Ernst J. Meyer 174 School Street Belmont, Massachusetts 02178 617-868-4666 April 6, 1993 Dear Mr. Moore, Thank you for your letter. I am uncertain whether or not protocol requires, or permits, an answer. Possibly my writing to you once again reflects nothing more than my need to have the last word. Or perhaps I am like the tramp on the street corner, who, if you bid him a polite "Good morning", will detain you with an interminable harangue, as if your courtesy had opened the flood gates of a reservoir whose murky contents would at minimum sully the beginning of your day. However, you yourself said that I should publish some of what has been on my mind for so many years. My attempts at publication have always begun by addressing myself to another individual. I don't know why they have never progressed beyond that point. In any event, you can not expect someone like myself who has been dumb all his life to break that silence by talking in public. Unavoidably I have my own explanations. Only a madman would speak without expecting to be understood. The need to be understood induces the speaker to choose that language, vocabulary, and syntax which will make his words accessible to the audience. To make what I have on my mind even tentatively acceptable to the potential hearer, requires a degree of censorship which destroys what I thought I had to say. Or do you really think that with respect to the impending "health care reforms", our new Queen, that unseemly hybrid of Portia and Florence Nightingale, would care to be reminded of the fact that man's, excuse me, person's relationship to nature and to God began with a health care crisis in the original great society in the Garden of Eden, when the voters there decided that modern maturity required they should never get sick but live forever. It was after all their demand to eat of the tree of life, we would call it the tree of preventive medicine, which led to their expulsion. I find infatuation with ones own life to be the most corrosive form of idolatry. Now the nation clamors for paradise and demands ever more urgently to eat of the tree of life. Why do we never learn? As soon as we abandon that desire, he will authorize to have us readmitted, although even readmission might prove - 2 - unnecessary if we were smart enough to realize that we were already there. Please, Mr. Moore, to whom shall I suggest my solution to the "health care crisis" other than to yourself, and perhaps even you will think it a bit strange. The other issue which your letter brought to mind is the matter of language and its translations. I have spent much of my life struggling to read in the original German, English, French, Greek and haltingly, in Latin. As the years passed it became clear however, that if I wanted to learn to write I could ill afford the distraction of yet another idiom, so I gave up on the remaining languages on my wish list, Italian, Hebrew and Arabic. And having made all that effort to read the original texts, I must confront the truth that even though I can decipher his Greek, God still insists on speaking to me in Luthers German and in Jacobean English, and that all I know of Kierkegaard, of Dostoevsky and Chekhov, from each of whom I have learned so much, I owe to a quasi anonymous translator. I am impressed with the dual function of language. on the one hand as the most compelling outward evidence of the individuals subjectivity, of his inwardness, but also as the bond which binds him to his fellow human beings not so much as individuals, but as a society. Language is, after all, the instrument by which society controls the individual. When one listens or when one reads one becomes subject to the speaker or the author. When one speaks and when one writes one declares a world of ones own. Unavoidably one modifies the language that one receives from ones mother and from ones teachers. The word which I speak has a dual significance. On the one hand, a word means what I intend it to mean, and has a meaning unique to my use. That word then becomes a key to a subjective, personal world for which it is a symbol and of which it gives a fragmentary account. At the same time that same word becomes idiotic unless it also refers to a world which I have in common with my friends and my enemies. Thus language reflects the ambiguity of man in his social situation. You allude to reading literature in translation. For someone like myself, whose mind straddles two languages, there is more to translation than meets the ear. In the sense that it seeks to convey the subjective reality which inheres in the original, translation is an impossibility. The translators product has but a contigent relationship to the original. What he creates is undeniably different. Whether it be better or worse is beside the point, for, paradoxically, the comparison is inappropriate. In any - 3 - event, the translator is no less a creator, and deserves no less recognition than the primary author. But perhaps recognition is the error. Rather than to the author and his translator one should look to the text and its translation; for it seems to me that among our most obdurate mistakes is our insistence on the historical significance for the objects of our cognition, be they mental or physical, an insistence which, I fear, is mere proxy for our own lust, forbidden and therefore disguised, after immortality, which brings me back to the issues of the "health care crisis." At this juncture, my thoughts have become so unravelled, or knotted in thanatopsis, - the choice of metaphor is yours, - that I should stop, and simply close by sending you my regards.