Along with Joyce's the dead Thomas mann's disorder and early sorrow stand as one of the great 20th century stories about a party in this case an evening gathering of some 20ish folks in the home of a distinguished German prof of history. The party guests are friends of his two older children and two younger ones about age 6 hang on the fringes. The family is weirdly interconnected and insular despite many social connections and though prosperous by any measure - servants abound - there is much talk about inflation and hard times - this is Germany in 1925 - the house is in poor repair for ex. It's a story of mood and forebode rather than action. The prof is envious of the success and social skills of his guests and wishes his own son and artistic dilettante would match up. The climax comes when young daughter cries and cannot sleep because of one of those infantile crushes on one of the guests. The prof cannot console her. The young man comes to her to wish goodnight and the prof admires and despises him a story about first feelings of love and loss about a father realizing his children are growing and have grown away from him. Hence the two poles of the title. Unlike Joyce's party story this one has a peculiar poignancy as we suspect the family is German Jewish bourgeois intellectual and we know as Mann did not that their way o life or even their life itself was on the verge of extinction.
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thnkx its hlpfl fr me
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