, diseased—and he sobbed with repentance and homesickness.
About him it was quiet and dark. But from below the sweet, trivial waltz time of life came up to him muffled and swaying.
Tonio Kröger sat in the North and wrote to Lisaveta Ivanovna, his friend, as he had promised.
Dear Lisaveta, down yonder in Arcadia, whither I shall soon return, he wrote. Here, then, is something like a letter, but it will probably disappoint you, for I am thinking of keeping it somewhat general. Not as if I had nothing to tell, or had not had this or that experience on my journey. At home, in my native town, they were actually going to arrest me … but of that you shall hear by word of mouth. Now I frequently have days on which I prefer making some good general observations to telling stories.
I wonder if you still remember, Lisaveta, that you once called me a commoner, a commoner astray. You called me so at a time when I was confessing my love for that which
