The time provides the pictures, I merely speak the words to go with them, and it will not be so much my own story I tell as that of an entire generation - our unique generation, carrying a heavier burden of fate than almost any other in the course of history.'
Listening to this audiobook, and reading Stefan Zweig's "The World of Yesterday", I am reminded of my own father who was of the same generation but never talked about the two World Wars, the Great Depression, the life under the Hitler regime, and the other events that had broken him. Day after day, still in his dressing gown, he sat by the window and with vacant eyes watched the world pass him by. Like Stefan Zweig in his autobiography, he no longer had the "unusual powers [that] are needed in order to make another wholly new beginning".
But after one’s sixtieth year unusual powers are needed in order to make another wholly new beginning. Those that I possess have been exhausted by long years of homeless wandering. So I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on earth.
I salute all my friends ! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all toe impatient, go on before.
Stefan Zweig.
Petropolis, 22. II. 1942.
So many books yet to ready, so little time left.
