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18 August 19071
Dear colleague, Hotel Wolkenstein in St. Christina, Gröden2
My personality was impoverished by the interruption in our correspondence. Fortunately that has now come to an end. Though I
myself am wandering lazily about the world with my family, I know that you are working again and that your letters will carry me back to what for both of us has become the centre of interest.
Don't despair; I presume it was only a phrase that cropped up in your letter. It doesn't matter whether we are understood by the official figures of the moment. Among the nameless masses hidden behind them there are plenty of individuals who want to understand and who at a given moment suddenly step forward; I have had that experience time and time again. Your lecture in Amsterdam will be a milestone in history and after all it is largely for history that we work. What you call the hysterical element in your personality, your need to impress and influence people, the very quality that so eminently equips you to be a teacher and guide, will come into its own even if you make no concessions to the current fashions in opinion. And when you have injected your own personal leaven into the fermenting mass of my ideas in still more generous measure, there will be no further difference between your achievement and mine.
I am not well enough to risk the trip to Sicily we had planned for September, because at this time the scirocco is said to blow without let-up. Consequently I don't know exactly where I shall be in the next few weeks. Until the end of August I shall stay here, hiking in the mountains and picking edelweiss; I shall not be returning to Vienna before the end of September. All in all you had better write to me at my Vienna address for the present, because the post is very unreliable in the mountains in the summertime. I have not made a single entry in my pocket notebook in the last four weeks; my intellectual preoccupations have just faded away. But I shall always be thankful