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10 May 1925
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
Dearest Lou
Sunday afternoon and quiet! This morning with the help of Anna and the typewriter I dealt with my correspondence, which had accumulated as a result of my inveterate negligence, and now I can thank you and have a talk with you.
First of all let me thank your dear old man for the kind lines he wrote to me, a stranger. May he keep going as long as he himself wants to!
As for me, I no longer want to ardently enough. A crust of indifference is slowly creeping up around me; a fact I state without complaining. It is a natural development, a way of beginning to grow inorganic. The ‘detachment of old age’, I think it is called. It must be connected with a decisive turn in the relationship of the two instincts postulated by me. The change taking place is perhaps not very noticeable; everything is as interesting as it was before, neither are the ingredients very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking; unmusical as I am, I imagine the difference to be something like using the pedal or not. The never-ceasing tangible pressure of a vast number of unpleasant sensations must have accelerated this otherwise perhaps premature condition, this tendency to experience everything sub specie aeternitatis.
Otherwise existence is still bearable. I even think I have discovered something of fundamental importance for our work, which I am going to keep to myself for a while.185 It is a discovery of which one ought really to be ashamed, for one should have divined these connections from the beginning and not only after thirty years. One more proof that we're all fallible[….]