Book Specs 📖

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

After the embarrassment of asking a paraplegic to dance, a young cavalry officer becomes a slave to his destructive sympathies.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• Zweig makes it clear that the pitiable do not belong to a certain class/caste. He portrays characters of high rank/prestige such as Lajos von Kekesfalva and Dr. Condor in conditions that invite pity emotionally, physically, or materially (home/office/garments). We are very much in the same positions where, depending on conditions, we are capable of pitying others and being pitied.
• There is a passage in the book where Anton proclaims himself to be a God, to have created “life” for the Kekesfalvas with his company and his promises. In the same passage, he also bemoans that he is a slave to the same pity. Is an act truly altruistic if underneath the facade is a snobbish elitism? Ultimately even if our sympathies help someone in the short-term, can we guarantee that we can provide this crutch, our pity, with them to the end? Like Dr. Condor said “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.” We should all strive for the second kind of pity Dr. Condor explains as the unsentimental but creative kind, which is the opposite of weakness and short-sightedness, a real compassion to carry out a mission until the end.
• Another good question that sparked thinking: love as a freedom, both to the lover and the one being loved. Once you become an object of pity or an obligation, is there still room for (romantic) love? I’ve never thought about the recipient of unwanted love, how this can be a source of pain and how the power of pity can become the foundation for a love story (if we can call it love…sounds like a horror story to me!)

“Quotes”🗣

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.

It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an indivudal to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream…

It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one’s own existence.

…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.

For one’s emotional state is always determined by the most odd and accidental things, and it is precisely the most superficial factors that often fortify or diminish our courage.

…it is always madness that first gives one an insight into the intensity of a passion….

For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but neatly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in the world.

But all that one has heard and read passes one by; it is only from personal experience that the heart can learn the true nature of its emotions.

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 it.

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…

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.