Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

‘Always.’ I shuddered as I read that word, which binds a person irrevocably and for all eternity. But there was no turning back now. Once more my pity had been stronger than my will. I had yielded myself up. I no longer belonged to myself.

For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.

when one wants a thing as desperately as I do, one can wrest it from God.

With the breath of my lips I had raised her up out of the hell of her fears into the heaven of love, and her ring sparkled on my finger like the morning star.

For I and I alone was the beginning, the focal point and the origin of their happiness; when they extolled one another, they were extolling me, and when they loved one another, they thought of me as the creator of all love.

And I, the slave of my pity,

this everlasting consideration for others

But it is an absurdly inconsequential characteristic of suicides that, ten minutes before they are to become mangled corpses, they yield to the vanity of trying to make as tidy an exit from life as possible (from that life of which they will no longer know anything); that they shave themselves and put on clean underlinen (for whom?) before putting a bullet through their heads:

Only those with whom life had dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devoted his life to them atoned to them for what life had taken from them. They alone knew how to love and be loved as one should love and be loved — gratefully and humbly.

no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.