"I do not rebel against the universal order. After all...I have lived over seventy years. I had enough to eat. I enjoyed many things–the comradeship of my wife, my children, the sunsets. I watched the plants grow in the springtime.Now and then the grasp of a friendlyhand was mine. Once or twice I met a human being who almost understood me. What more can I ask?"
"You have had," I said, "fame. Your work affects the literature of every land. Man looks at life and himself with different eyes because of you. And recently on your seventieth birthday the world united to honor you–with the exception of your own university!»
"If the University of Vienna had recognized me, they would have only embarrassed me. There is no reason why they should embrace either me or my doctrine because I am seventy. I attach no unreasonable importance to decimals. "Fame comes to us only after we are dead, and, frankly, what comes afterwards does not concern me. I have no aspiration to posthumous glory. My modesty is no virtue."
"Does it not mean something to you that your name will live?"
"Nothing whatsoever, even if it should live, which is by no means certain. I am far more interested in the fate of my children. I hope that their life will not be so hard. I cannot make their life much easier. The war practically wiped out my modest fortune, the savings of a lifetime.However, fortunately, age is not too heavy a burden. I can carry on! My work still gives me pleasure."
We were walking up and down a little pathway in the steep garden of the house. Freud tenderly caressed a blossoming bush with his sensitive hands.
"I am far more interested in this blossom," he said, "than in anything that may happen to me after I am dead."
"Then you are, after all, a profound pessimist?"
"I am not. I permit no philosophic reflection to spoil my enjoyment of the simple things of life."
"Do you believe in the persistence of personality after death in any form whatsoever?"
"I give no thought to the matter. Everything that lives perishes. Why should I survive?"
"Would you like to come back in some form, to be reintegrated from the dust? Have you,
in other words, no wish for immortality?""Frankly, no. If one recognizes the selfish motives which underlie all human conduct, one has not the slightest desire to return. Life, moving in a circle, would still be the same."Moreover, even if the eternal recurrence of things, to use Nietzsche’s phrase, were to reinvest us with our fleshly habiliments, of what avail would this be without memory? There would be no link between past and future."So far as I am concerned, I am perfectly content to know that the eternal nuisance of living will be finally done with. Our life is necessarily a series of compromises, a never-ending struggle between the ego and his environment. The wish to prolong life unduly, trikes me as absurd."