At the Prophet's by Thomas Mann — Read

There are strange places, strange minds, strange regions of the spirit, lofty and poverty-stricken. Along the peripheries of the big cities, where the streetlights grow scarcer and the policemen walk in couples, you must climb the stairs in the houses until you cannot go any higher, climb into the attics under slanting roofs, where pale young geniuses, criminals of dreams, sit brooding with folded arms; climb into cheap and imposingly decorated studios, where lonely, rebel artists, consumed from within, hungry yet proud, contend with their latest and wildest ideals in clouds of cigarette smoke. Here is the end of things, here is ice, purity, and nothingness. Here no contract is valid, no concession, no consideration, no measure, and no value. Here the air has grown so thin, so chaste, that the miasmata of life can no longer thrive. Here stubbornness reigns, the uttermost logical conclusion, the ego upon its desperate throne, freedom, madness, and death.

It was Good Friday, eight o'clock in the evening. Several of the people whom Daniel had invited came at the same time. They had received invitations on quarto sheets, upon which there was an eagle which bore a naked rapier in its claws through the air, and which contained in a singular handwriting a request to participate in a kind of convention on Good Friday evening, when Daniel's proclamations were to be read. And so now they met at the appointed hour in the desolate and half-dark suburban street in front of the banal block of flats which contained the physical home of the prophet.