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lately she has no longer had the strength, and probably not the will either; perhaps she has doubted for too long whether I am really serious, as is proved, after all, by the way she continually teases me unmercifully about Mendelssohn Bartholdy. I hadn’t written anything for years — because of my sister, I always maintain, but perhaps also because I am no longer capable of writing. We’ll try anything in order to be able to start work on a study, absolutely anything, and we don’t recoil from even the most terrible things if they’ll make it possible for us to write such a study, even if they involve the greatest inhumanity, the greatest perversity, the gravest crime. Alone in Peiskam, surrounded by all these cold walls and with only the banks of fog to look at, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I had tried the most senseless experiments: for instance I had sat on the stairs which lead from the dining room to the first floor and declaimed a few pages of Dostoyevsky, from The Gambler, in the hope that this would help me to begin my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, but naturally this absurd experiment was a failure, ending with a prolonged shivering fit and with my tossing to and fro in bed for several hours, dripping with sweat. Or I would run out into the yard, breathe in and out deeply three times and then stretch out first the right arm, then the left, as far as possible. But this method too only led to exhaustion. I tried Pascal, then Goethe, then Alban Berg — in vain. If only I had a friend! I said to myself again, but I have no friend, and I know why I have no friend. A woman friend! I exclaimed, so loudly that the hall echoed, but I have no woman friend either; I quite deliberately have no woman friend, since that would mean giving up all my intellectual ambitions. One can’t have a woman friend and at the same time have intellectual ambitions if one’s general condition is as bad as mine. There’s no question of having a woman friend and intellectual ambitions! Either I have the one or I have the other; to have both is impossible. And I decided very early in favour of intellectual ambitions and against having a woman friend. I never wanted a male friend from the time I was twenty and suddenly began to think independently. The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me — I have no others. And I’d always found it hard to have any relationship with another person — I wouldn’t think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship , a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one—I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but — what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought — needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick — impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word. I always believed that I could get on with my intellectual work if only I were completely alone, with no one else around. This proved to be mistaken, but it is equally mistaken to say that we actually need someone. We need someone for our work, and we also need no one. Sometimes we need someone, sometimes no one, and sometimes we need someone and no one. In the last few days I have once more become aware of this totally absurd fact: we never know at any time whether we need someone or no one, or whether we need someone and at the same time no one, and because we never ever know what we really need we are unhappy, and hence unable to Start on our intellectual work when we wish and when it seems right. I believed fervently that I needed my sister in order to be able to start my work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. And