Name: Journey Into the Past
ISBN: 9781590173671

Stefan Zweig

A previously unpublished novella, which was found among the author's stories after his death, investigates the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything—time, war, betrayal—can last, telling the story of Louis, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. Original.

Journey Into the Past

soochie

“But love truly becomes love only when, no longer an embryo developing painfully in the darkness of the body, it ventures to confess itself with lips and breath. However hard it tries to remain a chrysalis, a time comes when the intricate tissue of the cocoon tears, and out it falls, dropping from the heights to the farthest depths, falling”

“But he must not think that out to the end now, he must not want anything, desire anything, he must simply stay like this, carried on into the unknown as if in a dream, carried on by a strange torrent, without physical sensation and yet still Feeling, desiring yet achieving nothing, moving on into his fate and back into himself.”

“What you ask is folly, but I never could, I never will deny you anything. I will come.”

“If their colours are not to fade and their petals to drop, even such apparently unearthly things as dreams need a certain amount of nourishment from the senses, some tender pictorial aid, or their blood will run thin and their radiance be dimmed.“

readingsnmusings 

A short novella on love, memory and nostalgia.

“As a man grows older he goes in search of his own youth, taking silly pleasure in little memories.”

"In the old park, in ice and snow caught fast
Two spectres walk, still searching for the past."