ABSTRACT
In the essay ‘On transience’ (1916), Freud describes ‘a summer walk through a smiling
countryside in the company of a taciturn friend and of a young but already famous poet’
(305). During the walk, the young poet admired the beauty of the scene surrounding them
but felt no joy in it since he was ‘disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to
extinction’. A conversation ensued in which Freud, though agreeing over the transient
nature of all things, disputed the pessimistic poet’s view ‘that the transience of what is
beautiful involves any loss in its worth’. To Freud, it was ‘incomprehensible…that the
thought of the transience of beauty should interfere with our joy in it’.
