Death in Venice Foreignness and "The Other" Quotes

Where did one go when one wished to travel overnight to a unique, fairy-tale-like location? Why, that was obvious. What was he doing here? He had come to the wrong place. That is where he should have gone. He lost no time in announcing his departure. A week and a half after his arrival on the island a swift motorboat bore him and his luggage across the misty morning water back to the naval base and he disembarked only to mount a gangplank leading to the damp deck of a steamer about to weigh anchor for Venice. (3.2)

Once Aschenbach had had a closer look, however, he realized with something akin to horror that the man was no youth. He was old, there was no doubting it: he had wrinkles around his eyes and mouth; the matt crimson of his cheeks was rouge; the brown hair beneath the straw hat with its colorful band—a toupee; the neck—scrawny, emaciated; the stuck-on mustache and imperial on his chin—dyed; the full complement of yellow teeth—a cheap denture; and the hands, with signet rings on both forefingers, those of an old man. A shudder ran through Aschenbach as he watched him and his interplay with his friends. Did they not know, could they not see that he was old, that he had no right to be wearing their foppish, gaudy clothes, no right to be carrying on as if he were one of them? They seemed to be used to him and take him for granted, tolerating his presence and treating him as an equal, returning his pokes in the ribs without malice. How could they? Aschenbach laid his hand on his forehead and shut his eyes: they felt hot for want of sleep. He had the impression that something was not quite normal, that a dreamlike disaffection, a warping of the world into something alien was about to take hold […] (3.4)

Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden. Accordingly, the figures encountered on the journey—the repulsive old fop with his "sweetheart" drivel, the outlaw gondolier defrauded of his fee—still rankled in the traveler's mind. Though neither difficult to explain rationally nor even thought-provoking, they were utterly outlandish—or so he found them—and unsettling precisely because of this paradox. (3.37)