I didn't know that Mahler would come to play so large a role, nor that music and literature and philosophy can interinanimate one another in the way I've come to think they do in this case.

The expert is a midwife. The expert is not someone who has the authority to pronounce the last word on the subject.

After the success of Buddenbrooks, he married and fathered six children. Yet the surviving diaries tell us of recurrent sexual problems - and of Katia Mann's extremely sympathetic response to them

Klaus Mann saw very clearly how different was his own (more liberated) form of homosexuality from the same-sex attractions of his father - and that is reiterated in TM's diary queries about "how two men can sleep together".

Ethical inquiry has always been motivated by the aim of improving human conduct. It doesn't follow from that that the goal is to produce a complete rule book that would be applicable to all cases.

Schopenhauer's thought that Will is insatiable, that once satisfied in one form it must be expressed in new desires, is inherited both by Mann and by Aschenbach (it's in Mahler, as well). So life is inevitably incomplete.

Critics who perceive the first level of Mann's irony recognize that the second voice is giving us reasons to be dubious about various aspects of Aschenbach's life and work. But many of them don't appreciate the second level of irony, the one exemplified in setting this narrative voice alongside the more sympathetic one, and inviting us to choose.