“My father, you know, had the temperament of the north; solid, reflective, puritanically correct, with a tendency to melancholia. My mother, of indeterminate foreign blood, was beautiful, sensuous, naïve, passionate, and careless at once, and, I think, irregular by instinct. The mixture was no doubt extraordinary and bore with it extraordinary dangers. The issue of it, a bourgeois who strayed off into art, a bohemian who feels nostalgic yearnings for respectability, an artist with a bad conscience. For surely it is my bourgeois conscience makes me see in the artist life, in all irregularity and genius, something profoundly suspect, profoundly disreputable: that fills me with this lovelorn faiblesse for the simple and the good, the comfortably normal, the average unendowed respectable human being.”
Thomas Mann, “Tonio Kröger”, 1903
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