Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

But delusions in the dark are like hothouse flowers; they grow faster and with more tropical luxuriance. Confused and fantastic, they shoot up in the warm ground into bright creepers that choke your breath, forming with the speed of dreams and chasing the most absurd fears through the overheated brain.

Only at that moment did I faintly begin to understand (and this is something that most writers never mention) that the outcasts, the ugly, the faded and afflicted, the social misfits desire with a much more passionate and dangerous longing than those who are happy and healthy, that they love with a dark, fanatical, black love, and no passion on earth is felt more greedily and desperately than by those of God’s stepchildren who have no hope, but feel that their earthly existence can be justified only by loving and being loved.

Not in my most fleeting daydreams had I ever imagined that a woman might love me so fiercely. Of course I had often heard comrades boasting of how this or that girl was “running after them”, perhaps I had even laughed cheerfully with the others at the indiscreet tales told of such immodest advances, because at the time I didn’t yet know that every form love takes, even the most ridiculous and absurd, involves the life of another human being, and even indifference leaves you running up a debt to love.