"Beware of Pity"
Last weekend, I finally finished Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig. At that time, I was recovering from a sudden bout of a sore throat and cold, “bedrotting” with not much to do but watch and read.
Looking back, it wasn’t the most ideal time to finish the novel. But my options were limited at that time with my frail and sick body. So I just read and read to avoid boredom and literally rotting in bed.
What otherwise started as an innocuous read, so lovely and mellifluous turned so sour and depressing in the end. Zweig writes so beautifully, and I was savoring his words like eating a piece of chocolate cake, but the ending – why oh why?!
I kept thinking about the novel for days on end. The ending, in particular, kept on prodding my thoughts during spatial tasks; when I’m decluttering, sweeping, or even showering.
I guess this restlessness is a good benchmark of how phenomenal of a read it was.
It’s such a tactfully written piece, and the thorough literary examination of the human condition that is pity, is truly intriguing and unlike I’ve ever read before.
Here’s a snippet of what is TRULY pity from the book, in the words of Dr. Condor:
‘[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 heat, 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. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. 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. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say, “No”, and then one must not mind the other person’s hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. Yes, my dear Lieutenant, one has got to keep one’s pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference – we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the lawn and pawnbrokers; if they were all to give way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still – a dangerous thing, pity, a dangerous thing! You can see for yourself what your weakness has done … You take on yourself a confounded amount of responsibility when you make a fool of another person with your pity. An adult person must consider, before getting himself mixed up in such a thing, how far he’s prepared to go – there must be no fooling about with other people’s feelings … Pity – that’s all right! But 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 against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only kind that 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 is only when 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!’