Stefan Zweig

nd noted with increasing astonishment how little trustworthy information there was concerning this astounding exploit. As had happened to me several times before, I found that to tell the story to others would be the best way of explaining the inexplicable to myself. Such was the origin of my book, which, I can frankly say, has come into being to my own surprise. For, in recounting this odyssey

I beg you, do not tire of listening to me for a quarter of an hour, when I have never tired of loving you all my life.

I breathed freely, purely, and full of sudden delight I felt the air on my lips like a clear drink. It was soft, effervescent air carrying on it the aroma of fruits, the scent of distant islands, and making me feel slightly drunk.

Now, for the first time since I had set foot on the ship’s planks, I knew the blessed joy of reverie, and the other more sensual pleasure of abandoning my body, womanlike, to the softness surrounding me.

artless and almost brazen in extracting,

artless and almost brazen in extracting

was artless and almost brazen in extractin

The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite

these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

Without introducing himself—“You know who I am, and who you are is of no interest to me,”