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 then, when she was there, I knew that I didn’t need her, that I could start work only if she wasn’t there. But now she’s gone and I’m really unable to start. At first it was because she was there, and now it’s because she isn’t. On the one hand we overrate other people, on the other we underrate them; and we constantly overrate and underrate ourselves; when we ought to overrate ourselves we underrate ourselves, and in the same way we underrate ourselves when we ought to overrate ourselves. And above all we always overrate whatever we plan to do, for, if the truth were known, every intellectual work, like every other work, is grossly overrated, and there is no intellectual work in this generally overrated world which could not be dispensed with, just as there is no person, and hence no intellect, which cannot be dispensed with in this world: everything could be dispensed with if only we had the strength and the courage. Probably I lack extreme concentration, I thought, and I went and sat in the ground floor room which my sister, for as long as I can remember, has always called the salon — which is dreadfully tasteless, for there’s no place for a salon in an old country house like this. But it’s just like her to use this designation for the ground floor room. She uses the word salon all too readily, but of course in Vienna she really has a salon — she actually runs a salon, though the way she runs it would be a subject for a large dissertation if I cared to write one. So I stretched out my legs in the downstairs room which my sister calls the salon — every time I hear the word it makes me want to vomit. I stretched them out as far as possible and tried to concentrate on Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But naturally it’s quite wrong to begin a work of this sort with On the third of February 1809 … I hate books and articles which begin with a date of birth. Altogether I hate books and articles which adopt a biographical and chronological approach; that strikes me as the most tasteless and at the same time the most unintellectual procedure. How shall I begin? It’s the simplest thing in the world, I told myself, and I can’t understand why this simplest thing in the world eludes me. Perhaps I’ve made too many notes, written down too much about Mendelssohn Bartholdy on these hundreds and thousands of bits of paper that are piled up on my desk? Perhaps I’ve done too much work on Mendelssohn Bartholdy, my favourite composer? I’d often wondered whether I hadn’t overdone my research on Mendelssohn Bartholdy and whether this was the reason why I was now incapable of starting my work on him. A subject that has been overworked can no longer be realised on paper, I told myself. I had masses of evidence to prove this. I won’t list all the projects I didn’t succeed with because I’d overworked them in my head. On the other hand, Mendelssohn Bartholdy was a subject requiring years, if not decades, of research. If I say I’ve got the whole article, essay, book, or whatever in my head, then it follows that I can’t realise it on paper. That’s how it is. Is this the case with Mendelssohn Bartholdy? It almost drives me crazy, indeed demented, to think that I might have overworked the subject, and that it was therefore pointless, on the one hand, to telegraph my sister, as a rescuing angel so to speak, and, on the other, to throw her out of the house, and so on. I’d spent two weeks in Hamburg and two in London. It was in Venice, curiously enough, that I’d found the most interesting documents relating to Mendelssohn Bartholdy. To ensure myself the best possible protection I had at once withdrawn to the Bauer-Griinwald, to a room which had a view of the church of San Marco across the red-tiled roofs, and studied these documents, which I had borrowed from the archbishop’s palace. In Turin I had found a number of Mendelssohn autographs on Carl Friedrich Zelter, and in Florence a whole pile of letters written to his Cecile. I made my own copies of all these texts or had them copied and brought the copies back to Peiskam. But these journeys in pursuit of Mendelssohn took place years ago, some of them more than ten years ago. I set aside a room to house this Mendelssohn material and finally managed to catalogue it all, often spending whole weeks in this room (which is above the green room on the first floor!). It was not long before my sister christened it the Mendelssohn Room. At first, I believe, she actually spoke of the Mendelssohn Room with genuine respect, but in the end only with scorn and contempt, in order to hurt me. Only after some years did I begin moving various items which seemed important from the Mendelssohn Room to my desk, always hoping and believing that the moment was not far away when I could begin my work. But I was wrong. My preparations have now been going on for years, for more than a decade, as I have said. Perhaps, it occurs to me, I ought not to have interrupted them by doing other things, perhaps I shouldn’t have begun anything on Schönberg or Reger, or even contemplated the Nietzsche sketch: all these diversions, instead of preparing me for Mendelssohn, simply took me further and further away from him. And if only these subjects, of which I can no longer give a complete list, had at least led to something! But they only proved to me again and again how hard it is to produce any intellectual work at all, even of the briefest and apparently most peripheral kind — though obviously there can’t be any such thing as a peripheral intellectual work, not to my mind at least. All these attempts to write on Schönberg, Reger and so on had basically been merely distractions from my main subject; moreover, they had all been failures, a fact which could only weaken my morale. It’s a good thing I destroyed them all, all these attempts which eventually got stuck in the initial stages and would now cause me profound embarrassment had they ever been published. But I’ve always had a sound instinct about what should be published and what should not, having always believed that publishing is senseless, if not an intellectual crime, or rather a capital offence against the intellect. We publish only to satisfy our craving for fame; there’s no other motive except the even baser one of making money, which in my case, thank God, is ruled out by the circumstances of my birth. Had I published my essay on Schönberg I shouldn’t dare to be seen in the street any longer; the same would be true if I’d published my work on Nietzsche, although that was not a