Fantastic Night & Other Stories by Stefan Zweig

hurly-burly that stilled my own inner torrent of feeling. I watched the servant girls, skirts flying, getting themselves pushed up in the air on the swings with loud cries of glee that might have issued from their sexual orifices, I saw butchers’ boys laughing as they brought heavy hammers down on the try-your-strength machine, barkers with hoarse voices and ape-like gestures cried their wares above the noise of the orchestrions, and all this whirling activity mingled with the thousand sounds and constant movement of the crowd, which was drunk, as if it had imbibed cheap spirits, on the music of the brass band, the flickering of the light, and their own warm pleasure in company. Now that I myself had been awakened I suddenly felt other people’s lives, I felt the heated arousal of the city as, hot and pent up, it poured out with its millions in the few leisure hours of a Sunday, as its own fullness spurred it on to sultry, animal, yet somehow healthy and instinctive enjoyment. And gradually, feeling people rub against me, feeling the constant touch of their hot bodies passionately pressing close, I sensed their warm arousal passing into me too:my nerves, stimulated by the sharp aroma, tensed and reached out of me, my senses played deliriously with the roar of the crowd and felt that vague stupor that inevitably mingles with all strong sensual gratification. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt the crowd, I felt human beings as a force from which lust passed into my own once separate being; some dam had been burst, and what was in my veins passed out into this world, flowed rhythmically back, and I felt a new desire, to break down that last barrier between me and them, a passionate longing to copulate with this hot, strange press of humanity. With male lust I longed to plunge into the gushing vulva of that hot, giant body, with female lust I was open to every touch, every cry, every allurement, every embrace—and now I knew that love was in me, and a need for love such as I had not felt since my twilight boyhood days. Oh, to plunge in, into the living entity, to be linked somehow to the convulsive, laughing, breathing passion of others, to stream on, to pour my fluids into their veins; to become a small and nameless part of the hurly-burly, something infused into the dirt of the world, a creature quivering with lust, sparkling in the slough with those myriads of beings—oh, to plunge into that fullness, down into the circling ripples, shot like an arrow from the bow of my own tension into the unknown, into some heaven of collective experience.
    I know now that I was drunk at the time. Everything was roaring in my blood at once, the ringing bells on the carousel, the high lusty laughter of the women as the men swung them up in the air, the chaotic music, the whirling skirts. Every single sound fell sharply into me and then flickered up again, red and quivering, past my temples, I felt every touch, every glance with fantastically stimulated nerves (it was rather like sea-sickness), yet it came all together in a delirious whole. I cannot possibly explain my complex state in words, it can perhaps best be done by means of a comparison if I say I was brimming over with sound, noise, feeling, overheated like a machine operating with all its wheels racing to escape the monstrous pressure that must surely burst the boiler of my chest any moment. My fingertips twitched, my temples thudded, my heated blood pressed in my throat, surged in my temples—from a state of half-hearted apathy lasting manyyears I had suddenly plunged into a fever that consumed me. I felt that I must open up, come out of myself with a word, with a glance, unburden myself, flow out of myself, give my inner self away, bring myself down to the common level, be resolved—save myself somehow from the hard barrier of silence dividing me from the warm, flowing, living element. I had not spoken for hours, had pressed no one’s