Letter from Lou Andreas-Salomé to Freud, May 18, 1925

B … stein, 18.v.25

Dear Professor,

Your letter sent to me here was like a kind of birthday letter from you to me: for it contains something wonderful and splendid—concealed for a while like a dish with mysterious contents—but the very fact that it exists is itself a source of anticipatory pleasure. You go on to say that it should really have been discovered thirty years ago—you say that almost disparagingly in relation to your own achievement. But since the precise moment which gives birth to such things, the product of the most intensified inner activity, can never be a matter of chance, it is clear that we perhaps often owe to old age our finest products, not as a residual deposit, but as the fruit itself.

The process of becoming inorganic, which you mention in this connection, is capable of various interpretations: round the kernel of a fruit everything grows much harder and tougher than it was when it was in its earliest stage; finally nothing remains but the shell itself which holds and contains it, whereas these distinctions were not so sharply drawn in spring and summer. This is no doubt what may be understood by the term ‘sub specie aeternitatis’ or the ‘detachment of old age’, i.e., they are not merely a euphemistic or ironic way of describing a process of ossification or retardation.

According to my own experience of old age, it has often seemed to me that on the one hand many aspects of experience disappear and vanish, whereas on the other hand the tendency to relinquish the multifarious in favour of the essential and vital increases. This latter, I feel, is the reason for much of my present happiness, and also for the feeling of gratitude that I did not die young (as if those who die young are indeed, as is often declared, favourites of the gods, but not of life). At the same time, to be sure, the purely personal and physical complaints increase; and that is certainly the case with you, for your suffering is greater in proportion as your