Thanks to Books by Stefan Zweig

[Published in The Saturday Review, 1958, with an editor’s note: “The following commentary by Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), German novelist and critic, first appeared in 1937 in a volume of occasional pieces entitled Begegnungen mit Menschen, Büchern, Städten. It was translated for SR by Harry Zohn, professor of German at Brandeis University.”]

They are there, waiting and silent. They neither urge, nor call, nor press their claims. Mutely they are ranged along the wall. They seem to be asleep and yet from each one a name looks at you like an open eye. If you direct your glances their way or move your hands over them, they do not call out to you in supplication, nor do they obtrude themselves upon you. They make no demands. They wait until you are receptive to them; only then do they open up. First, there has to be quiet about us, peace within us; then we are ready for them. Of an evening, on returning home from tiresome errands; some day at noon when one is weary of his fellow men; in the morning when one is cloudily half-awake after dream-laden sleep — only then is one ready for books. You would like to have a conversation and yet be alone. You would like to dream, but in music. With the agreeable anticipation of sweet sampling you step to the bookcase: a hundred eyes, a hundred names meet your searching glance silently and patiently, the way the slave women of a seraglio greet their master, humbly awaiting the call and yet blissful to be chosen, to be enjoyed. And then — as the finger gropes about on the piano to find the key for the inner melody, gently it nestles against the hand, this dumb white thing, this closed violin; in it all the voices of God are locked up. You open up a book, you read a line, a verse, but it does not ring clear at the moment. Disappointed, almost rudely, you put it back. Finally the right one is at hand, the book that is right for this hour — and suddenly you are gripped, your breath mingles with another’s breath, as though the warm, naked body of a woman were lying next to yours. And as you carry it away to your lamp, The Book, the happily chosen one, glows with an inner light. Magic has been done; from delicate dream clouds arises phantasmagoria. Broad vistas open up and your senses fade away into space.

Somewhere a clock ticks. But it does not penetrate into this time which has escaped from itself. Here the hours are measured by another unit. There are books which have traveled through many centuries before their words came to our lips; there are new books, born only yesterday, just yesterday begotten out of the confusion and distress of a beardless boy. But they speak with magic tongues, and one like the other soothes and quickens our breathing. And as they excite, they also comfort; as they seduce, they also soothe the open mind. Gradually you sink down into them; you experience repose and contemplation, a relaxed floating in their melody in a world beyond this world.

You pure leisure hours, transporting us away from the tumult of the day; you books, truest and most silent companions, how can we thank you for your ever-present readiness, for this eternally uplifting, infinitely elevating influence of your presence! What have you not been in the darkest days of the soul’s solitude! In military hospitals and army camps, in prisons and on beds of pain, in all places, you, the eternally wakeful, have given men dreams and a hand’s breadth of tranquility amidst unrest and torment. God’s gentle magnets, you have always been able to draw out the soul into its very own sphere when it was buried in everyday routine. In all periods of gloom you have always widened the expanse of our inner horizon.

Tiny fragments of eternity, mutely ranged along an unadorned wall, you stand there unpretentiously in our home. Yet when a hand frees you, when a heart touches you, you imperceptibly break through the workaday surroundings, and as in a fiery chariot your words lead us upward from narrowness into eternity.