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Yes, a single life, so much fought for, so much accomplished.
Within that single life how many deaths, how many resurrections?

I might say that I alone created an original culture
for a frenetic, ecstatic age. So long ago it seems now,
I surrounded myself with adepts of the dance,
found composers to devise miraculous scores,
visionary craftsmen of colour and form provided a new world
for our dance to fill. Between us we built temples,
palaces of spectacle and sensation, we prepared banquets
to re-energise the most jaded, the most conventional palates.

This will be the finale, in this city both gilded and rotten
I will leave all my pasts behind. At last I have arrived
with no luggage beyond my death. Here is final port
of embarkation now that my journey has reached its end

When my coffined corpse is rowed across the lagoon
I shall have no further fear of the sea. I can imagine
my spirit consumed already in the radiance of the setting sun..

Von Aschenbach arrived at this point of departure unprepared.
His world, it is true, was far removed form any actuality,
His character forged in his creator’s conflicted passions.
A ghost, you might say, haunted by the ghost of a beautiful boy .

My end in Venice at least will be free from
carnal obsessions. Nijinski, unknowing, will outlast me
as he wanders the corridors of his broken mind.