You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Vienna IX, Berggasse 19
May 13, 1924
Dearest Lou
I have admired your art more than ever this time. Here is a person who, instead of working hard into old age (see the example1 beside you) and then dying without preliminaries, contracts a horrible disease in middle age, has to be treated and operated on, squanders his hard-earned bit of money, generates and enjoys discontent, and then crawls about for an indefinite time as an invalid. In Erewhon (I trust you know Samuel Butler's brilliant phantasy) such an individual would certainly be punished and locked up. And you can still praise me for bearing my suffering so well. Actually, it isn't quite like this; although I have weathered the awful realities fairly well, it is the possibilities that I find hard to bear; I cannot get accustomed to life under sentence.
It is now six months since my operation and the attitude of my surgeon, who allows me to travel far afield in summer, ought to lull me into something like security—so far as such a feeling is admissible, considering the di doman non c'é certezza2 which affects us all. But it has no effect on me; perhaps partly because the extent to which the prosthesis has restored both functions of the mouth is a very modest one. In the beginning it promised to be more successful, but the promise was not fulfilled.
Six hours of psychoanalysis, this is all I have retained of my capacity for work; everything else, especially social contact, I keep at bay. (Of course Romain Rolland, who has announced himself for tomorrow, I cannot refuse….)