I gather that Wes Anderson has contributed to something of a mini-vogue for the works of Stefan Zweig in recent years -- as en vogue as this sort of thing can ever be --by doing little more than making public references to his work in relation to a recent film. (I am reminded of the consternation and rage one of my high school English teachers always expressed over the fact that Oprah -- by means of her book club -- was apparently able to "claim," and thereby emblazon her name onto virtually any work of literature in circulation, without having contributed in any way to the book in question. When this fate befell his beloved Faulkner, it was almost too much for him to bear.) If you come to Zweig's Beware of Pity by this particular trail of bread crumbs -- the Andersonian one -- you will probably be expecting to find in the novel picturesque details of the late Hapsburg social life that would soon crumble into dust with the guns of august.
And there will be enough of that -- we have in our first few pages, after all, a reference to Sachertorte and the "variegated species of snob" that inhabited the Vienna café scene. This, however, is the milieu of our author alone -- not really of the story he wishes to unfold. As he tells us in a prefatory chapter -- one that believers in the autonomy of artistic production will probably regard as a clever novelistic framing device, whereas those who have confronted before the profound difficulty of creation ex nihilo will recognize it as more likely the simple and honest truth -- the tale that follows is not Zweig's own invention, but the actual experience of an Austrian cavalry officer whom he encountered in social life, as it was related to him over several long discussions.
The events that follow in the novel are largely set out in the provinces of the Empire, rather than among the intellectuals of Vienna, and involve the innermost feelings of an unscholarly and honor-bound -- but by no means unsophisticated and unselfconscious -- subaltern in the imperial army. Lieutenant Hofmiller is a surprisingly lovely, endearing, and thoughtful narrator -- surprising at least for those of us who have been warped by other reading to expect that all characters in active, military, hierarchical professions will be dunderheaded figures of fun (though dunderheads do abound in the book among Hofmiller's comrades in arms).
And while Zweig warns us in advance that the details of his plot will hinge upon a series of fine points of honor and disgrace that are most intelligible within the context of the hidebound caste system of the Austro-Hungarian officer corps, in reality I suspect that anyone who has lived through a stage of life in which they were 1) young and lacking in self-confidence; and 2) surrounded 24 hours a day by people their own age who have somehow to fill up the hours and break the monotony by finding things to say to one another, even if they are repetitive dull gossip and cruel jokes -- in short, anyone who has been to a four-year college -- will probably be able to relate to Hofmiller's concerns.
Thus, apart from the scenes of military maneuvers and Zweig's accounts of the at-times baffling difficulty involved in placing calls with an operator in the early days of the telephone, this book is not really a window into the sociology of a vanished Central European society. Rather, it is an exploration of an eternal human problem -- i.e., the way in which our efforts at kindness often eventually result in cruelty; the way in which, through a misguided sense of politeness and sympathy, we assume implicit obligations to others that we do not have the will and strength to carry out. This is a book for any epoch in which homo sapiens still walk the earth.
On the other hand, do not be fooled by the book's didactic title (in its English translation). Timeless and untethered as its themes may be, this is by no means a "message novel." It would have no right to clock in at 350 pages if it were. Rather, it is a novel in the grand 19th century tradition - though published in 1938. It is so in the sense that its main stream of narration is interrupted by no less captivating novels-within-novels, as characters duck themselves into pubs or living quarters and relate to one another an entire life story; in the sense that its thematic content comes in twists and turns, in which the voice both of self-sacrifice and self-preservation are given equal weight and a fair hearing, with no final resolution of the conflict between them (since mature experience -- and the best novels that are based on it -- seldom show us that one person is all wrong and the other all right); and in the sense that it is above all an exploration of the finest distinctions between human feelings, the subtle shades of emotion that are aroused by contact between sensitive and conscientious people.
Novels at their best -- and I now gratefully include Zweig's among them -- are essentially concerned with problems of morality, but not with moral or immoral people; nor with moral or immoral behavior. The characters in Beware of Pity contend -- like all of us -- with mixed motives and moods; with incompatible values and contradictory obligations. And they find their way through them with varying degrees of success. It all goes to make up a remarkably moving and honest book.
--
Lieutenant Hofmiller's troubles begin at his provincial post when he is invited to dinner at the home of the wealthiest man in town, Herr von Kekesfalva. There, he mistakenly asks the man's young daughter, Edith, to dance -- out of his sense of decorum as a guest. What he does not realize until too late is that her legs are paralyzed, and she gets about on crutches. She is humiliated and upset by his mistake.
After this innocent yet deeply wounding error, Hofmiller is not only wracked with guilt, he is also aware that he cannot simply try to forget the incident, unless he somehow makes amends. Others will not let it be forgotten. As previously indicated, the pre-war barracks life that Hofmiller leads is teeming with the scandal and tattle born of ennui. The cavalry officers apparently spend their days repeating the same tiresome maneuvers over and over on the field, preparing for hypothetical battles that no one -- at that point -- seems seriously to expect to arrive. Surrounded by this boredom, pent-up energy, and exclusively male company, the fellow officers have nothing to do with their time but rag one another and retail old stories. "[A]t our mess table every piece of idiocy on the part of any one of us was chewed over for the next ten or twenty years," Hofmiller relates, "every asininity immortalized, every joke fossilized." (p. 16, Blewitt translation throughout).
Hofmiller must therefore race to patch things up. He sends a bouquet of flowers and receives a kind note in response. He returns to the home of the Kekesfalvas and discovers that Edith actually delights in his company and conversation. The gratitude he receives from her father for his visits warms and flatters him, and he finds that he begins to look forward to joining the family at meals almost as if at last he had found his home and his purpose in life. Edith even seems to be making a partial recovery from her paralysis on the strength of the joy he has brought into their lives.
Inevitably, however, it all comes apart. Edith falls in love with Hofmiller, and he does not feel the same in return. He discovers that Edith's father had been eyeing him from the start as a potential son-in-law, and that he has gradually come to link obsessively the hope of his daughter's future health and mobility to what he imagines will be Hofmiller's ultimate offer of marriage. Hofmiller has soon gotten into an emotional dilemma from which he cannot extricate himself, at least not without wounding people who have been extremely kind to him, and whom he cares about (even as he soon comes to resent them as well). Hofmiller in this way becomes the victim of his own good nature. But, more than this, so do all the Kekesfalvas. They are all the worse off for his compassion, at last, than if he had displayed none in the first place.
--
Older people than Hofmiller might have seen what was coming, and never have allowed themselves to be taken in so far. Many adults are cautious -- often to a fault -- about taking on new obligations, either because they already have so many or because they are haunted by the memory of people they have disappointed in the past and have pledged never to relive the experience. Most adults live in a state of precarious balance, in which they feel that their lives have been arranged just so and the slightest new pressure in either direction could topple the edifice. ("Everyone is right up there at the very brink of their pain limit," as Martin Amis once wrote.) They therefore might find Hofmiller's actions difficult to comprehend.
Yet they are merely forgetting what it is like to be young and un-useful. Anyone who has gotten over their head in an emotional entanglement at Hofmiller's age or younger (the cavalry officer is 25 at the time of the book's events) will understand exactly how he could have found himself in this mess. When one has never had a job or a family, when one has spent one's life so far in school, performing activities that can matter to no one other than oneself -- and don't especially matter to the latter -- one is not frightened at the possibility that one will be pulled in too many directions by the needs of others. One has the opposite terror: that one is not in fact needed at all: that one is only ever going to be taken care of by others, to be a burden indefinitely.
To discover that another person actually depends on one, therefore -- to discover that she or he waits upon one every day and attaches to oneself the most significant hopes of their life, is entirely bewitching. Growing up one never thinks that this will happen, at heart. One thinks of oneself as utterly undistinguished and uninteresting. (I recall as a high school student looking with terror at the college admission rates of the schools I wanted to attend, and feeling deep in my soul that there was no reason, no reason at all, why I would be in the fraction that was deemed acceptable rather than the vast majority that were refused.)
To find that after all at least one person needs one, longs for one, is thus to take a step into a new life; it is to become convinced that everything that came before was a shadow, a half-life, a mere and irrelevant prelude. "All of a sudden," as Hofmiller describes it, "I could no longer understand the slothful torpor in which I had hitherto lived as in a grey, insipid twilight." (47).
So it is that a situation that may appear from the outside to be unhealthy, dependent, even abusive may at the same time feel -- to the person enmeshed in it -- to be the most vivid and real experience they have ever had. (For this reason, those who have been through Hofmiller's experiences will never have any trouble again in understanding the apparently miserable romantic entanglements of others, nor the reason why people stay in cults or totalistic political movements long after the latter have revealed to them their toxic cores.)
The problem that inevitable arises -- and ends Hofmiller's delusions -- is that Edith is a human being too, with just the same emotional requirements as Hofmiller -- the same need to be needed. She cannot live happily as a burden, as someone who is simply taken care of by others, never caring for others herself. She seethes -- with good reason -- at the possibility that others visit her simply out of pity or obligation. She wants not only the company of others, but for them to depend on her company.
Just as Hofmiller is surrounded by his fellow officers but feels perpetually bored and lonely in their midst -- recognizing as he does that "nothing had so much weighed on me from childhood up as the conviction that I was an utterly superfluous individual [....] I was profoundly convinced that were I suddenly to disappear, to fall from my horse, let us say [...] my fellow-officers would not doubt remark 'Pity about him,' [...] but in a month's time no one would really miss me" (p. 40) -- so too, Edith feels unloved even in the presence of a loving father and cousin -- and of the kindly Hofmiller -- because she does not feel that any one of them needs her in quite the way she relies upon them.
Thus, when she finally corners Hofmiller on the subject of his visits and demands from him an honest explanation of his motives in coming to see her each day, he fatally blunders into speaking the words she most dreads to hear. With all intended and frustrated kindness, he tells her, "Whenever I look at you, I have a feeling that [...] that here is someone to whom I'm not so terribly unimportant as I am to the fellows in the regiment." As we all have done at one time or another, he thus trods on exactly the sore toe, in his very effort to be comforting and kind. As George Eliot says of a character in Felix Holt: "he always blundered when he wanted to be delicate or magnanimous; he constantly sought to soothe others by praising himself."
Hofmiller has indicated why it pleases him to see that Edith needs him, but not why he needs her. And this is not enough emotional sustenance for any human being to live on. Edith does not want to flatter Hofmiller's vanity by depending upon him; she wants him to crave and desire her just as she feels for him.
--
So why doesn't he? Why not just go about loving Edith, go about marrying her? There are plenty of good reasons why he could do so. She's young, she loves him, she has a family that is already attached to him, and there are no end of financial incentives to enter into marriage with the daughter of the town's wealthiest citizen (of these last advantages Hofmiller is especially wary -- more on that in a second). At a much younger age, I wouldn't have been able to see the downside to Hofmiller's predicament. Having anyone fall in love with me would have seemed like an impossible stroke of good fortune. Nor is Hofmiller some sort of cad or bigot who is put off by Edith's disability. So what's the issue?
Simply, it is that one cannot invent one's feelings, or always explain why one has them -- sometimes they are simply too powerful and definite to brook argument. "Every man knows what he wants and what he's got to do," says Hofmiller, "No one can understand from the outside." (p. 236).
Indeed, one of the central ideas of the book is this incommunicability of the truths that have been won through personal experience -- a theme that is all the more poignant if one feels, in reading it, that one had to pass through something like Hofmiller's and Edith's struggles oneself to find emotional meaning in Zweig's novel at all. As I say, as a teenager or young college student, I couldn't have understood why having someone fall in love with you would be a bad thing. Neither, Hofmiller tells us, could he -- until it happened.
The tragic reality, therefore, is that it is practically impossible to advise others, to see them off a dangerous path once they have started down it -- especially in matters of love. "It's not always easy to warn people," says the wife of the straying minister in Gide's Symphonie Pastorale. (Bussy trans.) To return to Zweig's words: "[A]ll that one has heard and read passes one by," says Hofmiller, "it is only from personal experience that the heart can learn the true nature of its emotions." (p. 214).
--
Of course, Hofmiller's and Edith's shared fear and conviction that they are each "superfluous"-- that no one truly needs them -- is merely an illusion of youth -- the characteristic failure of self-confidence of youth. In reality, Edith's father depends upon her wellbeing as the key to his own happiness with a far fiercer urgency than that with which she relies on Hofmiller. So too, even as Hofmiller chases after the friendship of the Kekesfalvas under the belief that no one values or cares for him in the regiment, his companions in fact notice his absence with sadness and annoyance. When he periodically returns to the barracks, they rag him with jokes about how he must be spending time at the Kekesfalva's so routinely simply to plunder their well-stocked larder, or otherwise to exploit their generosity. Hofmiller takes these remarks as a sign of his companions' moral stupidity and their incomprehension of all nobler motives to action -- motives of kindness and compassion. This could be the case -- but their jokes could equally be signs that they miss him and are frustrated by his absence.
This is another all-too-typical mistake of the young who have wandered into an emotional entanglement. Because of their very conviction that they don't and couldn't possibly matter to anyone, and because they think that their new, disastrously co-dependent relationship is the only "true," "real" relationship they have ever had, they are shockingly careless with their friendships and family. They hurl themselves into the entanglement because they think no one elsewhere will miss them. Thus, their very self-effacement and self-doubt harms those around them as much as themselves. And when others politely object to what they are doing by making stale jokes about the baser motives that animate love and lust, the young conclude that the others simply "don't get it." And maybe they don't. Or, maybe, they have been seared too in their own personal histories by getting too close to the flames of sentimentality, and don't know how else to caution the youngster against them.
--
Hofmiller sees none of this. He takes his companion's references to his alleged "sponging" off the Kekesfalvas altogether literally, and this deepens his predicament. One of the reasons he cites for why he absolutely cannot marry Edith, at last, is that the others will regard him as having sold himself -- that his fellow officers will joke that he married an unfortunate invalid for her money, and/or so as to get even closer to a local rich man and power-broker.
Hofmiller cannot stand the vulgarity of this supposition. His disgust and fear of being thought a mere sponger is further reinforced throughout the book as he learns about the life stories of two other powerful men with whom he comes in contact -- Kekesfalva himself and Balinkay (a favorite rogue and former member of the regiment), both of whom are the objects of unfair tattle in the town to the effect that they only married in order to squeeze money out of their wealthier spouses.
The former's backstory makes up a particularly delightful and intriguing sub-plot within the novel. Kekesfalva, it so happens, was not always the aristocrat he presents himself as, but began life as a struggling Jewish business agent from a small town in the hinterlands. Despite the fact that Zweig was himself Jewish, it is quite possible to read into the character from here an all-too-familiar anti-Semitic stereotype -- the social climber and money-hungry striver. One hesitates to do so, however, because the character is so human and sympathetic throughout -- even at his most formerly sordid -- and because his motives and deeds are so comprehensible -- if not particularly admirable -- as a reaction to conditions in semi-feudal Austro-Hungarian society.
--
The plot in Kekesfalva's backstory hinges -- as it does in so many a fine novel in the grand tradition -- on real estate. After having made a name for himself as a particularly ruthless businessman and trader, Kekesfalva overhears a conversation on a train one day concerning an estate. It seems that a member of the imperial aristocracy has passed on her enormous fortune to a single domestic servant -- her lady's companion -- thereby slighting in the process her many relatives. Kekesfalva (then Kanitz) knows the estate well, including the worth of many of the valuables on site. After meeting the estate's new possessor, he becomes convinced that she has no understanding of the true value of the property and can be persuaded to sell it all at a vastly deflated price.
His cynical project is soon abetted by the fact that one of the family's lawyers has managed to finagle an assessment of the property at only a third of its true value, in order to reduce the amount that will have to be paid in estate tax (it would seem that they didn't have Republican tax plans in Austria-Hungary). Kekesfalva buys the estate from the former servant and new possessor at even less than this amount, justifying his actions to himself as he does so on the theory that skill should be rewarded, and anyone so unwise in matters of business does not deserve to have so much property.
A person of great good nature and inward beauty, however, the former lady's companion and new owner is if anything relieved to be rid of responsibility for the property and more than pleased to have a small annuity from investing the proceeds of the sale (on Kekesfalva's advice) in government bonds (though -- one thinks with a wrench -- what happened to those bonds after 1918?)
When Kekesfalva discovers that the woman not only fails to hate him for his odious deception, but is positively grateful for his advice, his conscience is touched. He reflects that the woman he has just duped and cheated is, far from being a fool, someone of such decency that she prefers having wrong done to her than to do wrong to others -- "someone who would rather be betrayed than betray." (p. 127). She has survived years of miserable servitude to an ungrateful and violent tempered princess, emerging from it without the slightest malice toward others. She is the embodiment of the protagonist of that memorable late poem by Gottfried Benn:
I have met people who
grew up in a single room with their parents
and four brothers and sisters, and studied at night
with their fingers in their ears at the kitchen table,
and grew up to be beautiful and self-possessed as duchesses—
and innerly gentle and hard-working as Nausicaa,
clear-browed as angels. (Hofman trans.)
She is, as Kekesfalva declares, "so inherently a dignified, so refined a being." (131). Having finally realized that this is the sort of person that one should try to be, rather than the sort of person that one should try to swindle, Kekesfalva falls in love with her, and eventually proposes marriage.
But, as with poor Hofmiller, what is in fact a conscientious deed becomes construed by the town gossips as one of his basest deceptions. He is accused by his compatriots -- with open anti-Semitism -- of marrying her for her money, just as Hofmiller is deemed a sponge, and thereby gaining for himself an estate and title.
--
Plainly, one might think, Zweig's message at this point of the story is clear: the rewards for good deeds are few and far between -- they win for one neither personal happiness nor the esteem of others. Even if one supposes that the compensation of self-sacrifice will surely at least be that one is respected for it, one would be mistaken. People manage to attribute base motives to the finest deeds. One's neighbors are ultimately as hesitant to attribute superior virtue to anyone as they are to attribute superior intellect or wealth, etc. etc. Beware of pity and goodness in that case, Zweig is telling us. Better to save yourself while you can.
But, as I have already suggested, the novel is by no means so univocal on the subject as my synopsis thus far would suggest. Dr. Condor, the ferocious conscience of the book, is to be sure the only character to warn Hofmiller against the dangers of pity, and of the implicit obligations he is assuming to others by following its dictates -- but he is ruthless with Hofmiller when it comes to urging him to follow through on those obligations, once he has engendered them by failing to heed to Doctor's warning. Let us take these two sides of his admonition to Hofmiller in turn.
"[P]ity is a confoundedly two-edged business," says Condor. To him, pity is a deadly and addictive substance. "It is only at first that pity, like morphia, is a solace," he continues, "But the devil of it is that the organism, the body [...] has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphia, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'No', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all."
That is certainly a warning that rings true, for anyone who has a certain amount of Hofmiller in his blood or his past. It is indeed as Condor describes. This is how one becomes hopelessly enmeshed. This is how one -- at each stage -- thinks one is "helping" another person, when one is only adding to the weight of the final blow that one must strike.
So, perhaps, there is no such thing as truly helping another person? Some have argued as much, and with considerable spirit of conviction and experience behind them. As the great -- if uneven -- rock critic Lester Bangs writes in an article on Van Morrison, of all people (the incorrigible essayist always gathers their inspiration where they may) -- sounding much like Dr. Condor on this point-- "there is absolutely nothing you can do but finally reject anyone in greater pain than you [....] You got their hopes up. Which makes you viler than the most scrofulous carrion. [...] Because you have committed the crime of knowledge, and thereby not only walked past or over someone you knew to be suffering, but also violated their privacy, the last possession of the dispossessed." Bangs' contempt for Hofmiller would be a given -- he would regard him as one who has made everyone else suffer for his pity, even more than they were before.
--
Yet Bangs' admonition captures only half of Condor's message. For all his warnings against pity to Hofmiller, Condor is himself an altruist and secular saint. He maintains a working class practice when he could easily command far more wealthy patients. He dotes on a wife who is unwell and at times ill-tempered. He himself puts into thoroughgoing practice the pity and self-sacrifice whose perils he wishes to make plain to the naïve and inexperienced Hofmiller. His message to the younger man is not to avoid self-sacrifice -- rather that if one chooses its path, one must actually be prepared to make sacrifices for it. One cannot do it just because one thinks one will become happy and gain esteem in the eyes of one's neighbors. One may very well not gain either -- as Hofmiller's and Kekesfalva's experiences suggest. Rather, one must actually be willing to give something up.
There is a passage in Orwell's great essay on Tolstoy in which he takes the great Russian to task for "renouncing the world under the expectation that this would make him happier" -- in which case he has really made no renunciation at all. Writes Orwell, ventriloquizing what he takes to be the ultimate moral of Shakespeare's King Lear, "Give away your lands if you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself."
This, in essence, is the lesson that Condor has for Hofmiller. Don't go about promising of oneself to others unless you are actually prepared for it to hurt. Only if you are prepared to sacrifice should you indicate to others by your actions that you are willing to do so. "You take on yourself a confounded amount of responsibility when you make a fool of another person with your pity," says Condor. "An adult person must consider, before getting himself mixed up in such a thing, how far he's prepared to go. There must be no fooling about with other people's feelings."
I recall in this regard a story from the great Glynn Washington, host of NPR's "Snap Judgment" about the time he promised a female schoolmate of his, when he was a child, that she could come and live with his family if she ever had to leave home. When he discovered one day that she actually intended to take him up on the offer, he was in the terrible position of having to disappoint her -- to reveal that his promise had been a false one, that he had not meant it when he gave his word. I wish I could track down the transcript of the original story, as Washington's father had some resonant advice for him after this incident that was very much like Dr. Condor's words of wisdom -- very much too like the words of a Chinese student's manual that a friend once shared with me: "Do not promise idly."
--
Of course, Dr. Condor's dichotomy between sacrifice and self-preservation, in which each is set diametrically against the other and one can only be pursued at the expense of the other, will strike many as misguided, unduly bleak -- even pathological. To be sure, I, like many of us, have had other experiences in my life that suggest Condor is wrong to paint things so starkly. So many of the best relationships in our lives, after all, are mutually enriching; in them we gain even as we give to others, with no conflict between the two.
Yet one does wonder if this most optimistic view of the human condition -- in which ultimately we all gain from helping one another as much as we sacrifice -- can truly encompass the vastness of human suffering and injustice. In the face of calamity, war, ethnic cleansing, starvation -- is it truly never the case that we are called to sacrifice ourselves utterly, that we can always "help" to remedy these titanic evils without in any way damaging our own happiness and wellbeing in the process? Dr. Condor does not pretend to know how to do away with such large-scale evils, but he suggests that in the face of the human problem, one should never grow too attached to one's selfhood, but should be prepared to give of it, wherever one can, and to those people who happen to be within reach:
"[A] doctor, of all people, seldom has a clear conscience," he says, speaking in defense of his own decision to marry someone to whom he did not have a fully reciprocal relationship, someone who depends on him far more than he does on her. "One knows how little one can really do to help; as an individual one can't cope with the infinite wretchedness that exists all around us in the world. One merely bales a few drops out of the unfathomable ocean of misery with a thimble [...] and so it's always good to know that one has saved at least one person, kept faith with one person, made a good job of one thing. One must know, after all, whether one has lived a dull, useless existence, or lived to some purpose." (265).
There it is then: Condor's fork. The two options with which he at last confronts Hofmiller -- and us. We can either not get involved in promising our aid to anyone in the first place, or we must go the whole hog. We must be willing to give of ourselves until it hurts, not just in so far as is comfortable or appealing. Hofmiller, by the time he meets Condor, knows it is too late for the former. And that he lacks the strength and will for the latter. As he resonantly and presciently observes early in the novel: "I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world." (p. 185).
--
But if Hofmiller -- in the most sympathetic way and for the best possible reasons -- at last deals irrevocable harm to the people around him, what then would have been the better way to proceed? Which prong of Condor's fork must one take, so as not to add still further to the sum of misery in the world -- self-preservation, or self-immolation?
--
When I was far younger than Hofmiller, and had not yet been through any entanglements of my own, I would certainly and unhesitatingly have opted for the latter. I was quite prepared to sacrifice myself, not having had any experience of the good things I might be giving up by doing so. I was ready to march for any cause, make any commitment, since I didn't realize yet that I had needs apart from the need to be needed. It's aways easiest to give up what one doesn't have, and doesn't yet dream of possessing. Thus, my heroes in those first years of college were Tolstoy and Gandhi. The former's "Master and Man" and "Death of Ivan Ilyich" spoke to me deep in the vessels of my Hofmiller heart. Here, it seemed, was a path at last out of ennui. To live for others. To sacrifice oneself for others. That was the escape from the boredom and discontent of being a "superfluous individual."
Likewise, the words of Gandhi's Talisman at one point hung on my dorm-room wall: "Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test. Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny?"
By the time I got to divinity school, I still thought Gandhi's advice was the right one (I do even today), but what I found missing from his words was any guidance as to how one was actually to be of use to the suffering. When I tried to apply Gandhi's test, I drew blanks. I could not feel I really knew which of my actions were doing any good for others, and which were hurting. Like Hofmiller, I had had experience enough by that time of the ways in which my own sentimentality, my own Christian virtues -- as well, of course, as my selfishness and vanity -- had only made things more miserable for myself and the people around me.
--
It was important for me, I now see, to reach this realization -- painful as it was to pass through. It was necessary to grow out of the naïve altruism that sacrifices that which it does not appreciate in the first place, and that regards moral life as a simple choice between helping others and helping oneself, when in reality it is often hard to discern between the two courses, and in this -- rather than in actual ill-will -- lies the moral peril.
It is likewise essential that -- at some point in our growing up -- we develop a sense of self-preservation, over against self-sacrifice -- a feeling for our rights to happiness and self-direction against those who would -- not because they mean to, nor because they are malicious, simply because they have needs we cannot satisfy -- simply drain us dry. We must have a period when we gain some of the ferocious spirit of self-defense that is signaled in the lines of D.H. Lawrence: "I am trying to learn not to give of my life to the dead/ Never, not the tiniest shred."
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In the great dialectic of personal development, however, there is always time for another turn of the wheel. Having carved out for oneself a share of happiness and personal autonomy at last -- having gained and defended the right to decide what one does with one's happiness and autonomy -- one is now in a position to consider making sacrifices of either. And the sacrifice can be real this time, because it is done with full knowledge of what one is giving up, and because it is actually a choice. When one is young and lacks all control over one's own life, any "sacrifice" that is demanded of one is really just theft. One hasn't made it -- one has simply had it taken from one. But when one is truly in control of one's own destiny, one has the liberty to decide to part with elements of that perfect control, of that idealized personal autonomy.
No sooner has one finally wrested a self from the world, therefore, than one can begin to appreciate its ultimate insignificance. We can only, after all, give up that which we have. It is only when we have attained an adult identity, and are no longer struggling to discern who we are, that we can recognize that that identity is not all-important. In Kenzaburo Oe's A Personal Matter, the protagonist Bird spends most of the novel seeking to evade his responsibilities as a new father. Yet, as he asks himself toward the end of the book: "What was it in himself he was so frantic to defend? The answer was horrifying-- nothing! Zero!" (John Nathan trans.) This is when we may be ready to take the second half of Condor's advice to young Hofmiller, when we realize that the world does not exist for our individual selves. This is when we can more genuinely start to live for the sake of others -- for children, for loved ones, for the future, for humanity. This is when "beware of pity" -- however sage advice it may be to the young -- is no longer the last word on human life.
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