Beware of Pity

by Stefan Zweig

Kekesfalva related this story to me during the saddest night of his life, the night on which his wife died, at one of those moments, therefore, which a man lives through perhaps only twice or three times in his life—one of those moments when even the most reserved man feels a need to bare his soul to another man as to God. I can still see him clearly before me.

But chance is a willing accomplice of the man who is ready to venture all.

No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbour lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth rather than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.

I’ve destroyed your conception of a doctor as a helper of mankind and fount of truth? You, in your youthful enthusiasm, had had a very different notion of medical morality, and are now—oh, I can tell!—Disillusioned and even revolted at the thought of such practices. I am sorry, but medicine has nothing to do with morals; every illness is in itself an anarchistic phenomenon, a revolt against Nature, and one must therefore employ every means to fight it, every means. No, no pity for the sick—the sick person places himself outside the law, he offends against law and order, and in order to restore law and order, to restore the sick person himself, one must, as in the case of every revolt, attack ruthlessly, enjoy every weapon at one’s command, for goodness and truth have never yet succeeded in curing humanity or even a single human being.

I feel as though I had only now really begun to live.

But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give.

Kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond. It is only when one goes on to the end, to the extreme, bitter end, only when one has an inexhaustible fund of patience, that one can help one’s fellows. Only when one is prepared to sacrifice oneself in doing so—and then only!’

For the first time in my life 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.

But there are some people who simply cannot have all the good things of this life.

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. That it is precisely from the lowest abysses of despair that the panic cries and groans of those hungry for love ring out most gruesomely—this was the dread secret which I, in my raw inexperience, had never ventured to suspect.

Our instincts are always more prescient than our waking thoughts;

I tried everything that lies in the power, and beyond the power, of a human being.

Every man knows what he wants and what he’s got to do. No one can understand from outside.

And then I had a stroke of luck, the sort of luck that only comes your way after you’ve drawn a hundred thousand blanks.

In all our actions vanity is, after all, one of the most powerful driving forces, and weak natures in particular succumb to the temptation to do something which, viewed superficially, makes them appear strong, courageous and resolute.

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 those whom one imagines one has cured today have a new malady tomorrow.

One simply can’t help the whole world.’ ‘But one must try,’ he said, with a glance at me. ‘That’s what one lives for. For that alone.’

Was it not the most wonderful thing on earth to be able to help one’s fellow creatures? I now knew that it was the only thing that was really worth while.

It is characteristic of those who love to have an uncanny insight into the true feelings of the beloved, and since love, according to the inmost laws of its being, ever desires the illimitable, all finiteness, all moderation, is repugnant, intolerable to them. In every sign of constraint, of restraint, on the part of the other they suspect opposition; any reluctance to yield utterly they rightly interpret as secret resistance.

It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.

Once more my pity had been stronger than my will. I had yielded myself up. I no longer belonged to myself.

It’s enough to know that it is only because of you that I am alive again and can go on living…that only since yesterday have I begun to live.

On that evening I was God. I had created the world, and lo! it was full of goodness and justice. I had created a human being, her forehead gleamed like the morning and a rainbow of happiness was mirrored in her eyes.

On that evening I was God. I had calmed the waters of unrest and driven the darkness from their hearts. But from myself, too, I had chased away the fear, my soul was at peace as never before in all my life.

‘If you sell yourself, at least you should get a good price.’

We must keep our hands clean, always clean. You can’t touch pitch without being defiled.

I would do everything possible to atone for my cowardice, my lies; the only point of my life now was to prove to her that it was not she whom I had betrayed, but only the other.

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.

And so I plucked up courage and began to live again. Since no one reminded me of it, I myself forgot my guilt. For the heart is able to bury deep and well what it urgently desires to forget.

But ever since that moment I have realized afresh that no guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.