nde like Hans, whom Tonio falls in love with two years later at the age of sixteen. Tonio sees his love for Hans as silly when he falls in love with Ingeborg, but Hans and Ingeborg are very much alike---beautiful and able to live at ease in the world as it is. He sufers with Ingeborg as he suffered with Hans, but he is more than willing to suffer because love makes him feel "vital and rich" (85).
All the people Tonio loves and admires are comfortable in the world but they all live on the surface of life, compared with the depths of great joy and pain where Tonio lives. There is something "stupid" about them which makes them "loved" and "lovable" (86). On the other hand, a girl like Magdalena likes Tonio, but Tonio does not like her. Tonio only loves people who do not love him back. He only wants people who are completely different than he is, people he cannot have. He cannot live comfortable in the real world, but his inner life brings him much pain: "For he was looking within, into himself, the theatre of so much pain and longing" (88). At the same time, his great pain makes him feel alive and even happy in a way: "But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full; hotly and sadly it beat for thee, Ingeborg Holm, and his soul embraced thy blonde, simple, pert, commonplace little personality in blissful self-abnegation" (89). He sees himself as very special, but he loves people who are simple and commonplace, who live on the surface of life, who are happy and beautiful. He believes that "happiness . . . is not in being loved---which is a satisfaction of the vanity and mingled with disgust. Happiness is in loving, and perhaps in snatching fugitive little approaches to the beloved object" (89). He swears he will love Inge forever, but he remembers that he felt the same about Hans.
His love for Inge fades, and his philosophy of life becomes more clear: "He bore within himself the possibility of a thousand ways of life, together...