Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

Never had I, even in my wildest dreams, imagined that invalids, cripples, the immature, the prematurely aged, the despised and rejected, the pariahs among human beings, dared to love.

It was only from this moment that I began to have an inkling of the fact (suppressed by most writers) that the outcasts, the branded, the ugly, the withered, the deformed, the despised and rejected, desire with a more passionate, far more dangerous avidity than the happy; that they love with a fanatical, a baleful, a black love, and that no passion on earth rears its head so greedily, so desperately, as the forlorn and hopeless passion of these step-children of God, who feel that they can only justify their earthly existence by loving and being loved.

If anyone can understand a man’s fear of his fellow-men the moment their preconceived ideas are flouted, I can. You’ve seen my wife, haven’t you? No one could understand why I married her. Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line makes people first curious and then indignant. It immediately got about among my colleagues that I had bungled my treatment of her and had only married her out of panic. My so-called friends, on the other hand, spread it abroad that she had a lot of money or was expecting a legacy. My mother, my own mother, refused for two years to receive her, for she had had another match in mind for me, a marriage to the daughter of a professor — one of the most famous specialists of the day — and had I married her, I should within three weeks have got a lectureship in the university, have become a professor, and have sat pretty for the rest of my life. But I knew that my wife would go under completely if I left her in the lurch. She believed in me, me alone, and had I taken her faith from her, she would have been incapable of going on living. I may as well confess to you that I have never regretted my choice, for, believe me, a doctor, of all people, seldom has a clear conscience. One knows how little one can really do to help; as an individual one can’t cope with the infinite wretchedness that exists all around us in the world. One merely bales a few drops out of the unfathomable ocean of misery with a thimble, and thos...

But she trembled as she laughed; this was hysteria rather than genuine merriment. I could tell that she longed to jump up, and indeed that would have been the most natural thing for her to do in her state of extreme agitation, but her powerless legs fettered her to her chair. This enforced immobility lent her anger something of the viciousness and tragic helplessness of a caged animal.