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This book is about the workings of the mind.

But before I go into that, let me start by saying that to me the name of Stefan Zweig evokes a feeling of nostalgia. Of course, this is foremost due to the title of his famous memoirs, and because we know that he belonged to a world that was disappearing. And probably because he realized this he decided to depart from it.

But for me it creates an additional longing. It makes me yearn for a world in which I did not yet exist, a world that followed Zweig’s. In particular the beginning of this novel, which starts out in a ship travelling from New York to Buenos Aires, at a time when these two cities, together with Shanghai, were the most cosmopolitan centers in the world, made me think of a few decades later when my parents were young and left their country and boarded on ships that would take them to New York and to Buenos Aires and other places.

Nostalgia is also part of our fantasy.

Zweig’s novella is a meditation on the nature of the mind: how it creates its own reality, how it lives thanks to sensations and perceptions, but also on how it can get trapped and fall prey to circular thinking.

His story makes you think about the heart of imagination, what is the feeling of anticipation and how an inner mental projection can elicit joy. Zweig presents how curiosity provides a pleasure that the mind needs, but if this curiosity is not tamed it can also enslave the mind. Similarly, surprise is conceived as sudden state that gives fresh air to the mind. For the reader it is easy to identify those mental phenomena, because Zweig focuses on the effects that an object, which is both simple and complex, can provide. Such delicious and nourishing food for the mind is brought about by a book.

Through Zweig’s writing we observe the process of thinking and learning and problem solving, and how these constitute the gymnastics of the brain. The mind needs to explore its limits and exert itself. It needs to surmount obstacles and for this some degree of discipline is required. Understanding, creativity, the power of the brain when it concentrates on a single task, the agility and flexibility that it is capable of-- all of these aspects parade through this tale.

We also see that if the mind’s nature is abstract it, however, also has to be able to project outside itself. It needs to record what is in the world and absorb it, and if its space and universe is limited, its locked up habitat will be disastrous. This is what Zweig calls materielle Exterritorialisierung.

By studying what happens to the mind when it is put in a vacuum, in isolation, when it is on a diet of sensory stimuli, which is its vital source of energy, Zweig creates a situation of despair, a monotony that would only sound like a single tone with no rhythm. He presents us the mental existence of Nothingness, in which one can only enslave himself (Der Sklave des Nichts).

Because related to sensory input and the capability to project onto larger space, for the mind, in spite of its cogito abilities it is essential to be able to deal with one of the most abstract concepts: it needs to measure time. If one is deprived of a system of proportions, time just does not exist: it conflates. And the mind is in the void.

It is then that consciousness can split, because the mind has turned against itself, and dichotomies and paradoxes and impossibilities relish in this new schizophrenic self. The poisonous obsessions possess the psyche. Anxiety and patience confront each other like opposing players in a chess game.

Either Nonsense or a new Self emerges.


And of course, all of the above is developed through a gripping plot.