[Bookpossum]

I'm finding the later parts of the book much more interesting than the early ones because there seems to be much more introspection, particularly by Thomas Buddenbrook. Part 10 Chapter 5 has him considering his relationship with death and the infinite - at least, that's how I am interpreting it.

I bear in myself the seed, the tendency, the possibility of all capacity and all achievement. Where should I be were I not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not I - if this my external self, my consciousness, did not cut me off from those who are not I? Organism! Blind, thoughtless, pitiful eruption of the urging will! Better, indeed, for the will to float free in spaceless, timeless night than for it to languish in prison, illuminated by the feeble, flickering light of the intellect!

And a bit further on:

And in so far as he could now understand and recognize - not in words and consecutive thoughts, but in sudden rapturous illuminations of his inmost being - he was already free, already actually released and free of all natural as well as artificial limitations. The walls of his native town, in which he had wilfully and consciously shut himself up, opened out; they opened and disclosed to his view the entire world, of which he had in his youth seen this or that small portion, and of which Death now promised him the whole. The deceptive perceptions of space, time, and history, the preoccupation with a glorious historical continuity of life in the person of his own descendants, the dread of some future final dissolution and decomposition - all this his spirit now put aside. He was no longer prevented from grasping eternity. Nothing began, nothing left off. There was only an endless present; and that power in him which loved life with a love so exquisitely sweet and yearning - the power of which his person was only the unsuccessful expression - that power would always know how to find access to this present.

But he backs away from this contemplation of infinity and goes back to the safety of the day to day:

... harrassed by a thousand details, all of them unimportant, he was too weak-willed to arrive at a reasonable and fruitful arrangement of his time.

And I suppose we all do the same. We cannot cope with more than a glimpse of infinity at a time, and need to get back to our day to day occupations.

I loved that chapter.