Beauty can pierce one like a pain.

Mann’s line captures a recurring theme in his work: aesthetic experience is not merely pleasurable but can be destabilizing, even wounding. “Pierce” suggests an involuntary, bodily impact—beauty breaks through defenses and exposes the observer to longing, vulnerability, or self-knowledge. The comparison to pain hints at beauty’s double edge: it can awaken desire for what cannot be possessed, intensify awareness of transience, or provoke moral and psychological conflict. In Mann’s world, refined sensibility often comes with a cost; the more acute the perception of beauty, the sharper the accompanying ache of distance, loss, or forbidden attraction.