Conciseness has always seemed to me to be the most essential problem in art. To fit his destiny to a man so nicely as to leave no vacuum, to inclose him as radiantly as the ember does the fly and yet the while preserve every detail of his being has, of all tasks, ever been the dearest to me.
–Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian journalist and playwright, with a Ph.D. in philosophy. His short stories are philosophically provocative. He was a pacifist and a friend of Romain Rolland. He wrote many biographies, including that of Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Casanova, Stendhal, and Tolstoy. As a Jew, he was forced into exile by the Nazis, and eventually committed suicide with his wife in Brazil, far away from his homeland.
Art Collection as a Metaphor for the Value of Life
Through the story of an old art connoisseur, Zweig conveys a haunting sense of loss and nostalgia. Having fallen on hard times during the war, the old man’s family sold his prized collection of prints and engravings to survive, although he gave them firm instructions not to sell them, for they were his life. Opportunistic dealers took advantage of their ignorance, and swindled them out of their most valuable possession. The old man had been blinded by illness, so his family concealed the loss from him by replacing the prints with blank sheets. Hence, the “invisible” collection–one that exists only in the old man’s memory. The story reaches a climax when an art dealer who had previously sold him engravings comes to visit him, with the intent to buy them back.
Zweig’s story of the invisible collection is an allegory, in which the art collection is a metaphor for the values of life. The moral and spiritual values that are most important to us have been and are being eroded, by the incessant demands of our material lives, by our own lack of courage, integrity and discernment, by the vain opinions and influences of the fallen powers around us. Little by little, day by day, our values become either completely invisible, or fossilized like fly in ember. They no longer possess vitality and energy, but retain only abstract and lifeless forms, and interest none but few academics.
References:
- Zweig, Stefan. “Kaleidoscope.” Open Library. Accessed November 6, 2016. https://openlibrary.org/works/OL28382W/Kaleidoscope.