 
                        20030113.00
Dear Professor Gaehde,

My  driver's  license also comes up for renewal in 2005, and
each time I pass the Registry offices in Watertown on my way
to  Home Depot for construction supplies, I wonder what will
have become of me by then.

I am both happy and ashamed to think that  you  should  have
spent your time reading the first chapter of my novel, which
seems to me, in retrospect, verbose and presumptuous. I  em-
bedded  the  essay on hermeneutics, which actually antedates
the novel itself by several years, in  an  experimental  at-
tempt to fashion a conceptual frame for the book.

That  my  amateurish  improvisations  should not necessarily
seem plausible to you, is not surprising  at  all.  Probably
they are inadequate, perhaps downright erroneous. I am mind-
ful that you have devoted much of your life to  the  written
word   in   its  most  obvious  physical  manifestation,  as
manuscript, the artistic embellishment of which must somehow
be  related to its meaning, though perhaps dialectically, in
that the manuscript was so prized for its illumination  that
it  might  have  come to be treasured primarily as a work of
art rather than as an instrument of communication.  Again  I
speculate  about matters of which I am ignorant but ready to
learn. If you could refer me to some of your work which  you
think  I  might understand, I might be able to borrow copies
from one of the Harvard libraries.

I am diffident about even suggesting  that  you  might  read
more  of the novel. It is so long and verbose, as if, having
arrived in this country with no  more  language  proficiency
than  that of a nine year old child, I had spent a life time
habilitating my ability to speak and write  German,  and  in
the  end proved unable to restrain myself from demonstrating
what I had learned.  If you are interested, you  might  con-
sider  looking into the 7th chapter, a digression on ethics;
the 28th chapter as the turning point of the novel. The 34th
chapter  is  a  dangerous approximation to the aesthetically
illicit, the 41st chapter is theater and  the  43rd  is  the
end,  as  the land surveyor would say, a return to the point
of beginning.


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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
