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...