Strangers Passing in the Street

"Nothing is stranger, more delicate, than the relationship between people who know each other only by sight – who encounter and observe each other daily, even hourly, and yet are compelled by the constraint of convention or by their own temperament to keep up the pretence of being indifferent strangers , neither greeting nor speaking to each other. Between them is an uneasy and overstimulated curiosity, the nervous excitement of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need to know and to communicate; and above all, too, a kind of strained respect. For man loves and respects his fellow man for as long as he is not in a position to evaluate him, and desire is born of defective knowledge."

Thomas Mann - Death in Venice