Back to every day life

Nov 10, 2023

Quote of the week

“My today is so different from all my yesterdays; I have risen and fallen so often, that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not just one but several completely different lives.”

Stefan Zweig from The World of Yesterday, Memoirs of a European

Hello,

Back home again after a sejour of three months in a number of countries. It is always good to be back home, but life is different. So much to do to catch up with necessary administration; changing winter tyres, service the car, going to the dentist, cut my hair, you name it. I also have to catch up with blogging, newsletters and trying to write a novel. Do I feel stressed? Nah. Or just a little bit.

The World of Yesterday

The positive vibes in my life, for the time being, are coming from reading and blogging. The blogging world is such a nice, friendly community, and we exchange views on a subject we really love. Being lost in a book, is to forget everything around you, just for a short while.

One person who had to flee his country due to war was Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) an Austrian writer. “At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and popular writers in the world. (Wikipedia). His prose is beautiful, even when he writes about bad things. For the Nonfiction in November , as well as for German Literature Month challenges I am reading his The World of Yesterday, Memoirs of a European.” Just started it, but even on the first couple of pages, I have underlined sentences that so much catches the essentials of life. He was uprooted because of the situation in Europe during the first part of the 20th century. From The World of Yesterday:

“For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it. has been birth to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere.”

“One generation might see revolution, the next a coup, the third a war, the fourth famine, the fifth national bankruptcy - and many lucky countries and lucky generations never knew any of that.”

I think many of the things Zweig tells us, can be applicable to people today. So many people are uprooted because of bad living conditions and wars. Zweig talks about the world of security. The security man needs to be able to have a decent life. “Only those who could look forward with confidence to the future enjoyed the present with an easy mind.” How true?

Zweig had to emigrate to England in 1934, and in 1940, he briefly moved to New York and then Brazil where he settled down. In 1942, he and his wife Lotte committed suicide. In translator’s note, Anthea Bell writes:

“Their double suicide raises another point: there has been discussion of the reason for it, since at that date, when the United States had just entered the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941, there were clear signs that the tide was turning against Hitler.
…
One surmise, with which I concur, is that Zweig’s underlying reason may have been a sense that whether the war was won or lost, the world of civilised culture in which he had lived and worked was gone for ever.”

This week

I have started watch The Vanishing Triangle an Irish thriller. It is really good and I can recommend it. I also started to watch The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix, based on a novella by Edgar Allan Poe. I did read the novella some years ago, but must admit I did not understand much of it. It is a ghost story of some kind. The adaptation has moved the timeline from end of 19th century to present day. Do I like it? The change of timeline, I mean. Not really, but it is certainly well done nevertheless. I have only seen the first episode. I am a little bit afraid of looking at films like that when I am alone … and, yes, I am a grown woman.