#stefan sweig

[melaly]

Los libros se escriben para unir, por encima del propio aliento, a los seres humanos, y así defendernos frente al inexorable reverso de toda existencia: la fugacidad y el olvido.

[my-dear-diaryblog]

Here are some of the books I want t read in the next few months

[tournevole]

C'était un léger vent qui bruissait parmi les arbres et brisait entre les branches le miroir rigide de la lumière lunaire en cent morceaux flexibles.

Stefan sweig

[xjoyce66]

Mais déjà Erasme apprend – il y a presque cinq cents ans de cela – combien un défenseur acharné de la paix doit peu compter sur la gratitude et l’approbation des hommes : « C’est à croire que c’est une grossièreté, une extravagance et une hérésie de parler contre la guerre » ; ce qui ne l’empêche pas de déclencher ses attaques contre le bellicisme des princes avec une inébranlable fermeté, à une époque où règnent la violence et la loi du plus fort. Pour lui Cicéron est dans le vrai lorsqu’il dit « qu’une paix injuste vaut encore mieux que la plus juste des guerres », et ce lutteur solitaire cite contre la guerre une foule d’arguments dans lesquels on pourrait aujourd’hui encore puiser avec profit. « Que les animaux s’attaquent entre eux, s’écrie-t-il, je le comprends, je les excuse, en raison de leur ignorance, mais les hommes devraient reconnaître que la guerre en soi est obligatoirement injuste, car ordinairement elle n’atteint pas ceux qui l’allument et la déclarent, mais pèse presque toujours de tout son poids sur les innocents, sur le pauvre peuple à qui ne profitent ni les victoires ni les défaites. Elle frappe la plupart du temps ceux qui n’y sont pour rien et même quand la guerre connait le succès le plus heureux, le bonheur des uns n’est que dommage et ruine pour les autres ». Il ne faut donc jamais joindre l’idée de guerre à celle de justice ; et puis demande-t-il ensuite, comment donc pourrait-elle être juste ?

Stefan Zweig - Erasme. Grandeur et décadence d'une idée. 1988.

[supersaiga]

Beware of Pity - Stefan Zweig

Oh what a book. What a book! What a book! Read the book.  The day after the US Presidential election my uncle and I went to a cafe, and as I walked to the table with the tea and scones every single table I passed was worrying about Trump and what is going to happen to us all.      Future historians of our epoch will one day record that in the year 1937 almost every conversation in every country of this distracted Europe of ours was dominated by speculation as to the probability or improbability of a new world war. Wherever people met, this theme exercised an irresistible fascination, and one sometimes had a feeling that it was not the people themselves who were working off their fears in conjectures and hopes, but, so to speak, the very air, the storm-laden atmosphere of the times, which, charged with latent suspense, was endeavoring to unburden itself in speech. I hope I am just paranoid and my feeling of connection with that other time and place is childish.. it is what it is I suppose. What must be shall be. The first chapter was probably the best first chapter of any book I have ever read. Do not read on. Spoilers. Do  not even google its name because the google results contain spoilers without you even needing to click a link. And do not read the introduction of the book, because it contains a summary of the entire plot and no real analysis. Never read introductions until afterwards, if they don’t tell you the entire story they will at the very least tell you the ending. 

Beware of Pity

Our anti-hero, the ring-tailed fool, dillydallies between two views. To be kind and self-sacrificing, or to be selfish and independent. 

Were people really made so kind and happy by seeing others display kindness and pity? If that were so, Condor was right; if that were so, anyone who made a single person happy had fulfilled the purpose of his existence; it was really worth while to devote oneself to others to the very limit of one’s strength, and even beyond. If that were so, every sacrifice was justified, and even a lie that made others happy was more important than truth itself.

Is pity incompatible with love? 

   Only now did I realize [...] why my pity so enraged her. Obviously she had realized with a woman’s clairvoyant instinct that pity is far too lukewarm and fraternal a feeling, and but a sorry substitute for real love.

From selfless:

Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.

To selfish:

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

Perhaps in his selflessness he was dishonest and in his selfishness he was honest. At many points in the book people take an inexplicable liking to him, at one point he even notices and is puzzled himself. If he would only stop and see what a coward he is, or if someone would look past his gentlemanliness and his Aryan eyes and realize what he really is and point it out to him before it’s too late. 

Is it a crime to marry someone you don’t love to make them happy?

How often has it been committed?  

For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.

Sometimes insightful, now blind: 

What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies. 

There is something so horrible about this. The man is so obsessed with this person’s disability that he can at no time think of the person without thinking of the problem. And he for some reason assumes that the person is equally plagued by it and never thinks of anything else. He assumes that because he has reduced them to nothing but a condition that this is truly all they are and they are aware of it. I’ve seen people say this book is a-political. Those people are blind! This way of thinking leads down a clear road to the years where 11 million people were killed in concentration camps because they were defined according to one and only one aspect of themselves, ranging from race to chronic illness  to sexuality to political belief.

The fact that the object of pity in this book is Jewish, like the author himself, can surely be no coincidence. The Herr Lieutenant is haunted by the idea that his family and friends might find out he is romantically associated with a “Jewess”. 

Narrow-minded person that he is, every single moment he is with her he pities her. He never forgets why she is sitting down. When she tries to show him her strength and perseverance, tries to show him that she can, in fact, walk, all he can see is weakness: 

She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.

She is constantly aware of his pity and it is a constant reminder to her of her situation. It destroys her:

A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.

On self-deception: 

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.

One should not always let the wish be father to the thought. Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called “success” with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it.

On courage: 

During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking a stand against the mass enthusiasm.     It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. Even in the last war he had not met many men at the front who had either unequivocally acquiesced in or opposed the war. Most of them had been whirled into it like a cloud of dust and had simply found themselves caught up in the vast vortex, each one of them tossed about willy-nilly like a pea in a great sack. For the first time in my life I began to realise that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

Other interesting bits:

It seemed to him to be more important and sensible to become rich than to be regarded as rich  one might have thought he had read Schopenhauer’s wise paralipomena with regard to what one is or merely represents oneself to be).

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. -

What a wonderful line. It says so much and so early on about the narrator.

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.

  There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative 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.

   Love is illimitable, all finiteness, all moderation, is repugnant, intolerable to it. In every sign of constraint, of restraint, on the part of the other it suspects opposition; any reluctance to yield utterly it rightly interprets as secret resistance. And there must have been a trace of embarrassment and confusion in my behaviour, of disingenuousness and gaucherie in what I said, for all my efforts were no match for her alert expectancy.

    For a young and inexperienced person almost invariably forms a picture of real life and experience that is a reflection of the world of which he has heard or read in books; before he has experienced life at first-hand he inevitably moulds his ideas of it on second-hand experience. 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..   I felt like a murderer who has buried the corpse of his victim in a wood: the snow begins to fall in thick, white, dense flakes; for months, he knows, this concealing coverlet will hide his crime, and afterwards all trace of it will have vanished forever. And so I plucked up the 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.  So often in fiction, films and TV more than books, people are, in the end, good or bad. This person, oh and I despise him, this person is both. He is so real. He’s insightful at times, but incredibly blind. Kind, but impossibly cruel and selfish overall. Honorable, but despicable. Brave, but as cowardly as they come.  

[cristianemagalhaes]

Mendel, o livreiro – Stefan Sweig

Um pequeno conto muito bom! Um homem que vive para vender livros e deles muito sabe e o desconhecimento, indiferença e brutalidade da polícia que cuidava da censura de correspondência com os países contra os quais se estava lutando na primeira guerra.  

“...Nosso amigo Jakob Mendel realmente não havia feito nada de errado, mas apenas (e só mais tarde eu saberia de todos esses detalhes) uma estupidez terrível, comovente, completamente improvável mesmo naqueles tempos loucos, explicável apenas pela completa absorção, por sua maneira única de estar tão distante quanto a lua.”

[epearboleda]

📚🎧NOVELA DE AJEDREZ de Stefan Zweig🎧📚

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📚NOVELA DE AJEDREZ | Stefan Zweig | Audiolibros Completos en Español | Gratis

Disfruta cada instante del Audiolibro Completo y en Español 'NOVELA DE AJEDRES' de Stefan Zweig.¡Disfruta de esta obra clásica de la literat

[omgsevereengineerbouquet]

Amok de Stefan Sweig

14x20. 1961. Broché. 178 pages. …Más

Ofrecido por philippe arnaiz