Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

Were one to attempt, I was quite certain, to visualize the misery that existed at any one time all over the world, there would be an end of one’s sleep and the smiles would die on one’s lips. But, 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 some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has been given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering, acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

You try to creep away, to hide yourself in the dark, you tear the clothes from your body so as to breathe more freely, you throw yourself on your bed to try and deaden all feeling. But your thoughts, they will not rest; they flutter like bats in ghostly concision round and round the exhausted brain, they gnaw and nibble their way like rats through your leaden weariness. The more quietly you lie there, the more restless is you: memory, the more agitating the flickering pictures in the dark; and so you get up and light the lamp again to scare away the ghosts.

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.