Thomas Mann's Aschenbach, travelling alone, had no feeling for Istra, so he moved on to Venice, which he entered from the sea, and from there to the Hotel des Bains. Looking out the window of his suite, at the direction from whence he came. Not at what he sees, but his thoughts.
"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of the gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty familiar and perilous -- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd." (29)
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