He said that he would not move to Berlin because it would take him away from his Black Forest environment — from ‘the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow’. When a blizzard blows around the cabin on a deep winter’s night, he wrote, ‘that is the perfect time for philosophy’.
