Even in music, for which he had a genuine passion and at which he worked hard, he never could acquire any facility at sight, and he was an inaccurate scorer, even when only copying the score of others.[89] Two things nearly incompatible, he writes in an important passage, are united in me without my being able to think how; an extremely ardent temperament, lively and impetuous passions, along with ideas that are very slow in coming to birth, very embarrassed, and which never arise until after the event.

"One would say that my heart and my intelligence do not belong to the same individual....

I feel all, and see nothing; I am carried away, but I am stupid....

This slowness of thinking, united with such vivacity of feeling, possesses me not only in conversation, but when I am alone and working.

My ideas arrange themselves in my head with incredible difficulty; they circulate there in a dull way and ferment until they agitate me, fill me with heat, and give me palpitations; in the midst of this stir I see nothing clearly, I could not write a single word.