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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