In graduate school, after Professor Horst Daemmrich told me to stop reading Der Zauberberg (1924), by Thomas Mann (1875-1955), and focus on Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947), I turned to the latter novel with the ideas about distance I haddrawn from Mann's novellas Tonio Kröger (1901) and Der Tod in Venedig (1911). In good scholarly fashion, I underlined many passages to develop those ideas. Then, on a sunny Saturday afternoon in my room in West Philadelphia, I read the last few hundred pages of the novel—but as the book's emotional intensity collapsed my own intellectual distance from it, I cried the whole time, in a mix of tears and underlining. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 6 June 2026, for Mann's birthday and for Tom Deveson)