thomas Mann meets Monsieur Ambivalence

Monsieur Ambivalence hosted a small dinner party the other night at an undisclosed continental location.

The conversation sparkled, and Monsieur demonstrated the proper--and gallic--way of removing a champagne cork by sticking a metal knife down the bottle's front immediately upon the cork's ejection, therefore neutralizing the liquid's carbonation (among other things).

One guest had recently read Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice', having the temerity to suggest that the book had "aged poorly."

"Au contraire", Monsieur countered, "Mann remains relevant to our age and 'Death in Venice' a miniature masterwork."

The guest, having the Modern Library petite copy of 'Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories' in the sidepocket of his brown cordoroy smoking jacket, produced the book and read from it, choosing a passage at random:

         Amor, in sooth, is like the mathematician who in order to give children a knowledge of pure form must do so in the language of pictures; so too, the god, in order to make visible the spirit, avails himself of the forms and colours of human youth, gilding it with all the imaginable beauty that it may serve memory as a tool, the very sight of which then sets us afire with pain and longing. 

The guest reader's claim was that Mann's language was "archaic", the book having first been published in 1912.

"Can you not see that in this very passage the limnings of postmodernism', Monsieur Ambivalence said, 'the precursor of certain Wittgensteinian concerns that have occupied so much of our intellectual lives for the past century"? 

More wine was poured and the lively discussion continued, ranging from Mann's cunning invocation of homosexuality and its equation with certain Greek ideals to Monsieur's latest literary attempt to re-create life in a small village in the middle of France.