"I left Germany a few days after the Reichstag fire. How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was inte…
"I left Germany a few days after the Reichstag fire. How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes.”
The above quote are Szilards actual words and no where does he mention reading about later events at the border in papers or magazines much later after the fact. Indeed, Including the line " The same train on the next day,...." so soon after mentioning his own experience at the border implies that he he intended that statement to have an urgency about it that would imply first hand knowledge as a witness, and the statment "You just have to be,...." implies that the time bewteen his crossing the border and when he became aware of what happened later was of Very short duration. Your point is correct on strictly techical grounds but it really only makes sense if Szilard spent his lifetime writing in a stark, technically correct way: in fact he was often given to using metaphor, allusion, etc even when writing such precise documents as patents that he intended to apply for. Heck the above quote was formulated entirly to give the sense of urgency and speed, which isn't something that you would do if what you were writing about included two acts that were days if not weeks apart,..
Why the heck would he require allusion to describe such an event? And why are you having such difficulty understanding that a person can write about events decades after the fact while instilling a sense of urgency in the narrative?
He could well have learned about the situation at the border the next day over a matter of weeks, whether through newspaper accounts or even personal communication. That this narrative would stick with him long after the fact should not be surprising: He's describing having narrowly escaped with his life.
"I left Germany a few days after the Reichstag fire. How quickly things move you can see from this: I took a train from Berlin to Vienna on a certain date, close to the first of April, 1933. The train was empty. The same train on the next day was over-crowded, was stopped at the frontier, the people had to get out, and everybody was interrogated by the Nazis. This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier than most people. This is all that it takes.”
The above quote are Szilards actual words and no where does he mention reading about later events at the border in papers or magazines much later after the fact. Indeed, Including the line " The same train on the next day,...." so soon after mentioning his own experience at the border implies that he he intended that statement to have an urgency about it that would imply first hand knowledge as a witness, and the statment "You just have to be,...." implies that the time bewteen his crossing the border and when he became aware of what happened later was of Very short duration. Your point is correct on strictly techical grounds but it really only makes sense if Szilard spent his lifetime writing in a stark, technically correct way: in fact he was often given to using metaphor, allusion, etc even when writing such precise documents as patents that he intended to apply for. Heck the above quote was formulated entirly to give the sense of urgency and speed, which isn't something that you would do if what you were writing about included two acts that were days if not weeks apart,..
Why the heck would he require allusion to describe such an event? And why are you having such difficulty understanding that a person can write about events decades after the fact while instilling a sense of urgency in the narrative?
He could well have learned about the situation at the border the next day over a matter of weeks, whether through newspaper accounts or even personal communication. That this narrative would stick with him long after the fact should not be surprising: He's describing having narrowly escaped with his life.