'They Are There, Silent and Waiting'

“[Stefan] Zweig had always treasured the refuge of reading. His parents remembered him locking himself inside his room with a book to escape the disturbance of their socially active family life.” 

Doesn’t every kid? I suppose not. One mustn’t generalize from the particulars of one’s life, though I remember most of my parents’ friends as voluble, condescending bores. Once the obligatory niceties were out of the way, I headed for my room and resumed reading. In The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World (Other Books, 2014), George Prochnik describes Zweig using books as “ballast that will keep him from washing away.” I quibble with Prochnik’s use of “escape.” In the previous sentence, refuge is more appropriate. When fleeing Hitler, Zweig sought refuge in the U.S., among other places. Escape, escapist, escapism – all connote failure, laziness, weakness, even cowardice. A refuge is a place of safety, as Brazil was supposed to have been at the end of Zweig’s life. There, Zweig and his wife committed suicide in 1942. Prochnik continues:

 

“It’s no wonder that in the Americas Zweig turned more than ever to what remained of his library as an antidote to the tumult of the era . . . And yet there were books.”

 

Can non-readers -- whether illiterates, alliterates or readers exclusively of junk -- know what access to books means to a civilized man or woman? One’s life is rooted in them. They form a sustaining continuum and make us contemporaneous with our forebears. Bookless, one is without sustenance. Zweig hated the New York portion of his exile, yet Prochnik writes:

 

“Zweig’s thrill at being given free run of the university library is touching. 'I can take as many books home as I want and go to the shelfs myself,’ he informed [his wife’s] family in England. ‘Books are better company than humans just now and I have had to do without them for a long time,’ he exclaimed in another letter.”

 

Nabokov, after emigrating to the U.S. in 1940, expressed similar delight in the freedom of American libraries. “The pain of being separated from books,” Prochnik writes, “is a recurrent motif among the émigré authors . . . . No one reverts to the problem of separation anxiety from books so insistently as Zweig. His pining for their presence reflected the way books served him both as sensual objects that could be held and stroked and as vehicles of sublimation—physical entities that mediated between this world and a higher realm.”

 

That gets perilously close to an unholy melding of mysticism and fetishism, but one understands. Prochnik quotes from a brief 1937 essay, “Thanks to Books,” written by Zweig while still in Austria, translated into English by Harry Zohn and published in the February 8, 1958 issue of The Saturday Review.      

 

“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.”