Thomas Mann in Nida.jpgA thought for today from Thomas Mann:

The world has many centers, one for each created being, and about each one it lies in its own circle…About you lies a universe whose center I am not but you are….Our universes are not so far from each other that they do not touch…God has interwoven them deep into each other


The voice is that of Joseph, speaking in Mann’s novel Joseph in Egypt. The book was part of my travel reading when I visited Nida, the resort on the Neringa, the spit of land with amazingly high sand dunes that shelters the coast of Lithuania from the wild Baltic. Mann wrote much of his Joseph trilogy at his summer cottage here.

The novelist states, elegantly and provocatively, something that seems me to be incontrovertible, though we often fail to recognize it. We are each the center of our own universe, and yet those universes interweave.

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