Read Online Confusion by Stefan Zweig - Free Book Online

up between her and me; and for the very reason that we always spoke casually of unimportant matters, or went to the theatre together, there was no tension at all in our relationship. Only one thing—awkwardly, and always confusing me—interrupted the easy tenor of our conversations, and that was any mention of his name. Here my probing curiosity inevitably met with an edgy silence on her part, or when I talked myself into a frenzy of enthusiasm with a strangely enigmatic smile. But her lips remained closed on the subject: she shut her husband out of her life as he shut her out of his, in a different way but equally firmly. Yet the two of them had lived together for fifteen years under the same secluded roof.
    The more impenetrable this mystery, the more it appealed to my passionate and impatient nature. Here was a shadow, a veil, and I felt its touch strangely close in every draught of air; sometimes I thought myself close to catching it, but its baffling fabric would elude me, only to waft past me again next moment, never becoming perceptible in words or taking tangible form. Nothing, however, is more arousing and intriguing to a young man than a teasing set of vague suspicions; the imagination, usually wandering idly, finds its quarry suddenly revealed to it, and is immediately agog with the newly discovered pleasure of the chase. Dull-minded youth that I had been, I developed entirely new senses at this time—a thin-skinned membrane of the auditory system that caught every give-away tone, a spying, avid glance full of keen distrust, a curiosity that groped around in the dark—and my nerves stretched elastically, almost painfully, constantly excited as they apprehended a suspicion which never subsided into a clear feeling.
    But I must not be too hard on my breathlessly intent curiosity, for it was pure in nature. What raised all my senses to such a pitch of agitation was the result not of that lustful desire to pry which loves to track down base human instincts in someone superior—on the contrary, that agitation was tinged with secret fear, a puzzled and hesitant sympathy which guessed, with uncertain anxiety, at the suffering of this silent man. For the closer I came to his life the more strongly was I oppressed by the almost three-dimensional deep shadows on my teacher’s much-loved face, by that noble melancholy—noble because nobly controlled—which never lowered itself to abrupt sullenness or unthinking anger; if he had attracted me, a stranger, on that first occasion by the volcanic brilliance of his discourse, now that I knew him better I was all the more distressed by his silence and the cloud of sadness resting on his brow. Nothing has such a powerful effect on a youthful mind as a sublime and virile despondency: Michelangelo’s Thinker staring down into his own abyss, Beethoven’s mouth bitterly drawn in, those tragic masks of suffering move the unformed mind more than Mozart’s silver melody and the radiant light around Leonardo’s figures. Being beautiful in itself, youth needs no transfiguration: in its abundance of strong life it is drawn to the tragic, and is happy to allow melancholy to suck sweetly from its still inexperienced bloom, and the same phenomenon accounts for the eternal readiness of young people to face danger and reach out a fraternal hand to all spiritual suffering.
    And it was here that I became acquainted with the face of a man genuinely suffering in such a way. The son of ordinary folk, growing up in safety and bourgeois comfort, I knew sorrow only in its ridiculous everyday forms, disguised as anger, clad in the yellow garment of envy, clinking with trivial financial concerns—but the desolation of that face, I felt at once, derived from a more sacred element. This darkness was truly of the dark; a pitiless pencil, working from within, had traced folds and rifts in cheeks grown old before their time. Sometimes when I entered his study