from L.W.'s notes on Culture and Value

"If it is true that Mahler’s music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is what he ought to have done with his talent. For obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and then burned them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not written them? Should he have written them and realized that they were worthless? But how could he have realized that?"