Buddenbrooks

Conservative and thoughtful and not be spending willy nilly, you know? But

then again, if you've read Buddenbrooks, you realize how quickly a Hanseatic family can go from super wealthy to completely irrelevant.

It only takes a generation.

So maybe he's admitting that we're actually on the downside of the once mighty club coming down.

And my all-time favorite is Thomas Mann.

With the Budenbrock, I think this is something that really touched me very early and I still love it.

And the nice thing is now there is also a movie about Thomas Mann in the cinemas that won a prize in Cannes.

So I think this is something on my to-do list.

There was an immense output of creative works depicting the shallowness of the mercantile civilization.

The antidote to commerce was, as evidenced by Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks and John Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga, art as a pure, disinterested expression of imagination in pursuit of the beautiful and the sublime.

But over time it became clear that commerce and capitalism had been blamed somewhat hastily and that the causes lay deeper.

More prospective thinkers soon realized that the very success of technology, productivity, and industry, that great achievement of the genius of modern man, was conducive, as José Ortega y Gasset persuasively argued, to the sterility of imagination and the triumph of self-satisfied pettiness.

Okay.

Which was just a few years after Thomas Mann published Buddenbrooks in Germany.

And Buddenbrooks is sort of the classic family saga in German literature.

Have you read that?

Yes.

When the stranger came, I know Ronnie was in the gym shooting baskets and doing pushup after pushup.

Mouser was sitting on the playground reading some Thomas Mann thing, I think it was Buddenbrooks, and talking with Widgeon about heart treatments.

Widgeon's father had died of a stroke ten years ago.

Athena was in the music room fiddling with the piano there.