How Stefan Zweig Taught Me Compassion
Turns out you really do need to beware of pity
If you get to know me for any length of time, there’s a high chance that I will at some point have gifted, lent or recommended to you Stefan Zweig’s only novel, Beware of Pity. Reading it for the first time was one of the few revelatory experiences I’ve had and profoundly changed my approach to almost every aspect of my life. It is not my favourite book, I should say that from the outset, but it is certainly one of the most important — and best — that I’ve ever read.
I first read Beware of Pity when I was a teenager and in the middle of the process of working out the kind of person I wanted to be. I already conceptualised myself as a “kind” person, but had little idea about what that meant. I was continuously overwhelmed by the depths to which humanity seems determined to plummet and the more I learned about what was going on in the world, the worse it got.
It is profoundly ungrateful to appropriate a victimhood that is not one’s own, and to ignore life’s privileges
Although we don’t often talk about it, I think it’s a very common thing to suffer guilt at the prospect of being happy in an unhappy world. The randomness of the distribution of pleasure and suffering can make it seem profoundly selfish to enjoy oneself. For those of us who have the luxury of living in such a place and time that our quotidian concerns run more to the tune of rent payments than sweat shops, there is a constant pressure to be aware of that fact; to not just be aware, to privilege that knowledge above everything else. It is profoundly ungrateful to appropriate a victimhood that is not one’s own, and to ignore life’s privileges. But to confuse doing that with being present in your life, for better and for worse, that’s a dangerous road.
And it’s one I was going down.
That’s where Stefan Zweig entered my life, stage left. Zweig was, himself, no stranger to worldly disappointment. As a Jewish Austrian, born in the late 19th Century, a lot of his life was concerned with witnessing the downward fascist cycle that would lead to the deaths of millions and, on a more personal basis for him, the loss of his home. Primarily a writer of short stories and biographies, his only novel does not — at least not on its surface — look at the contemporary issues of his day, instead reading like a lament for times gone by. For a world that made sense, even in its imperfections. The characters in Beware of Pity are wealthy and successful, their issues mostly those of their social milieu. But beneath the surface there is a palpable melancholia to the novel, one that serves to force its readers to recon with their own approach to life. And, of course, to pity.
I’ll pause for a second here to state that, if it isn’t completely obvious by now I recommend reading this book. More than once. So maybe stop here, because I’m going to be talking about some details.
For Zweig, there are two kinds of pity: the pity of self-interest, which exists only to satiate those feelings of discomfort that we have escaped the suffering we see in front of us; and the pity of empathy…
The pity in question seems at first to take the form of a kindness. A dashing soldier makes a promise to a young, infatuated girl so that she will be motivated to recover from an illness. But although he makes it — in his own mind — with good intentions, his lack of true empathy for her is what leads (as it does in all great fiction) to tragedy. For Zweig, there are two kinds of pity: the pity of self-interest, which exists only to satiate those feelings of discomfort that we have escaped the suffering we see in front of us; and the pity of empathy, to see another creature in pain and to lament it for their sake. Through his novel, he shows us how useless the former is. How selfish. And that’s the truest lesson we can learn. Because to care about people is to care about them. Not to hold them in your consideration only to the extent to which they have the power to have an effect on your emotions. It is the difference between feeling bad about a seeing a homeless person on the street and feeling sorry that that person is homeless. Change, real change, is born of caring. But that caring must be external to mean anything, everything else is just noise.
So how did this rather philosophically abstract realisation shape the way I try to live my life? Well, the answer can be found in a particular passage of the novel, which I will include in its entirety:
‘I realised that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone was unhappy. I realised that all the time one was laughing and cracking silly jokes, somewhere in the world someone was lying at the point of death; that misery was lurking, people staring, behind windows; that there were such things as hospitals, quarries, and coal-mines; that in factories, in offices, in prisons countless thousands toiled and moiled at every hour of the day, and that it would not relieve the distress of a single human being if yet another were to torment himself needlessly.’
The story, its characters’ mistakes and tragedies, its critique of self-pity masquerading as empathy, showed me how not to live. There is, of course, a cruel amount of pain and suffering in the world, but to surrender to it, to add to it meaninglessly, does not help anyone. Instead, we must recognise the happiness we have and strive to share it with the people who don’t. Our instinct is too often to appropriate melancholy that we have not earned; to propagate the image of suffering. It is selfish and indulgent and it only serves to make sure that nothing really changes.
So, friends, we must beware of empty pity. And we must live our lives. But we must also never forget how much power we have if we really care to use it. I first read Beware of Pity as a shallow teenager with pretensions of depth, and I like to think that it paved the way for me to become a fully realised person.