ABSTRACT
It’s a rum life when one cannot have a leisurely and pleasing opportunity even of writing to one’s daughter who in any case is carried at enormous speed into the category of ‘old friend’ – if one is lucky. At one moment a baby daughter and at the next, so it seems, a young woman with a life and thoughts and ideas of her own. ‘Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume . . .’ Horace knew a thing or two 1 . I sometimes feel that if I am lucky I can only boast of knowing one thing and not much of that. Still, psychoanalysis, in so far as I know it, is not bad – there might be worse professions. Sometimes I feel that it is only ‘by accident’ that I am so well off and indeed it is only thanks to the accidents that I am as well off as I am.
