Zweig may have spent much of his life in the academy [Zweig was a professor at Columbia University], but he wished to throw himself into the world and test his ideas against experience, and then measure himself against the results. He wanted a destiny, not a career.

…[He saw] narcissism as a private stronghold against a hostile, mechanized modern world. For Zweig, withdrawal into the self wasn't necessarily an isolating pathology; it could provide essential strength and sustain one's original nature. [His book] The Adventurer … explored the idea of travel and action, from Homer to Nietzsche, as a movable fortress against dehumanizing reality — a kind of portable narcissism.

The idea of individuality was Zweig's intellectual passion: individuality either as buttress against impersonal forces or as portal to a more meaningful life. Yet he feared that this grand obsession derived from his inadequacy. "An experience became real for me only when I identified and shared it by giving it a name," he observed ruefully in Three Journeys. The impossibility of having an experience and making sense of it in words at the same time tormented Zweig. He wanted to live out dramatic thinking.

Zweig took off for the Sahara, where he spent a month driving through sandstorms, encountering Christian ascetics, camping at desert oases and trying to plunge beyond words into indescribable experience. Later, though, he confessed that adventure had escaped him in North Africa.