Our coexistence. – Don’t we have to admit to ourselves, we artists, that there exists an uncanny disparity within us; that in an odd way our taste and on the other hand our creative power stand each distinct from the other; each remains the way it is by itself, and each grows by itself; I mean each of these has completely different degrees and tempi of old, young, ripe, overblown, rotten? A musician, for instance, could spend a lifetime creating things that contradict what his spoiled listener’s ear, listener’s heart values, savours, prefers – he needn’t even be aware of this contradiction! As experience shows with almost embarrassing regularity, one’s taste can easily outgrow the taste of one’s powers, even without thereby paralysing them and hindering their continued productivity. But the opposite can happen, too – and this is precisely what I’d like to call artists’ attention to. A perpetually creative person, a ‘mother’ type in the grand sense of the term, someone who doesn’t hear or know anything but the pregnancies and child-beds of his spirit anymore, who simply has no time to reflect on himself and on his work and to make comparisons, who no longer wants to exercise his taste and simply forgets it, i.e. lets it stand, lie, or fall – maybe such a person would finally produce works that far excel his own judgement, so that he utters inanities about them and himself – utters them and believes them. This seems to me to be almost the norm among fertile artists – nobody knows a child less well than his parents – and this is true, to take a colossal example, even in the case of the whole world of Greek art and poetry: it never ‘knew’ what it had done.