Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

“The world offered itself to me like a fruit, beautiful and rich with promise.”

To the person who has over and over again tried to trace human destinies, many tell their own story.

the instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent,

a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows.

it seemed to me ridiculous to have to go about for the rest of my life labelled as a hero, just because on one occasion I had acted with real courage for twenty minutes — probably no more courageously than thousands of others, except that I had had the good fortune to be noticed, and the perhaps still more astounding good fortune to come back alive.

to live in a halo of glory seems unnatural and unendurable, and I felt genuinely relieved when I was no longer obliged to strut about with my heroic history writ large on my uniform.

courage is often nothing but inverted weakness.

but if you try to repair a watch in too much of a hurry, you’re as likely as not to put the whole works out of order.

a new face in this Godforsaken monotony.

At that moment of folly it seemed to me a hundred times easier to give one quick pull on the trigger of my revolver than to live through the hellish torments of the next few days, the impotent waiting to discover whether my comrades already knew of my disgrace and whether the secret whispering and sniggering were not already going on behind my back.

with the swiftness of dreams the most fantastic hallucinations take shape and chase hither and thither round the overheated brain. Disgraced for life, I thought to myself, hounded out of society, sneered at by my fellow-officers, gossiped about all over the town!

myself I looked upon as hunted and pursued by universal ridicule).

I was actually glad that my foolishness was going to cost me dear, for all the time I felt a kind of malicious desire to punish myself thoroughly, blunderer that I was, to make myself pay through the nose for my twofold doltishness.

She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.

how immeasurably she must suffer from her helplessness.

How is the child to possess her soul in patience when the whole thing is so slow, how keep from complaining when God has so afflicted her, and she has done nothing ... no harm to anyone?’

I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy. I realized that all the time one was laughing and cracking silly jokes, somewhere in the world someone was lying at the point of death; that misery was lurking, people starving, behind a thousand windows; that there were such things as hospitals, quarries and coal-mines; that in factories, in offices, in prisons countless thousands toiled and moiled at every hour of the day, and that it would not relieve the distress of a single human being if yet another were to torment himself needlessly. Were one to attempt, I was quite certain, to visualize the misery that existed at any one time all over the world, there would be an end of one’s sleep and the smiles would die on one’s lips. But it was never the suffering that one pictured to oneself, that one imagined, that stunned and devastated one; it was only what one had seen in the flesh with eyes of compassion, that stirred and shattered one.

It all began with that sudden pull at the reins, which was, so to speak, the first symptom of the strange poisoning of my spirit by pity.

for the first time I saw an emotional abyss opening out before me, to survey which, to hurl myself down into which, seemed in some inexplicable way alluring.

For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth,

nothing had so weighed on me from childhood up as the conviction that I was an utterly superfluous individual, uninteresting to other people and at most an object of indifference.

I was profoundly convinced that were I suddenly to disappear, to fall from my horse, let us say, and break my neck, my fellow-officers would no doubt remark ‘Pity about him,’ or ‘Poor Hofmiller!’ but in a month’s time no one would really miss me.

That I, Lieutenant Hofmiller, could be of help to someone, a comfort to someone? That if I went and spent an afternoon chatting to a lame, tormented girl, her eyes brightened, new life came into her cheeks, and a household that was overcast with gloom was flooded with light because of my presence?

My heart swelled so within me that I felt like tearing open my coat.

It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.

mere nothings, all these, to be sure, but such things as imperceptibly cast a homely warmth over a strange room and, without one’s being aware of it, cheer and lighten the spirit.

that long years of deprivation had impaired, robbed me of, my naïve and natural ease of manner.

And besides, of what crudeness, what perfidy would we not have been guilty if, without being really in love, we had indulged in furtive kissing and hand-holding behind the back of the pathetic creature who was fettered so helplessly to her invalid chair!

such little intimacies incidental to my platonic friendship with this helpless invalid made me happier than the most passionate love-affair with another woman could have done.

Unknown and unsuspected tender zones of feeling

Unhappiness makes people vulnerable, incessant suffering unjust.

so in a sick person a latent feeling of resentment at every obvious sign of consideration is always ready to burst forth.

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has been given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering, acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

Long protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.

Ever since I had first allowed this capacity for sympathy to enter into my being, it seemed to me as though a toxin had found its way into my blood and had made it run warmer, redder, faster, pulsate and throb more vigorously.

All around me I perceived, as though that first glimpse into the sufferings of another had given me a fresh, a keener, a more understanding eye, things that engaged my attention, thrilled me, shook me.

I was revolted by any act of brutality and moved to pity by any form of helplessness. Countless trifling things that had hitherto escaped my attention I now noticed, ever since chance had squeezed into my eyes those first hot drops of sympathy; little, simple things, but each of them with the power to move and stir me deeply.

Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone’s destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.

through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone who identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

How sensitive must one be, I thought to myself, for one’s nerves to throb so close beneath the surface, to be so exposed; how immeasurably must one suffer if one had such an airily light, elfin body, which seemed made to soar, to dance, to float, and were yet cruelly chained to the heavy, solid earth!

What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies, that there at least that kindly deceiver, the dream, reveals their form to them as a thing of beauty and symmetry, that at least in the nebulous world of slumber the sufferer can escape the curse to which he is physically chained!

How is it possible, I thought with dismay, to beat off suffering with such feeble hands? How struggle against, seize, hold anything?

But I, I liked it, the woman’s horror did me good, because, after all, it is honest, it is human, to be horrified at seeing such a sight all of a sudden.

But you, all of you, you always think you’ve got to spare my feelings with your false sense of delicacy, and you fancy you’re being kind to me with your beastly consideration

Things half done and hints half given are always bad; all the evil in the world comes from half-measures.

But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.

All my wiles, he thought, haven’t made me happy. I’m still a lost soul who knows no peace. Leopold Kanitz walked on to the end of the street, a stranger to himself, and never had he felt more wretched than on this day of his greatest triumph.

There was such an air of emptiness and forlornness about this little creature, and she viewed herself and her future with such bewildered apathy, that he was reminded of himself, of his own unsettled, homeless existence. Her aimlessness brought home to him his own.

even she, the despised, the downtrodden, the oppressed, could be respected, loved like other women.