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Vienna, January 1, 1919
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
After such a long pause in our letters, your new year's letter was doubly welcome. I know you to be in smooth sailing, in a commanding position,
surrounded by students and adherents, soon, very soon, let us hope, in possession of your own warm house and a woman unsurpassed in many important rBion, W.r.cts. I know that much work and great inner torment will confront you, but one shouldn't wish it otherwise. Success will then be the way it indeed can be under all the interplay of external forces and inner powers. In anye, very honorable and, let us hope, also happy. One will permit oneself to be neither bribed nor diverted by prospects. Is the Golden Age already here? Will these pains bring birth?
We have spoken a great deal about the alternative: to adapt—change the outside world.1 Well, my ability to adapt is on strike, I don't have power against the world. I remain a disgruntled person, by whom one should avoid being infected, as long as one still feels young and strong.
Toni arrived here again in bad, but only neurotic, condition, and is now showing the strange behavior of being a candidate for death in the morning and healthy in the afternoon. God knows what kind of a new cyclical form official psychiatry will make out of this. It is a transitory phase; both conditions are beginning to fuse with each other, and the total improvement is unmistakable. I hope to bring him far along this time, provided that nothing organic pulling the strings makes a fool of us. He naturally had to betray your splendid plan to make me rich, which I find to be totally impracticable, in fact impermissible. It is interesting to me that you bear so well the very same thing that has made him ill. His current attack of illness is quite doubtless based on the insight into the impossibility of making a nabob out of me by means of his tricks. I am once again fully booked through his coming and the advent of two returnees, but I don't like to