Thomas Mann: The Starvelings

I've had a long meeting with myself just now, myself, who has been thinking for months that I ought to read Mann for you. After all, Mann is nothing if not the one empty corner in the squathouse of growing up, and although my romance with Mann ended years ago, I can still smell him at the thought... you know how it is. And so, month after month, I look at his stories, and I Just. Don't. Know. But then I discovered that, ten years ago, give or take a day (give, actually, but who cares?) I wrote in a journal that I had read this story, not podcast-reading (because there was no such thing ten years ago) but physical lying-on-the-sofa-reading, probably the sofa, anyhow. Maybe in bed. Probably not at a table, because who reads at tables. And ten years ago, it affected me deeply-- or else I lied to myself in the journal. Who knows?
And so I made this discovery just a few minutes ago, that I'd read the story exactly ten years ago, and I thought "well, isn't that sort of neat! I'll read it again, and see if the bildungsroman chapter of my life has at least turned a page or two in the past decade!"
The answer is to be written down in a journal somewhere to be discovered in ten years' time. But the story, dear listener, is all yours.