The Death of a Soul - the Glance of History

The Death of a Soul, The Glance of History

And meet the time as it seeks us.

Cymberline

Before the preface, I saw the sentence adopted from ShakespeareЎЇs Cymberline . All of the sudden, a sense of seriousness and heaviness mounted up in my heart. I felt the authorЎЇs tone of despair and disillusionment. ÐŽoat most, one generation had gone though a revolution, another experienced a putsch, the third a war, the fourth a famine, the fifth national bankruptcyÐŽ­But we, who are sixty today and who, de jure, still have a space of time before us, what have we not seen, not suffered, not lived though?ÐŽ± Such struggling words can only be composed by a writer in unbearable agonies. Actually, the author was forced to witness the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages. What an embarrassing situation it was to an intellectual with great concern for the humanity and morality.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in a middle class family in Austria and died at his own hands in 1942 at the age of 60, crossing two centuries, witnessing two contemporary wars. He was well-known as a novelist, a playwright, a biographer a manuscript collector and a pacifist. In 1934, he was exiled to Britain and then to Brazil where he lived his rest of life with his wife. The World of Yesterday is his autobiography written between 1939 and 1940. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. As for his own autography, he was to ÐŽogive some reflection of his life before it sinks into the darkness.ÐŽ±(P.9)

It is not so much an autobiography as a ÐŽobiographyÐŽ± of his time. It is a vivid, moving and nostalgic portrayal of Europe before wars; it is a story about intellectual brotherhood which tried to prevent national madness that destroyed the Europe and the world, twice. In the book, we picture the dramatic progress of material wealth and despairing collapse of morality. It also provides a source for us to know other great figures like Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Tolstoy and Freud who constituted the most glorious and attractive scenery at that time, making the sky not so sad.

If we intend to figure out one of the best times in history, there is no doubt that the time before the World War IЎЄZweigЎЇs childhood and youth hoodЎЄis definitely one. It is a time that Zweig called the Golden Age of Security, a time when the first glance of the average Viennese into his morning paper was not at the events in parliament, or world affairs, but at the repertoire of the theatre which was predominant in the life of the individual and the masses. Perhaps Austria was the best place in that best time, the place where all the streams of European culture converged. As a curious and sensitive young man, enjoying the glorious inheritance, Zweig melted into the heart of the musical and academic atmosphere. Everything was orchestrated by music.

Similarly, if we are supposed to pick out the darkest time in the streaming river of history, the time after World War I may stand the ÐŽonotoriousÐŽ± name. After World War I, varieties of disasters emerged: war, revolutions, inflation, famine, epidemics, emigration, the rise of bolshevism, fascism and the most horrific all: nationalism in the cloak of patriotism. The ugliness and weakness of human nature was stirred out, and they brought forth tremendous catastrophes to themselves. Apparently the First World War was the watershed between the heaven and hell. ÐŽoWorld fell back morally a thousand years.ÐŽ±(P.7)

The fierce contrast, the paradox of humanity shook every nerve of an individual awakened. Numb and senseless people at that time could continue to live as if nothing had occurred. Speculators and calculators could make fortunes out of wars. However, seeing clearly the wounds of that time, Zweig, with endless passions and enormous concern for the worldЎЇs future, struggled and cried in letters at his full lung as the morality collapsed all of sudden. In this time, people awake suffered and became the wounds in themselves of the time. Zweig was not so much exiled by fascists as by himself. Born in the heaven, he couldnЎЇt put up with the fact that he had fallen to the hell. Being a pacifist, he experienced two world-wide wars. As an intellectual, he saw the culture declining. Nothing can be more unbearable than that to a homeless soul. At last, he discovered Brazil was a paradise where life was serene and peaceful. But it was not his paradise. He once owned several homes, but none of them belonged to him then. In our Chinese terms, he had lost his