[Göttingen] 20.v.27

Dear Professor,

I must have another chat with you. The reason is that when I read your letter, I have the feeling that I am sitting face to face with you, and one doesn't remain silent in such a situation. I have been thinking of what you wrote about the sterility and ‘eruptions’, and I said to myself: such a series of eruptions is after all a series of splendid benefactions, and our grateful memory of them can never really die away. Why should Vesuvius bother about a little bit of lava? But apart from this there is another aspect of the matter: it always seems to me as if old age requites the losses, the lavas, with deeper movements, which are not so easy to record from without. This does not seem to me to be solely the result of my own optimistic bias, but also of gradually acquired experience, e.g., in the sphere which touches women most nearly, the erotic. For I had feared that old age might set in too late (because speaking physiologically