“Yes, I shall stay,” Aschenbach thought. “Where would things be better?” And, his hands folded in his lap, he let his eyes lose themselves in the expanses of the sea, his gaze gliding, blurring, and failing in the monotone mist of the wilderness of space. He loved the ocean for deep-seated reasons: because of that yearning for rest, when the hard-pressed artist hungers to shut out the exacting multiplicities of experience and seek refuge on the breast of the simple, the vast; and because of a forbidden hankering — seductive, by virtue of its being directly opposed to his obligations — after the inarticulate, the boundless, the eternal, sheer nothing. To be at rest in the face of perfection is the hunger of everyone who is aiming at excellence; and what is nothingness if not a form of perfection?