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Budapest, May 15, 1922
Dear Professor,
I must wonder myself about the fact that I don't give in more often to the impulse to write to you. When I think about how great a space your person and the thoughts about common interests take up in my psyche, I am
forced to seek more deep-seated reasons for this tardiness.—There is no doubt that I also was unable to resist the temptation, as a recompense for everything that I have from you, to “bestow on” you the entire extent of overtender and oversensitive impulses of feeling which are appropriate only in relation to one's own father. The stage in which I now seem to find myself is the—badly belated!—weaning and the attempt to submit to my fate. If I am not greatly mistaken, I am, the way I am now, a much more comfortable collaborator than at that time in Palermo; perhaps I am also free of the inhibitions that, for instance, might have been contributing factors in my being late for trains in Italy. In a word: I have—unfortunately—become older and more sensible. This, as they say, “self-possessed” constitution also permits me, totally devoid of self-interest, to be pleased that you were able to celebrate your birthday again in complete freshness and health. Devoid of self-interest, that is to say, undisturbed by the fact that I was not in the fortunate position to greet you personally. The fact that we now meet so seldom forces me, among other things, also to a kind of intellectual self-reliance. Earlier I was happy about an idea mostly as a favor to you. I could hardly wait for the moment when I could offer you the discovery. Gradually, I learned to renounce this pleasure and to occupy myself with science for its own sake, thus, in a more matter-of-fact way. This matter-of-factness comes to the advantage of the sobriety of my views. But I admit that I think not without sadness about the time when I was that much more stormy, happy-unhappier.
To get to speak about practical things: my intellectual constitution is not unfavorab