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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 complete failure. To publish anything is folly and evidence of a certain defect of character. To publish the intellect is the most heinous of all crimes, and on a number of occasions I have not recoiled from committing this most heinous of crimes. It wasn’t even done out of a crude urge to communicate, because I’ve never wanted to communicate my ideas to anybody. That has never attracted me. It was a craving for fame pure and simple. What a good thing I didn’t publish my work on Nietzsche and Schönberg, not to speak of Reger! If I am nauseated by all the thousands and hundreds of thousands of publications by ofher people, I should be unutterably nauseated by my own. But we can’t escape vanity and the craving for fame. If necessary, we are prepared to yield to it with our heads held high, even though we know that we are acting in an unpardonable and perverse manner. And what about my work on Mendelssohn Bar-tholdy? I’m not going to write it just for my own satisfaction, after all, and then leave it lying around when it’s finished. Naturally I intend to publish it, whatever the consequences. For I actually believe that this work will be my most successful, or rather my least unsuccessful. I certainly am thinking of publishing it! But before I can publish it I have to write it, I thought, and at this thought I burst into a fit of laughter, of what I call