Impatience of the Heart

by Stefan Zweig

I cannot honestly claim that this enthusiastic gentleman was in himself a disagreeable or unpleasant person; he was one of those compulsively sociable types who collect acquaintances with the same zeal as children collect stamps, taking a particular pride in each and every specimen in their collection. For this harmless eccentric – who had a side-line as a knowledgeable and diligent archivist – the meaning of life was entirely defined by the modest satisfaction of being able to comment, as if breezily stating the obvious, whenever a name came up in a newspaper, ‘A good friend of mine’, or ‘Ah yes, I met him only yesterday’, or ‘My friend A has told me, and my friend B is of the opinion that …’ and so on all the way through the alphabet. He could be depended on to be there at the theatre applauding his actor friends’ first nights, and to be telephoning to congratulate every actress the next morning; he never forgot a birthday, unpleasing press notices he left unmentioned while sending copies of the favourable ones, and he cordially shared in the recipient’s pleasure. Certainly not a bad person, then, for he was genuinely eager, in fact delighted, to help out the moment one asked for some small favour, or if he saw any chance of augmenting his collection of acquaintances with a new curio. But there is no need for me to describe more exactly this friend Adabei, ‘Also-There’ – such is the nickname the Viennese tend to give to this category of good-natured parasite within the r...

But just as the growth of flowers becomes wilder and more tropical in a hothouse, so it is with your crazed imaginings in the dark. Muddled and fantastic, there in their sultry bedding they burst forth into outlandish lianas that choke your breath; with the swiftness of dreams, the most preposterous fearful visions come into being and chase each other round and round the overheated brain.

I knew that there was no sense in denying oneself an enjoyment simply on the grounds that it is denied to others, to refuse some happiness to oneself because some other person is unhappy. I was perfectly aware that at any single moment, while we may be laughing away and cracking silly jokes, there is somebody somewhere languishing on a sickbed and nearing death, that behind a thousand windows there is wretchedness cowering, and people going hungry, that there are after all hospitals, quarries and coal-mines, that in factories, offices and penitentiaries people beyond number are slaving away at every hour of the day, and it will not make life any easier for one suffering individual if another punishes himself to no purpose. I knew perfectly well that, if we were to try to imagine the misery existing in the world at any given moment, it would destroy our sleep and choke all our laughter for ever more. But it is not the suffering we can abstractly conceive of, or theoretically imagine in our minds, that really dismays us; only that which has confronted our soul, that which we have had to look upon in compassion, can genuinely shake us.

Is it really just compassion that makes you go over there, I asked myself, purely sympathy for these rich people? Isn’t there also perhaps the tiniest measure of vanity in it, and you really quite enjoy it too?

Nothing ever so increases a young man’s self-confidence, nothing so positively furthers the development of his character, as when he unexpectedly finds himself confronting a task which he has to discharge purely on his own initiative and under his own steam.

the kind of eyes one should have, he thought with dismay, not these red-rimmed, greedy, nervous ones of mine; no, those were the ones to have, blue, radiant, filled with a devout faith – his mother’s sometimes looked like that on Friday nights, he remembered. That was the kind of person one ought to be; better to allow oneself to be cheated on than become the cheat oneself – to be a decent, trustworthy individual. That’s the only kind of person blessed by God. All my clever ruses, he thought; they haven’t made me happy, I’m still the same blighted, restless soul.

he has promised both the synagogue and the local parish priest here huge donations in return for the child’s recovery; being uncertain which God to turn to, whether the one of his forefathers whom he has abandoned, or his new one, and haunted by terrible fear of having fallen out with either of them, he has made his oath to both at once.

Can you really not know the oldest trick in the doctor’s book? When we ourselves are stumped, and have no idea what to do, we just play for time and fool around, keeping the patient busy with silly talk and silly activities so we needn’t reveal how helpless we are. And, fortunately for us, the patient’s inner nature is our trustiest accomplice in the deceit. It’s natural that she feels better! Every treatment, whether it’s eating lemons or drinking milk or applying hot or cold compresses, initially brings about some change in the body and offers a new stimulus which the patient’s eternal optimism takes for improvement. This kind of auto-suggestion is our finest helper – it’ll help even the stupidest asses in the medical business. But there’s one catch here – as soon as the excitement of novelty has lost its edge, reaction sets in, and then you have to change course pretty quickly and find another treatment to fool the patient with; that’s the kind of fraudulent stratagem we in the profession keep up, in hopeless cases, as long as it takes, until perhaps the true, correct method just happens to be found.

medicine has nothing to do with morality; every illness in itself is an anarchical event, a revolt against Nature, and that’s why one is entitled to counter it with any means at one’s disposal – any means at all. No, don’t indulge your pity for the sick – the sick person places himself “outside the law”, he offends against Order, and to restore proper order, and him with it, we must act as we would in the face of any revolt; we have to attack ruthlessly, using whatever weapon comes to hand. Humanity itself was never healed by goodness and truth, nor was any single human being; if it takes an act of deceit to effect a cure, then that is no longer simply a base deceit, but a medical intervention of the highest class, and as long as I am not able to help a case in actual fact, then at least I must aim to help the patient through the ordeal.

pity is a two-edged affair if ever there was one. If you don’t know how to handle it you’ll do best to keep your hands – and your heart – well away from it. It’s only at the beginning – just like morphine – that it really helps a sick person and does do some good, but then if you don’t know how to get the dose right, and when to stop, it turns into a lethal poison, a murder weapon. You achieve something with the first few injections; they calm the patient, suppress the pain. The fatal problem is that the human organism, both the mental and the physical, has an uncanny ability to adapt; just as the nerves want more and more morphine, the mental state needs more and more pity, and eventually needs more than can be given. In both cases the moment inevitably comes when you have to say no, no matter whether the sick person hates you more, because of this final refusal, than if you had never helped him in the first place. Yes, my dear Herr Leutnant, you have to keep your pity well under control, otherwise it will do worse damage than all the indifference in the world. This is something we doctors know, and so does any judge or court-bailiff or pawnbroker, and if all of these people yielded and allowed their pity free rein, this world of ours would come to a standstill. It’s a dangerous thing, pity, a dangerous thing!

one hell of a responsibility you bring on yourself when you bamboozle someone with your pity! Before meddling in any business an adult should give some thought as to how far he’s proposing to take things – other people’s feelings are not there to be played around with! Granted that you deluded these good people from the worthiest, most honest motives, but in this world it’s not a question of how boldly or how timidly you strike – all that matters is what in the end you achieve, what comes of it all. Pity – yes, that’s fine! But there are in fact two kinds of pity. One, the feeble and sentimental kind, is really no more than the heart’s impatience to free itself as quickly as possible from emotional discomfort when faced with another’s misfortune; it is the sort of pity which is not at all genuine sympathy – “shared feeling” – but merely an instinctive defence of one’s own soul against the other person’s pain. Then there is the other kind, which is the only one that counts – unsentimental yet constructive, knowing its own mind, fully resolved to endure everything patiently, compassionately, along with that other person, right to the limit of its strength, and even beyond that limit. It is only when you see things through to the end, the real, bitter end, and you have great, great patience, that you can genuinely help others – only when genuine self-sacrifice is involved, only then!’

Now he is nothing more than the horse, the slave, of the wretched djinn, and however weakly his legs totter, however parched his lips grow, he – foolishly duped by his own pity – will have to run on and on, fated to carry the crafty, wicked, villainous old man on his back for ever more.

Here I was, twenty-five years of age, never having even dreamt that the sick among women, the maimed, the very young and the very old, the outcasts and the stigmatized, might so much as dare to love. When confronting the real world, and real life, a young, inexperienced person will almost invariably form his ideas and notions in the light of stories he has been told or what he has read; before he has had his own experiences he fills the void with borrowed images and models. But there again, in those books I’d read, and in all those plays and films – those superficial, simplistic versions of reality – it was always, without exception, young and beautiful people, the chosen elect, who fell in love with each other. And so I had assumed – this also explains why I was often so inhibited in my own awkward adventures – that you had to be particularly handsome, particularly graced by Nature and good fortune, if you ever hoped to attract a woman’s attention.

It was only at that moment that something began to dawn on me – something on which the poets generally have little to say – that in fact the outcasts of society, the ugly, the faded, the disfigured, the rejected and shunned, experience their desires with a far fiercer, more dangerous craving than the more healthy and fortunate among us; that they love with a dark, fanatical, pernicious love, and no passion on earth looms more greedily, more desperately, than the hopeless and desolate longing of those of God’s stepchildren who feel that their existence on this earth can be justified by nothing other than loving and being loved. That it is precisely from the deepest abyss of despair that the yearning for life issues its grimmest cry of panic – this was something I, the inexperienced young innocent, had never dared even suspect.

As a youngster of very limited experience I had always, till then, considered the pangs and longings of love to be the worst suffering the human heart could endure. But, from that hour, I began to see that there was another, grimmer agony to contend with, even worse than desire and yearning, namely to be loved against one’s will and find oneself incapable of fending off another person’s insistent attentions – to have to observe that devastating, scorching fervour of unrequited longing, and yet to stand there powerless, unable to muster the strength, or ability, or competence, to tear such a person away from the flames. A person unhappily in love can at least occasionally control his passion; he is after all not only the creature of his condition but also its creator; the lover who has not learnt how to master his feelings may at least be held liable for his own suffering. But there is no rescuing or helping a person who is loved and cannot love in return; he is no longer the one to set any measure or limit on that longing; it is beyond his control, and no willpower of his can withstand the will of one who yearns for him.

But what is truly disastrous is when Fate turns the scales, when the woman has so overcome her instinctive reserve as to reveal her own passionate commitment to the man, and with no certainty that it will be returned tenders her love, while he, now the courted one, remains reluctant and cold! This kind of entanglement is indeed insoluble, because not to respond to a woman’s desire is to crush her pride and undermine her modesty; the man who rejects a woman’s desires destroys what is most precious of all in her. Any attempt to be sensitive in his withdrawal will be in vain, any delicately evasive words useless, any offer of mere friendship a further injury to a woman who has once compromised herself and betrayed her weakness – every rejection dealt by a man becomes irredeemably a cruelty; by refusing the overture of love, he incurs guilt, guiltless though he may be. A dreadful, permanent fettering – just when you thought you were free, and felt you were your own master and indebted to no one, suddenly you find yourself hunted and surrounded, the targeted prey of someone else’s unwanted cravings. You are aware – and you feel the pain of it in the depths of your soul – that someone is waiting, waiting for you night and day, thinking about you, longing for you in agony, a woman, a stranger to you! She wants you, demands you with her whole being, every atom of her body. She desires your hands, your hair, your lips, your body, your night and your day, all of your feelings and yo...

absurd, is in fact the destiny of some human being, and that even indifference can place you in love’s debt. But whatever you simply hear told, or read in a book, passes you by without leaving much of an impression; it is only from direct experience that the heart is able to learn the true nature of emotion. I first had to experience for myself the predicament into which another person’s hopeless love can pitch one’s conscience before I was able to feel sympathy with both parties – the one that forcibly imposes itself, and the one that with equal force defends itself against such overwhelming intrusion. But how unimaginably greater was the burden of responsibility that had now fallen on me!

You know how little help you can give in reality, and as an individual you are not going to stem the daily tide of untold suffering. The most you can do is remove a thimbleful, a few drops from this unfathomable ocean – and then the people you fondly imagine you’ve healed today face new problems tomorrow. You are constantly feeling you’ve been too remiss, too careless, and to make matters worse there are the actual mistakes, the misjudgements, which you can’t avoid – with all of this, it is comforting to think that you may have saved at least one person, that there’s one whose trust you haven’t betrayed, one thing you may have got right. After all, we need to know whether we’ve simply lived out our time in a supine and brainless state or existed for some real purpose. Believe me’ – here I suddenly felt his closeness had become warm and almost tender – ‘it is well worth taking on a tough job if, by doing so, you can make life a little better for another person.’

But surely it was wonderful to be able to help – the only truly rewarding, worthwhile, thing you could do. And now this new-found knowledge pressed me to do something freely, willingly, something that even the day before I had felt was an intolerable sacrifice – namely to recognize the profound love of another person, and to feel profound gratitude for this love.

Unfortunately, though, between a woman who has once betrayed her feelings and the man to whom she has done so, there are charged and mysterious and dangerous forces at work. Characteristic of those in love is a peculiar intuitive insight into the beloved’s true state of mind; and as it is in the very essence of love that its desires are limitless, any limit, any moderation whatsoever, is felt to be repugnant and intolerable. The lover will see resistance in any little hint of restraint and in anything less than total readiness on the part of the beloved, and will quite rightly interpret any slight hesitancy in the other’s commitment as veiled opposition.

It is only what we cannot fathom, cannot comprehend, that scares us. Anything definable, anything to which we can see there is a limit, we can take as a challenge and a test of our capacity.

‘Ever’ – I felt a sudden shudder on reading the word, a word that binds a person irrevocably and for all eternity. But there was no turning back now. Once again my pity had proved stronger than my willpower. I had surrendered myself. I was no longer my own master.

Yes, on that evening I was God. But I did not look down, coolly, from my exalted throne upon my works and deeds. I sat there affably, approachably, surrounded by the creatures of my making, and in that beguiling haze I took in their faces, as if observing them through the silvery mist. To my left sat an elderly man. The great light of goodness radiating from me had smoothed out the lines on his furrowed brow and dispelled the shadows darkening his eyes. I had spirited death from him, and now he spoke like one marvellously returned to life, thankfully aware of the miracle I had worked in him. Next to me sat a young girl, and this girl had been but recently an invalid, confined and enslaved, grimly imprisoned within her own perplexed feelings; now the bright lustre of renewed health shone all around her. With my lips and my breath I had redeemed her from the hell of her fears and brought her into the heavenly realms of love; her ring sparkled on my finger like the morning star. Opposite her sat another young woman, she too smiling in gratitude, for I had brought this beauty to her face, and the sweet forest of dark hair to her fair forehead. They had all been graced by my gifts and raised up by the wonder of my presence; they all bore my light in their eyes, and when they looked at each other I myself was that brilliance in their gaze. When they spoke to each other I, only I, was the very essence of their words, and even when we fell silent I continued to dwell in their thou...

That single second was enough to tear apart all the mist of enchantment that had hung over my eyes for the whole evening. It was a moment of instant revelation, in which I now saw everything in all its shocking clarity; I knew that this unhappy creature would never fully recover. The miracle that they had all expected me to deliver had not come to pass. I was no longer God, but merely a pitiful, insignificant human being, whose weakness was as vile and damaging as any, who with his pity created nothing but confusion and desolation. In my mind I was precisely and horribly conscious of where my duty lay. If this wasn’t the time to keep faith with her, it never would be. It was now I had to help her or never – I must run after them, go and sit by her bedside, calm her mind, tell her any kind of lies about how splendidly she had walked, how splendidly well she would soon be again. But I no longer had the strength for that kind of desperate deception.

Our decisions are governed to a much greater degree than we would care to admit by the demands and constraints of the rank and conditions that chance has allotted us. Very many of our deliberations are merely automatic consequences of impressions and influences we absorbed long ago, and anyone brought up right from childhood in the rigorous routine of soldierly discipline is particularly subject to the unopposable psychological imperative of a command once issued. Any military order will exert a kind of power over him which, though logically quite inexplicable, completely overrides his own will. Confined in the straightjacket of his uniform, even if he is perfectly aware of the absurdity of an instruction he receives, he obediently does what is demanded of him like a sleepwalker, unresistingly, almost unconsciously.

That I had just committed myself afresh, and now permanently, to another being, one who suffered terribly, one of life’s outcasts, suddenly seemed no longer a sacrifice on my part. No, it is not the healthy, the secure, the proud, happy people on this earth whom we should love – they have no need of it! Love is, for them, no more than a homage, an entitlement, a duty owed to them, and they take it presumptuously and indifferently. To them, the devotion of another person is nothing more than an adornment, something to wear in the hair, a bracelet for the arm – not the entirety of life’s meaning and bliss. Only those whom Fate has laid low, those who suffer, the disadvantaged, the wretched and insecure, the unlovely, the humbled among us, only they can be truly blessed by love. Dedicate your life to them, and you truly restore what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love, and how to be loved as we truly should love and be loved – in gratitude, in humility.

no guilt is ever truly forgotten as long as the conscience is still aware of it.