Do you remember what you looked like when you first graduated?
I feel that the world is waiting for me to change. I feel that I can achieve something with a cavity of enthusiasm. I feel that “different flows and dirt” is a matter of course. At that time, you will fight with people for a point of view, pat the table for things you are not used to, and you will feel that you are not the same kind of people as those “mediocre adults”.
Then after a few years, you found that things were not right. The flattering colleague was promoted, the guy who lied and took the bonus, and the person you despised is much better than you. And you are still in the same place, keeping that “principle”, and you can’t even afford to pay the rent.
You began to doubt: Am I wrong?
Fabian, written in 1931, tells the story of how a person collapses step by step in the face of this problem.
How many times can a person be destroyed by life in two weeks?
The story takes place in Berlin during the Great Depression around 1930. The protagonist, Fabian, 32 years old, has a doctorate in literature. He writes advertising at a tobacco company during the day and wanders between bars and cafes at night.
Do you think this is the petty life of a literary youth? Wrong.
The duration of the whole book is less than two weeks. In just a dozen days, Fabian experienced: unemployment, his girlfriend left him for the future, and his best friend committed suicide by swallowing a gun.
Every thing that takes out is enough for one person to collapse for half a year, and it falls on Fabian like a domino.
But I must say that this book is not selling badly. The author’s brushstrokes have a strange calmness and irony – he makes you read the heaviest moment with a bitter smile on the corner of your mouth. For example, Fabian’s words after losing his job: “I have done a lot of things, but I don’t want to do anything. What’s the use of my progress? In order to realize and fight against?”
You can hear that this is not a resentful person crying, but a sober person stating an absurd fact.
The cruelest thing in this era is that sobriety itself is a danger
In the process of reading Fabian, I have been thinking about a question: what kind of person is Fabian?
You say he is indifferent? He sees the social chaos more clearly than anyone else, and his irony is to the point. You say he is weak? When he only has the last bit of money left in his pocket, he will help a strange little girl pay the bill. You said he was numb? He met an inventor on the street who wandered around because he didn’t want the machine to make workers unemployed, and he took him back to his apartment without saying a word.
He is not indifferent. He is too sober. I’m so sober that I can’t change anything.
There is a passage in the book that I have always remembered. Fabian said, “I don’t want money and power!” Then he punched the wall – but the wall was equipped with cushions and wrapped in long plush, and there was no movement when the punch went down.
What kind of powerlessness is this?
You hit the world with your fist, but the world doesn’t even give you a chance to hurt. It just digests your anger softly, and then continues to operate.
Fabian is not a person at the bottom. He has a doctorate degree, a place to live, and a few copper coins in his pocket. But it is precisely because of his sobriety and insight that his sense of powerlessness is so real. The greatest pain for a person is not to see the way out, but to see the way out clearly, but to find that the road does not belong to him.
This is a story about the defeat of idealists in the face of reality, and it is also a cruel chronicle of how an era engulfs those who are unwilling to go with the flow.
Write at the end
In this fast-paced and impetuous era, those who are speculative can always make quick profits, while those who stick to their original intentions often struggle. We will inevitably fall into confusion and want to give up. But the book “Fabian” never wants to make us despair, but wants us to see soberly – all struggles are meaningful, and all persistence is worth seeing. It tells us that being sober has never been a sin. The real danger is to cater to the world and lose one’s original intention; the real pain is to choose to compromise even though you can stick to it.
If you also feel that you are out of place, it is too difficult to stick to principles, and your efforts are not rewarded; if you are also repeatedly pulling between ideals and reality, if you also want to find a book that can understand all your loneliness and powerlessness, then you must open Fabian. It won’t give you the so-called “redemption plan”, but it will let you know that you are not struggling alone. Someone understands your sobriety, your persistence, and your unwillingness.
After reading it, you may still be confused and struggling, but you will definitely have more courage. After all, we can be as sober as Fabian, but we can be more tenacious than him. In this absurd world, keep the light in the bottom of our hearts, even if it is weak, enough to illuminate our way forward.
