Nothing is Stranger, More Delicate...

Years ago, I found this excerpt about the delicate relationship between strangers plastered onto a table in a little coffee shop in Boston. It was such a present to find first thing in the morning! The words have stayed with me ever since.

Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight - who encounter and observe each other daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled by the constraint of convention or by their own temperament to keep up the pretense of being indifferent to strangers, neither greeting nor speaking to each other. Between them is uneasiness and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate; and above all, too, a kind of strained respect. For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not yet in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge.

DEATH IN VENICE, Thomas Mann