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13.5.24
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
Dearest Lou
I have seldom admired your tact so much as in your last letter. Here is someone who, instead of working hard into old age (see the example beside you) and then dying without any preliminaries, contracts a horrible disease in middle life, has to be treated and operated on, squanders his hard-earned bit of money, has to live with discomforts and affect those around him with them, and then crawls about for an indefinite time as an invalid—in Erewhon166 (I trust you know Samuel Butler's brilliant phantasy) such a person would infallibly be punished and locked up. And yet you can still praise me for bearing my suffering so well. Actually, it isn't quite like that; I have stood the foul realities pretty well, but I don't bear well the thought of the possibilities before me, and I cannot get used to the idea of a life under sentence.
It is now six months since my last operation and the attitude of my surgeon, who allows me to travel far afield in summer, ought to lull me into something like security—so far as such a feeling is admissible, considering the di doman non c'è certezza167 which affects us all. But it has no effect on me; perhaps partly because the extent to which the prosthesis has restored both functions of the mouth is a very modest one. In the beginning it promised to be much more successful, but the promise has not been fulfilled.
Six hours of analysis, that is all I have retained of my capacity for work; everything else, especially social intercourse, I keep at bay (of course Romain Rolland, who has announced himself for tomorrow, I cannot refuse). […]
Well, I have got this off my chest, since we both seem to be prevented from meeting. The number of things one has to renounce! And instead one is overwhelmed with honours (such as the Freedom of the City of Vienna), for which one would never have lifted a finger.
My warmest greetings. I am adding a few words of thanks on a card for your husband.
Yours,
Freud