Wow, we complain about the immediacy of Twitter and FB, yet Zweig was already feeling too plugged-in in the mid-twentieth:
"In times of catastrophe former generations could revert to isolation and remoteness; it was reserved for us to have to know and to co-sense whatever evil happened on our globe at the moment of its occurrence. No matter how far I withdrew from Europe, its fate accompanied me. Landing one night in Pernambuco, under the Southern Cross, dark-skinned people in the streets, I read on a news placard of the bombing of Barcelona and of the execution of a Spanish friend with whom, a few months before, I had spent some pleasant hours. Once in a Pullman car between Houston and another Texas city I suddenly became aware of loud, mad shouting in German: a fellow-passenger had innocently tuned the train radio to Germany’s wave length and in consequence I had to listen to one of Hitler’s inflammatory speeches while the train rolled along the Texas plains. There was no escape, not by day, not by night; always I was in a torment of anxiety about Europe and about Austria within Europe."
I would be happy if one could once again board planes without doffing shoes, but Zweig remembers even more frictionless travel:
"Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I travelled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one."
"When those of us who had once conversed about Baudelaire’s poetry and spiritedly discussed intellectual problems met together, we would catch ourselves talking about affidavits and permits and whether one should
apply for an immigration visa or a tourist visa;
a stenographer in a consulate who could cut down one’s waiting-time was more significant to one’s existence than friendship with a Toscanini or a Rolland."