Thinking Zone. Sunday afternoon in my little Black Sea village, my coffee is beside me, and I am reading Buddenbrooks again after fourteen years, discovering that Thomas Mann possesses one particularly unpleasant quality: as the reader grows older, one begins to understand more and more of his irony, without necessarily deriving any pleasure from the discovery. This time, my attention is drawn not so much to the decline of the Lübeck merchant family as to the curious circumstance that the man who, at the age of twenty-five, managed to describe the disintegration of four generations ended his own life in Kilchberg, Switzerland, leaving behind a family whose relationships would probably have provided material for yet another novel, had the author not committed the imprudence of dying. In April 1954, Mann moved to Alte Landstrasse 39, into a house overlooking Lake Zurich, which he called his final address, and the following summer, after the celebrations of his eightieth birthday and a journey to the Netherlands, an illness brought him to Zurich's Cantonal Hospital. His final diary entries are remarkable for their almost indecent absence of literary solemnity: his mouth hurts, eating is an ordeal, medical procedures alternate with observations about the nurses, and the sparrows at the window receive whatever the patient does not wish to eat. I find it particularly amusing that one of his doctors compliments him on little Hanno from Buddenbrooks, as though a hospital room were an appropriate place for literary criticism, while Mann, despite everything, continues reading Alfred Einstein's book on Mozart for the third time. Shortly before his death, on 12 August 1955, he asks for his glasses so that he can read when he wakes up. I find this final gesture far more characteristic of him than all the jubilee speeches delivered in his honour. But the truly literary detail awaits me in the cemetery at Kilchberg, where Thomas and Katia Mann rest alongside several of their children, while their son Golo, the historian, wished to be buried separately, near the cemetery wall, as far as possible from his father's grave. I imagine this final family geography and cannot help appreciating its precision: even when death has definitively eliminated the possibility of conversation, the right remains to choose the distance at which one wishes to continue one's silence. Golo Mann evidently found a way to transform a difficult relationship with his father into a perfectly concrete spatial arrangement, requiring neither a psychoanalyst nor a literary interpreter, merely a sufficiently large cemetery. In Buddenbrooks, belonging to a family is simultaneously an inheritance, an obligation, a form of social capital, and a gradually diminishing vital force, while each successive member of the family receives not only the name but also the exhaustion accumulated by his predecessors. Fourteen years after my previous reading, I am beginning to find even more interesting not the disintegration of the family itself, but the individual's effort not to be entirely absorbed by it. And yet I feel a certain admiration for Golo, who, unlike his father's literary characters, managed to make a choice of his own, at least regarding his final place of residence. Thomas Mann would probably have turned this into a magnificent chapter. I suspect, however, that his son would have demanded its removal at the proofreading stage.