Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul against the sufferings of another;

one of those embarrassingly convivial souls who collect acquaintances as assiduously as children collect postage-stamps and are therefore peculiarly proud of every fresh addition to their collection.

a distinction of that kind, you know, only had any sort of point in our military world; and when the war was over, 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.

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.

Sometimes one is amazed that the good God should trouble to give the six or seven hundred roofs of a little town of this sort the background of a different sky and a different countryside.

I loved dancing, and, what is more, Ilona was a good dancer. Our bodies interlocked, we floated along;

Now, when in cold blood and at a distance of many years I look back on the simple incident which gave rise to the whole catastrophic chain of events, I must, in justice to myself, affirm that I blundered entirely innocently into the unfortunate error; even the cleverest and most sophisticated of mortals might have committed the gaffe of asking a crippled girl to dance with him. But in the first rush of horror I thought of myself not merely as an arrant bungler, but as a cad, a criminal. I felt as though I had struck an innocent child with a whip. The whole thing could, after all, have been put right with a little presence of mind; it was only by rushing away then and there like a criminal, without making any attempt to apologize—no sooner had I felt the first breath of cold air on my face outside the front door than this was immediately obvious to me—that I had irrevocably made a mess of the whole thing.

For my military duties to some extent kept at bay my uneasiness; the disquieting memory was still, it was true, drumming behind my temples, and I still felt as though an acrid sponge were lodged in my throat.

something. He said nothing, but the black, round pupils dilated, as though on the point of overflowing.

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 the eyes of compassion, that stirred and shattered one. In the midst of my exaltation I had seemed to see, as near and real as in a vision, the pale distorted features of the crippled girl, had seen her drag herself across the room on her crutches, heard the tap-tap and the clanking and creaking of the concealed supports on the helpless limbs;

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.

I saw an emotional abyss opening out before me, to survey which, to hurl myself down into which, seemed in some inexplicable way alluring. But at the same time an instinct warned me against yielding to such wanton curiosity, and said, ‘Enough! You have made your apologies. You have cleared up the whole silly business.’ But, ‘Go and see her once more,’ another voice whispered within me.

in the secret chemistry of the emotions the feeling of pity for a sick person is imperceptibly bound up with tenderness.

One had constantly to be on one’s guard against overstepping the scarcely perceptible boundary beyond which sympathy, instead of soothing, only hurt her the more.

I realized why my visits, my presence, were so welcome to Edith’s father and Ilona, to the whole household. Long protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly. Edith’s father and Ilona certainly shared to the full the sufferings of the poor impatient invalid, but by now their capacity for suffering was to some extent spent, they had become resigned to it. They regarded the invalid as an invalid, her lameness as a fact; they now waited with downcast eyes until the brief nerve-storms had played themselves out. But they were no longer appalled as I was appalled each time afresh, and because I was the only one to whom her suffering was a continually fresh source of consternation, I came to be the only one in whose presence she was ashamed of her lack of control. I had only to say, when she lost her self-control, ‘My dear Fraulein Edith!’ and the grey eyes would be lowered obediently. She would blush, and one could tell that she would have liked to run away from herself; but her crippled legs fettered her to her chair.

They really hadn’t meant it unkindly, the good chaps; all the same, their idiotic gaping and whispering had destroyed something in me that could never be restored: my confidence. For until now my strange relationship with the Kekesfalvas had in some wonderful way increased my self-esteem. For the first time in my life I had felt myself to be someone who gave, who helped; and now I had been made to realize how others regarded this relationship, or rather, how it was bound to be regarded from outside by those ignorant of the underlying circumstances. For what could they know of this subtle craving to be stirred by pity to which I had fallen a prey as though—I cannot express it otherwise—to some dark passion? To them it seemed beyond question that I had gained an entree to this luxurious, hospitable household solely in order to insinuate myself into the good graces of the rich, to save myself the expense of evening meals and to cadge presents.

What really vexed me was that I began to doubt my own motives. Wasn’t I, after all, really behaving like a sponger? Ought I, as an officer, as an adult person, to let myself be dined and wined evening after evening?

Lend—yes, I knew what he meant by that! He was trying to buy me, to pay cash down for my sympathy, for my entertaining company, just as he had promised Ilona a dowry simply to get her to stay and nurse his poor child.

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.

It seemed to him to be more important and more sensible to become rich than to be regarded as rich

Serene and lovable, she blossomed out in all that wonderful naturalness that is peculiar to only children whom life has never treated with hostility or harshness.

pity is a confoundedly two-edged business. Anyone who doesn’t know how to deal with it should keep his hands, and, above all, his heart, off it. It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison.

I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

I bent over her as hurriedly as possible, my lips rested lightly and fleetingly on her forehead. Quite deliberately, I scarcely touched her skin, and only from near-by inhaled the faint fragrance of her hair. But her hands, which had evidently been lying in wait on the pillow, shot up, and before I could turn my head away, seized me by the temples in a vice-like grip, tore my mouth from her forehead and pulled it down to her lips, which she pressed so hotly and greedily to mine that teeth touched teeth, while her breast strained and arched and thrust upwards to touch, to feel my body as I leaned over her. Never in my life had I received such a wild, despairing, thirsty kiss as the one given me by this crippled girl.

Just as in a cheap farce the sorry hero is the centre of an intrigue, the ramifications of which everyone in the audience has long since realized, and only he, poor innocent, goes on playing in deadly earnest, blissfully unaware of the net in which he is entangled (although the others have known its every thread and every mesh from the outset)—so everyone at Kekesfalva must have seen me blundering about in this foolish blind-man’s-buff of the emotions until at last she had torn the bandage violently from my eyes.

In my youth and comparative inexperience, I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one’s will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another’s passion.

She wants, she demands, she desires you with every fibre of her being, with her body, with her blood. She wants your hands, your hair, your lips, your manhood, your night and your day, your emotions, your senses, and all your thoughts and dreams.

when I had torn myself away from her violent caresses, I had dimly foreseen this, known that I should never have the selfless strength to love the crippled girl as she loved me, and, probably, not even enough pity simply to bear with this unnerving passion.

Remember that I am a prisoner who has to wait in her prison, to wait always in impatient patience, until you come and bestow an hour of your time upon me, until you permit me to look at you, to hear your voice, to know we are breathing the same air, to feel your presence, the first and only happiness that has been granted to me for years.

The feeling of self-assurance derived from physical achievement always transfers itself to the mental sphere.

Suddenly I felt that warm stream of compassion welling up within me, bringing the burning tears to my eyes, could feel my heart melting, my will weakening; once more I was at the mercy of my pity.

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

Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order or word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the strait-jacket of a uniform, an officer will carry out his instructions, even though fully aware of their absurdity, like a sleepwalker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.

The fact that at this moment I had pledged myself anew and forever to another helpless outcast no longer seemed to me to entail a sacrifice. No, it was not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy that one must love—they had no need of one’s love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accepted love only as homage that was theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another was to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a braclet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. 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.