Confusion E-Book

Zweig Stefan

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2002

Beschreibung

In the autumn of his days, a distinguished privy councillor contemplates his past and looks back at the key moments of his life. A reluctant and indolent student, he recalls a chance meeting with a reclusive professor and his frustrated wife, with whom he ends up sharing lodgings. His thirst for knowledge leads him to form an ambiguous and close relationship with the professor. But the professor harbours a secret which changes and scars both men for ever.

Leseprobe

STEFAN ZWEIG

CONFUSION

THE PRIVATE PAPERS OF PRIVY COUNCILLOR R VON D

Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

PUSHKIN PRESSLONDON

For J A R

Contents

Title PageDedicationConfusionOther Stefan Zweig titles published by Pushkin PressCopyright

CONFUSION

Confusion

THEY MEANT WELL, my students and colleagues in the Faculty: there it lies, solemnly presented and expensively bound, the first copy of the Festschrift dedicated to me by the members of the Department of Languages and Literature on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday and to mark my thirty years of academic teaching. It is nothing short of a complete biographical record: no minor essay of mine has been overlooked, no ceremonial address, no trifling review in the annual volume of some learned journal or other has failed to be exhumed from its papery grave by bibliographical industry—my entire career up to the present day is set out with impeccable clarity, step by step like a well-swept staircase—it would be truly ungrateful of me to take no pleasure in this touching diligence. What I myself had thought lost, spent and gone, returns to me united and well-ordered in the form presented here: no, I cannot deny that as an old man I now scan these pages with the same pride as did the schoolboy whose report from his teachers first indicated that he had the requisite ability and strength of mind for an academic career.

And yet: when I had leafed through the two hundred industrious pages and looked my intellectual reflection in the eye, I couldn’t help smiling. Was that really my life, did it truly trace as purposeful a course with such ease, from the first to the present day, as the biographer describes, sorting the paper records into order? I felt exactly as I did when I first heard my own voice on a recording: initially I did not recognize it at all, for it was indeed my voice but only as others hear it, not as I hear it myself through my blood and within my very being, so to speak. And so I, who have spent a lifetime depicting human beings in the light of their work, portraying the intrinsic intellectual structure of their worlds, was made aware again from my own experience of the impenetrability in every human life of the true core of its being, the malleable cell from which all growth proceeds. We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.

The book says not a word about this most secret factor in my mental development: that was why I couldn’t help smiling. Everything it says is true—only what genuinely matters is missing. It merely describes me, it says nothing real about me. It speaks of me, but does not reveal what I am. The carefully compiled index comprises two hundred names—and the only one missing is the name of the man from whom all my creativity derived, who determined the course my life would take, and now calls me back to my youth with redoubled force. The book covers everything else, but not the man who gave me the gift of language and with whose tongue I speak: and suddenly I feel to blame for this craven silence. I have spent my life painting portraits of human beings, interpreting figures from past centuries for the benefit of today’s sensibilities, and never thought of turning to the picture of the one most present to my mind. As in Homeric days, then, I will give that beloved shade my own blood to drink, so that he may speak to me again, and although he grew old and died long ago, be with me now that I too am growing old. I will add a page not previously written to those on open display, a confession of feelings to be set beside that scholarly book, and for his sake I will tell myself the true story of my youth.

BEFORE BEGINNING, I leaf once again through the book which claims to depict my life. And once again I cannot help smiling. How did they think they could reach the true core of my being when they chose to approach it in the wrong way? Even their very first step is wide of the mark! A former schoolmate, well disposed towards me and also a bearer of the honorary title of Privy Councillor, claims that even at grammar school my passion for the humanities distinguished me from all the other pupils. Your memory is at fault, my dear Privy Councillor! As far as I was concerned, anything in the way of humanist studies represented coercion which I could barely endure; I ground my teeth and fumed at it. For the very reason that, as the son of a headmaster in our small North German town, I was familiar at home with education as a means of earning a living, I hated everything to do with languages and literature from childhood: Nature, true to her mystic task of preserving the creative instinct, always impels the child to reject and despise its father’s inclinations. Nature does not want weak, conformist progeny, merely continuing from where the previous generation left off: she always sets those of a kind at loggerheads, allowing the later-born to return to the ways of their forefathers only after making a laborious but fruitful detour. My father had only to venerate scholarship for my self-assertive instinct to regard it as mere intellectual sophistry; he praised the classics as a model to be followed, so they seemed to me didactic and I hated them. Surrounded by books, I despised them; with my father constantly pressing intellectual pursuits on me, I felt furious dislike for every kind of knowledge passed on by written tradition; it was not surprising, therefore, that I barely scraped through my school-leaving examinations and then vigorously resisted any idea of continuing my studies. I wanted to be an army officer, or join the navy, or be an engineer, although I had no really compelling inclination for any of those professions. Only my distaste for the papery didacticism of scholarship made me wish for a practical and active rather than an academic career. But my father, with his fanatical veneration for universities and everything to do with them, insisted on my following a course of academic studies, and the only concession I could win was permission to choose English as my subject rather than classics (a compromise which I finally accepted with the private reservation that a knowledge of English, the language of the sea, would make it easier for me later to adopt the naval career I so fervently desired).