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It's a rum life when one cannot have a leisurely and pleasing opportunity even of writing to one's daughter who in any case is carried at enormous speed into the category of ‘old friend’ – if one is lucky. At one moment a baby daughter and at the next, so it seems, a young woman with a life and thoughts and ideas of her own. ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume …’ Horace knew a thing or two1. I sometimes feel that if I am lucky I can only boast of knowing one thing and not much of that. Still, psychoanalysis, in so far as I know it, is not bad – there might be worse professions. Sometimes I feel that it is only ‘by accident’ that I am so well off and indeed it is only thanks to the accidents that I am as well off as I am.
It is always hard to achieve a success so one is sometimes liable to snatch at the first that offers and regret it, or be choosey and turn it down (and regret that!). So, sometimes it is nice to feel that one appears to have got it right. Especially as one never has settled things ‘once for all’. It opens up a new and greater crop of problems whenever you settle one. Still – it can be fun.
Envy and rivalry and hate are so prevalent that they seem to be the spiritual nutrition on which we have to live.
When you muse about, and mourn your multitudinous failings – take courage. You are not the only one. Luckily for me I happened on a very efficient and charming girl (your Mother) or else I too would be mouldering ‘sous la terre’ of Iver Heath. Or – it is frightening to realize it – in a job in the Veterans Administration which was offered me after the last war. Incidentally I can't help wondering how it doesn't seem to occur to anyone that the reason why we are so poor is that it is very expensive to fight two wars and to be the only nation that was in both of them from start to finish and did not lose either of them.