An interest in death and illness, in the pathological, in decay, is merely a kind of expression of an interest in life, in humanity,[...] ; anyone who is interested in the organic, in life, that person is also interested in death; and it could well be the theme of a Bildungsroman to show that the experience of death is, in the final analysis, an experience of life and that it leads one to humanity
Thomas Mann quoted in Rodney Symington ib.
