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Vienna, March 30, 1922
IX., Berggasse 19
Dear friend,
I will take my congratulations on the publication, at last, of your popular lectures1 as an opportunity to write to you once again and to say that your last letter from the long past month of January has pleased me very much. The time since then has passed quickly, dreamlike, with the aftereffects of the flu, monotonous analytic work, business considerations, to which the Rundbriefe attest, and plans for the summer that can't come to fruition. The house is now empty, for Anna, who by nature dominates it more and more, has been in Hamburg for four weeks, and our niece Judith,2 whom we are putting up as a “house American,” cannot be a complete substitute, with all her goodness.
Of the summer, only the first four weeks, July 1 to August 1,3 are firm, at the same time the only time I can write anything, since I am inhabiting one room alone, which will not be achieved anywhere else.
I am naturally glad to hear you rave about my youth and capability for achievement, as you do in your letter, but when I turn to the reality principle, I know that it isn't true, and I'm not surprised about it. My interest flags so easily, i.e., it likes so much to turn away from the present, wants to connect with something else, and something in me bridles against the compulsion still to earn much money, which can never be enough, and to perpetuate the same psychological skills that have maintained me for thirty years against contempt for mankind and disgust with the world. Strange secret longings rise up in me, perhaps from the legacy of my forebears, for the Orient and the Mediterranean, and for a life of a completely different kind, belated childish wishes, unfulfillable and maladapted to reality, as if to indicate a loosening of the relationship to it. Instead of this—we will probably see each other on the sober ground of Berlin in September.4
I am happy to think that we are all sharing practical interests by way of the Rundbriefe. To the m