"Broad the Waves,” Thomas Buddenbrook said, “ah, see them surging, watch them breaking, ever surging, ever breaking, on they come in endless rows, bleak and pointless, filled with woes. And yes there’s something calming and comforting about them, too – like all things simple and necessary. I’ve learned to love the sea more and more – perhaps I preferred the mountains at one time only because they were so much farther away. I wouldn’t want to go there now. I think I would feel afraid and embarrassed. They’re too arbitrary, too irregular, too diverse – I’m sure I’d feel overwhelmed. What sort of people prefer the monotony of the sea, do you suppose? It seems to me it’s those who have gazed too long and too deeply into the complexity at the heart of things and so have no choice but to demand one thing from external reality: simplicity. It has little to do with boldly scrambling about in the mountains, as opposed to lying calmly beside the sea. But I know the look in the eyes of people who revere the one or the other. Happy, confident, defiant eyes full of enterprise, resolve, and courage scan peak to peak; but when people dreamily watch the wide sea and the waves rolling in with mystical and numbing inevitability, there is something veiled, forlorn, and knowing about their eyes, as if at some point in life they have looked deep into gloomy chaos. Health or sickness – that is the difference. A man climbs jauntily up into the wonderful variety of jagged, towering, fissured forms to test his vital energies, because he has never had to spend them. But a man chooses to rest beside the wide simplicity of external things, because he is wary from the chaos whithin,"

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks