I N T R O D U C T I O N T O V O L U M E 1 5 l v i i (Doc. 25). And while he thought that Eduard might be intellectually more gifted than his brother, he also characterized him as being egotistic, too ambitious, and lacking emotional balance and close contact with others. He found Eduard to exhibit feelings of isolation, anxiety, and other inhibitions, and believed him to take “a lot” after Einstein himself. He envisaged that the boy’s life would not be easy (Doc. 45). Einstein derived much pleasure from Eduard’s many poems (Doc. 78), but was concerned with the boy’s “delicate nervous system.” He urged Mileva to make sure that Eduard not become too lonely so as not to follow his brother’s fate (Doc. 185). But when Eduard sent him an exacting self-assessment in April 1926, Einstein now “felt like a hen that has hatched a duck egg.” While he really enjoyed Eduard’s sincere and comical reflections, he warned him of the pitfalls of taking oneself too seriously (Doc. 257). He deemed it important to spend as much time as possible with Eduard during this period of “stormy development” (Doc. 309). During an intense exchange of letters in the fall of 1926, Einstein confided that Eduard’s letters reminded him of his own adolescence, and recalled having simi- larly alternated between despondency and self-confidence. He counseled that youthful “heroism” needs to be ameliorated by humor and by meshing “into the social engine.” He tried to allay Eduard’s pessimism and nihilism, rooted in fear of worthlessness, and assured his son that he brought him “great joy” since he did not “go through life apathetically but rather as a seeing and thinking being” (Doc. 415). He was “joyous like a child with the bottle” when a letter arrived because he saw Eduard “agonize about the principal things in life” (Doc. 434). Einstein shared Mileva’s concern that, because of Eduard’s success as a writer, it was “dangerous for him if one courts him too much.” In Einstein’s mind, it would be “ruinous for him if his ambition is stirred up,” since Eduard could lose “the con- templativeness without which deeper development is impossible” and might become embittered later in life. The boy should therefore be strongly encouraged to pursue a “normal career that will give him a certain security of social status which will ensure his internal equilibrium.” Creative literary work as a primary occupation was for Einstein “an absurdity” (Doc. 488). Eduard’s self-perceptions also underwent many changes, as he himself recog- nized. In February 1926, he thought his predispositions guided him toward intellectual rather than emotional art, and not only in music (Doc. 190). Two months later, he delivered a quite critical, and quite exquisite, self-portrait: he was “generally fickle and erratic in character,” and egoistic. He was both “tremen- dously lazy,” but also disapproving of his laziness. In his mind, he was made up mainly of such “dual personalities” (Doc. 241). Half a year later he felt indifference to matters that a few years earlier were his “supreme goals.” Yet he acknowledged that no new aspirations had taken their place.