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 constraints of convention or their own temperament to keep up the pretense of being indifferent 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 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.

From “Death in Venice” by Thomas Mann

In this novel, Thomas Mann uses the protagonist and the plot to venture into the human mind in search of passions and desires that hide in remote corners. Do we all bear the inchoate seeds of deviant behaviors that plague the human brain? Mann’s extraordinary capacity for observation manifest in this snippet. We all share the common experience of often meeting the same strangers on a bus or in our neighborhood, but only a genius like Mann can express it as he does: “Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight … Between them is uneasiness and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and communicate.”