Bourgeois degeneracy

"What am I doing? As with any man whose native merits arouse an aristocratic interest in his ancestry, his achievements and successes always inspired him to recall his forebears, to assure himself mentally of their approval, their satisfaction, their mandatory respect. He thought of them here and now, entangled as he was in such an illicit experience, involved in such exotic emotional debauchery; he remembered their rigorous self-control, their respectable manliness, and he smiled dourly. What would they say? But then again, what would they have said about his entire life, which deviated from theirs to the point of degeneracy; what would they have said about this life lived under the sway of art? Once, with the bourgeois attitude of his forefathers, the adolescent had openly derided such an existence, which basically was so similar to theirs! He, too, had served in the military, had been a soldier and warrior, like a number of them - for art was a war, a grueling struggle that nowadays ground you down very quickly.

"A life of defiance and strength of mind, a stern, staunch, and abstemious life that he had shaped into a symbol of the frail heroism that fitted in with the times - he had the right to call that life manly, to call it valiant; and it seemed to him as if the kind of eros that had overpowered him somehow fitted in with and favored such a life. Had not this eros been highly revered by the bravest nations; had it not, it was said, flourished in their cities because of bravery? Countless ancient war heroes had willingly borne its yoke, never viewing its commands as humiliations; and those heroes did things that would be condemned as cowardice if done for other reasons: they knelt, vowed, begged, and slavishly groveled - and such actions never shamed the lover; why, he even reaped praise for them." - Death in Venice, Thomas Mann.