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Budapest, September 28, 1910
VII., Erzsébet-körút 54
Dear Professor,
Following your wise counsel, I am still enjoying the dolce far niente. Aside from the fact that today I have again assumed my duties at the Health Service and am at home in the afternoon between three and four, I am living here as if I were my own guest—I indulge myself with hour-long walks with Frau G., shop for large and small items, deal with the appropriate framing of the Sicilian photographs with a serious expression on my face, etc.—Still, the absence of overpowering expressions of art and nature is already having an effect: I am beginning to feel a desire for work and notice that in the course of the month of rest there has indeed been a buildup of reserve strength that requires activation. But I still have no inkling whatsoever of how I will work, and what on. The beautiful days that I spent in your company, the ideas that were stimulated in me at the time will, I hope, have a favorable influence on my activity. My general psychic and intellectual development and self-education must also benefit from this trip (as was the case with America). Still, I am sorry that you had in me a travel companion who is still so much in need of education.
You will probably think that I have begun to subject the events of our living together, the manner in which I reacted to them, to extensive self-criticism.1 And if I hope, in spite of this, that our personal and scientific relations will not have diminished in intensity as a result of closer acquaintance, then that is based on the one hand on the conviction of my own good intentions (which stand up to the most far-reaching analysis)—and on the other on the justified hope that you can forgive the unavoidable “chimpanzee,”2 who so often thwarted good intentions. Perhaps in our correspondence I will have the opportunity to return now and then to particulars regarding these things. For the time being, I only wanted to show the first signs of life from me and to th