Free Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann Page A

himself from his destiny.
    Anyhow, nobody for a long time thought of connecting young Adrian in any way with music. The idea that he was destined to be a scholar was fixed in their minds and continually strengthened by his brilliant performance in school, his rank in his form, which began slightly to waver only in the upper forms, say from the fifth on, when he was fifteen. This was on account of the migraine, which from then on hindered him in the little preparation he had to do. Even so he easily mastered the demands made on him—though the word “mastered” is not well chosen, for it cost him nothing to satisfy them. And if his excellence as a pupil did not earn for him the affection of his masters, for it did not, as I often observed—one saw instead a certain irritation, a desire to trap him—it was not so much that they found him conceited, though they did. They did not, however, think him proud of his achievements; the trouble was, he was not proud enough, just therein lay his arrogance. He obviously looked down on all this that was so easy for him: that is, the subject-matter of the lessons, the various branches of study, the purveying of which made up the dignity and the livelihood of the masters. It was only too natural that they should not enjoy seeing these things so competently and carelessly dismissed.
    For my own part I had much more cordial relations with them—no wonder, since I was soon to join their number and had even seriously announced my intention. I too might call myself a good pupil; but I was and might call myself so only because my reverent love for my chosen field, especially the ancient tongues and the classic poets and writers, summoned and stimulated what powers I had, while he on every occasion made it clear—to me he made no secret of it and I fear it was not one to the masters either—how indifferent and so to speak unimportant to him the whole of his education was. This often distressed me, not on account of his career, which thanks to his facility was not endangered, but because I asked myself what was not indifferent and unimportant to him. I did not see the “main thing,” and really it was not there to see. In those years school life is life itself, it stands for all that life is, school interests bound the horizon that every life needs in order to develop values, through which, however relative they are, the character and the capacities are sustained. They can, however, do that, humanly speaking, only if the relativeness remains unrecognized. Belief in absolute values, illusory as it always is, seems to me a condition of life. But my friend’s gifts measured themselves against values the relative character of which seemed to lie open to him, without any visible possibility of any other relation which would have detracted from them as values. Bad pupils there are in plenty. But Adrian presented the singular phenomenon of a bad pupil as the head of the form. I say that it distressed me, but how impressive, how fascinating, I found it too! How it strengthened my devotion to him, mingling with it—can one understand why?—something like pain, like hopelessness!
    I will make one exception to this uniform ironic contempt which he presented to what the school offered him and the claims it made upon him. That was his apparent interest in a discipline in which I myself did not shine—mathematics. My own weakness in this field, which was only tolerably made good by joyful application in philology, made me realize that excellence in performance is naturally conditioned by sympathy with the subject and thus it was a real boon to me to see this condition—at least here—fulfilled by my friend too. Mathesis , as applied logic, which yet confines itself to pure and lofty abstractions, holds a peculiar middle position between the humanistic and the practical sciences, and from the explanations which Adrian gave me of the pleasure he took in it, it appeared that he found this middle