Mr. Richard Moore
.sp
Dear Mr. Moore,
.PP
.fi
.na
Thank you for your letter, for the reprints
of your essay on Rilke and Brecht,
and for your poem with its existentialist interpretation
of dental decay.
.PP
Your juxtaposition of Rilke and Brecht
is provocative and challenging.
It reminded me of an hermeneutic task
that I have neglected for too long.
The Rilke of my childhood, to whom my parents introduced me,
was a saintly sage whose colorless photo still adorns the sitting
room in which they spent the declining years of their lives
watching television. My parents knew him above all as the author of
Malte Laurids Brigge, of Das Stundenbuch, das Buch der Bilder,
and Die neuen Gedichte. They were unable, or perhaps afraid,
to follow him into the labyrinth of the Elegies and Sonnets.
He was for them a prophet of inwardness, a latter-day Paul Gerhard,
and his poetry constituted for them with a map
by which they oriented themselves on the battlefields of their lives.
I don't remember that either of my parents ever mentioned Bertold
Brecht,  but I do remember
that in response to my sister's flirtations with the forbidden,
each of them replied curtly, "Das hat mit mir nichts zu tun."
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It is with some embarrassment that I confess to two levels of literary
interpretation. In one perspective every text is testimony of the
human spirit, which I consider my task not to judge, but to understand,
and in this perspective I see Brecht as an eloquent spokesman for the
modern European experience. But in another perspective,
some texts become sacred,
the blueprints of a highly subjective redemption
from the perplexities and sorrows of my life,
and in that perspective the writings of Bertold
Brecht are invisible to me, which is not so say that
there may not be some other reader for whom
"Erinnerung an die Marie A."  
is as inspiring as "Menons Klagen um Diotima" are to me.
It is good that we are all different.
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I have long since abandoned the effort
to reconcile these differences,
and in response to your question about publication,
I admit that I feel no obligation to inflict my ideas on the public.
On the other hand, it is always a pleasure and a privilege
to listen and to speak - to another individual,
and in the event that you were interested,
I should be pleased to lend you a copy of my seven-hundred page
unpublished novel,
although given the profusion of good literature with
which we are blessed,
you probably have better ways to spend your time.
.PP
Thank you again for your letter with its enclosures.