Confusion by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online

when he was teaching a factual subject or was alone in his study he lacked that spark of dynamite which here, in our intense and breathlessly spellbound company, broke down his inner walls; he needed—oh yes, I felt it—he needed our enthusiasm to kindle his own, our receptive attitude for his own extravagance, our youth for his own rejuvenated fervour. As a player of the cymbals is intoxicated by the increasingly wild rhythm of his own eager hands, his discourse became ever grander, ever more ardent, ever more colourful as his words grew more fervent, and the deeper our silence (I could not help feeling that we were all holding our breath in that room) the more elevated, the more intense was his performance, the more did it sound like an anthem. In those moments we were all entirely his, all ears, immersed in his exuberance.
    Yet again, when he suddenly ended with a quotation from Goethe on Shakespeare, our excitement impetuously broke out. Yet again he leaned against the desk exhausted, as he had leaned there yesterday, his face pale but with little runs and trills of the nerves twitching over it, and oddly enough the afterglow of the sensuality of release gleamed in his eyes, as if in a woman who has just left an overpowering embrace. I felt too shy to speak to him now, but by chance his glance fell on me. And obviously he sensed my enthusiastic gratitude, for he smiled at me in a friendly manner, and leaning slightly towards me, hand on my shoulder, reminded me to go to see him that evening as we had agreed.
    I was at his door at seven o’clock precisely, and with what trepidation did I, a mere boy as I was, cross that threshold for the first time! Nothing is more passionate than a young man’s veneration, nothing more timid, more feminine than its uneasy sense of modesty. I was shown into his study, a semi-twilit room in which the first things I saw, looking through the glass panes over them, were the coloured spines of a large number of books. Over the desk hung Raphael’s School of Athens , a picture which (as he told me later) he particularly loved, because all kinds of teaching, all forms of the intellect are symbolically united here in perfect synthesis. I was seeing it for the first time, and instinctively I thought I traced a similarity to his own brow in the highly individual face of Socrates. A figure in white marble gleamed behind me, an attractively scaled-down bust of the Paris Ganymede , and beside it there was a St Sebastian by an old German master, tragic beauty set, probably not by chance, beside its equivalent enjoying life to the full. I waited with my heart beating fast, as breathless as all the nobly silent artistic figures around me; they spoke to me of a new kind of intellectual beauty, a beauty that I had never suspected and that still was not clear to me, although I already felt prepared to turn to it with fraternal emotion. But I had no time to look around me, for at this point the man I was waiting for came in and approached me, once again showing me that softly enveloping gaze, smouldering like a hidden fire, and to my own surprise thawing out the most secret part of me. I immediately spoke as freely to him as to a friend, and when he asked about my studies in Berlin the tale of my father’s visit suddenly sprang to my lips—I took fright even as I spoke of it—and I assured this stranger of my secret vow to devote myself to my studies with the utmost application. He looked at me, as if moved. Then he said: “Not just with application, my boy, but above all with passion. If you do not feel impassioned you’ll be a schoolmaster at best—one must approach these things from within and always, always with passion.” His voice grew warmer and warmer, the room darker and darker. He told me a great deal about his own youth, how he too had begun foolishly and only later discovered his own inclinations—I must just have courage, he said, and he would