Dear Cyndy,
Again, I annotate:
= Rickie said she got your memoir and was much moved by it.
= She intends to write you after some digestion and rereading.
= No, I didn't get your attachment of the letter to her.
= I do not always notice attachments unless my attention
= is called to them in the body of the letter.
= Care to send it again, or is it pointless now?
Below, in the body of this e-mail are three attachments
that I've recently sent:
1) A draft of my letter to Rickie, which is too lengthy.
2) A copy of my letter to Rickie, which she received with the essay.
3) A draft of a letter to you, which is too lengthy.
= I would be interested in seeing other things you've done.
Why don't you look at
and
What's there is not really relevant to our immediate
concerns, and might prove distracting. Of course, I
can send anything you want to look at as e-mail, but
the serious stuff is in German.
I've had it on my mind, that I should rewrite some of
it in English to make it accessible to my grandchildren -
translations don't work for me, - and now is as good a
time to start as any.
I suspect you would find the teutonic theorizing - about
theology, about knowledge etc., uninteresting if not
distasteful, but I would rewrite some of it in English for
you, if you thought you wanted to see it.
Less uninteresting to you, I suspect, would be the fiction.
The first novel (311412 words == 778 pages), "Die Andere"
(The Other One) is pretty much complete. I finished it about
ten years ago, and I still like it - very much. Perhaps, some
time, if your patience endures, I could - should - give you a
synopsis or summary of it in English. That would be several
weeks' work, but valuable as preparation for rewriting it.
Of more immediate interest to me is the current novel "Die Freunde"
on which I have been working sporadically for ten years, subject
to all sorts of distractions. I should be glad to discuss what I
have done and how I would like to proceed, again a project that
would require very lengthy letters, which I am not sure you would
want to read. The text now comprises 161826 words, or about 400
pages; and I am just at the threshhold of the real drama.
Finally, a question about images. I have found three kodachromes
of Konnarock which I would like you to see; two of them landscape
photos, (427K and 584K), the third a picture of Margaret, Klemens,
and my parents as they watched Vietnam news.(422K) By comparison,
the picture you sent me was 238K and the Aspe Bay image was 204K.
My question: can your Internet connection and your computer cope
with these larger images?
= What were the plays about?
One was about my experiences in the "teaching hospital".
I didn't think it was good literature, and was soon ashamed
of it. The manuscript is somewhere, but I don't know where.
I think there were other plays, but I have forgotten.
= Yes, I noted the anniversary of Kristallnacht.
= Do you know Thomas Hardy's poetry?
No. But I downloaded two large files of his poems
from the Gutenberg site on the Internet.
= I've only recently come to it,
= having previously read only the novels.
= He died in 1928, a very melancholy man.
= The previous year he wrote "Unkept Good Fridays"
= which I shall attempt to attach.
= Seems germane to our discussion of sorrow.
Thank you very much for the poem. I like the poem
and I'm much appreciative of the fact that you sent it.
"Unkept Good Fridays" corroborates my surmise that we
are on the same wavelength.
Jochen
=========================================================
This started out as a letter, but turned into an essay on
my relationship to music. I considered it inappropriate
for an introductory letter. I thought, however, that it
might interest you.
- 1 -
Draft - Not sent
Dear Rickie,
Notwithstanding an ingrained reserve, - or
stuffiness -, that shrinks from calling by their first-
names all but members of my immediate family, I find it
inconceivable that I should address you as anything but
"Rickie". Perhaps that is the case, because although
the Flanders found, - and find - it impossible to adopt
me, I have found it impossible not to adopt the
Flanders. In any event, I ask you to forgive me,
especially in consideration of the fact that to address
you as "Mrs. Flanders" would inextricably enmesh my
emotions in confusion, since to my feelings, "Mrs.
Flanders" can never be anyone other than your mother-in-
law.
Steven told me some months ago that I should write
to you. I did not comply with his instruction, because
what I remembered of Peter from our five months'
acquaintance sixty-six years ago was so insubstantial
that it was inconceivable that my memories would have
any meaning at all for you, who did not share our
experiences in Chappaqua and Canaan, and whose thinking
is suffused with later echoes and images of Peter's
life.
For me the situation is different. My inadvertent
encounter on the Internet with Donald and Sara Flanders'
and Richard Courant's testimony before the Atomic Energy
Commission was like an archeological discovery which
provides me with an opportunity to contemplate not only
the temporal foundations of my own life, but also the
validity, if any, of historical knowledge in general;
and it is on this point, if I understand correctly, that
Cyndy's concerns coincide with mine.
As for this letter, please understand that I
understand that its length and detail are inappropriate
to its purpose of polite conveyance of the essay for
which you asked. My excuse is that a letter, like any
other composition, musical, verbal or pictorial, has
natural dimensions of its own, which the author is
required to respect. The reader, however, should, in
self-defense, be prepared to look for the nearest waste-
paper basket. In any event, a letter such as this may
not be susceptible to a reply. It certainly does not
require a reply, and perhaps it does not even deserve
one.
My own sparse knowledge of Peter's biography has
- 2 -
proved unexpectedly meaningful for me. I note that the
most detailed description in my short essay is of my
interest in Peter's efforts to put together a spring-
powered motor boat, a harbinger of my life-long interest
in physics and technology. His rejection of my advances
with the adage that too many cooks spoil the broth was
likewise a portent of the serial rejections,
institutional and personal, with which my life, though
perhaps no more than that of other people, has been
punctuated. In Chappaqua and Canaan, Peter and I were
clearly in competition, and since I have no memory of
hearing him practice his cello, I must have had no
inkling how disadvantaged I was in respect to the music
that mattered to me so greatly, At age 13, he would have
already been well on the way to being an accomplished
cellist.
Now that I have learned at the memorial concert,
the details of Peter's career as musicologist and choral
conductor, my life appears to me somewhat as a
contrapuntal basso continuo to his achievement, as if my
failures were the mirror images of his accomplishments.
Various scenes in my musical experiences come to mind,
and I cannot help but imagine what they would have been
like if he had been involved.
At Germantown Friends School, I sang, as best I
could, the music that Mary Brewer (whom you possibly
knew) had chosen to have her chorus perform: "All
breathing life sing and praise ye the Lord" (BWV 225).
I didn't sing very loud, and I doubt that she could
discern when I was off key. But for reasons that I
cannot fathom, I made her uncomfortable; I remember that
in instructing the chorus, she kept interrupting
herself, I think in a rather unprofessional way, to
berate me in front of the other students, for my
dispirited appearance. "John, Why don't you smile?" she
asked. Would Peter have been similarly annoyed by a glum
and gloomy chorus member? How would he have dealt with
me, if he couldn't have dismissed me?
(Germantown Friends School had determined to
socialize me by ridding me of my unpronounceable name,
replacing "Jochen" with "John", naively innocent of any
suspicion that the pseudonym with which they tagged me,
far from facilitating my social integration in fact
isolated me further. The classmates who were addressing
John were talking to someone who I was not and did not
want to be. Nor did the Harvard registrar help matters,
when he/she discovered and dusted off my first name, and
introduced me as Ernst J. Meyer into the chain of
bureaucracy which has subsequently done its best to trap
and to fetter me.)
- 3 -
Germantown Friends School also arranged for violin
lessons for me from none other than Alfred Mann, whom
you probably knew. Given the difference in their
temperaments, it would not surprise me if Peter and he
rubbed each other the wrong way. (If you don't tell me,
I shall probably never find out.) Alfred Mann was very
kind to me and I remember him with much affection. I
think he quickly realized that my musical talents were
incommensurate with my ambitions, and that, in
Beethoven's words, I should have to try long and hard
before I realized that I could not play. In any event,
at that time I lived with an unmusical and essentially
unsympathetic foster family such that I had no
opportunity to practice at "home", and the GFS phase of
my musical training was doomed to failure.
At Harvard, I tried again to learn to play violin
on an instrument given to me by my future mother-in-law.
I applied myself to pieces far far beyond my technical
competence. My fellow students in Lowell House, R entry
complained. I cannot blame them. But reading now the
letters I then wrote to my parents, I realize how
important, though unfit for ears of man or beast, the
sounds that I extorted from my violin were for my
emotional equilibrium.
I was surrounded by accomplished musicians. From
the Lowell House Common Room, the strains of Acis and
Galatea, produced by my fellow students, wafted into my
room. The fulfillment of longing and love in melody and
harmony, from all of which I was excluded by my
incompetence, threatened to demoralize me. I forced
myself to work all the harder. It was envy I that made
me shun performances of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra,
Instead I was a faithful auditor of Sanders Theater
concerts. I remember particularly vividly performances
by Alexander Schneider and Ralph Kirkpatrick of the
sonatas for violin and harpsichord (BWV 1014-1019). On
Sunday mornings I sat on the stone steps in what was
then Harvard's Germanic Museum, at the foot of the
plaster cast of the transept of the Naumburger Dom of
which my parents were enamored, and to which they had
taken me as a seven year old child, and in this mock-up
of the venerated shrine, I listened to the organ
recitals of E. Power Biggs, accompanied by his
stunningly beautiful wife who turned pages sitting next
to him on the organ bench. (Twenty-five years later
both Mr. and Mrs. Biggs were my patients in Cambridge.)
Although I did not realize it at the time, Peter's
studies at Harvard and mine overlapped. Interpolating
from our childhood acquaintance and from his career as I
heard it reflected in the memorial service, I fear that
- 4 -
a hypothetical encounter with him in the Harvard Yard in
1946 or 47 would have proved so humiliating to me, that
even now I cringe to contemplate it. Musically at
least, I could never hope to be in Peter Flanders'
league.
Over the years my understanding of music and my
relationship to it has changed. I admire now the
virtuosity of my grandchildren on the trumpet, violin,
piano and French horn. (Nathaniel just interrupted me
for a photocopy of Leopold Mozart's Trumpet Concerto,
which he will be able to play an hour or two after he
starts practicibg it.) The children's music is for them
an avenue of emotional expression which was closed to
me. And because it was closed to me, I invested my
energy in literature, in reading, understanding and
interpreting the works of Homer, Aeschylus and
Sophocles, Plato and Aristotle, Luther, Erasmus,
Shakespeare, Milton, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza,
Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Schelling, Herder, Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, Hoelderlin, Kierkegaard, Hofmannsthal,
Rilke, and not least, the Bible, the King James Version,
Luther's translation, the Vulgate, the Greek New
Testament, the Septuagint, listing merely those that
come to mind, not to flaunt myself, or show off my
erudition, or brag about my learnedness, but to look at
a map of where I have been, in an effort to render an
accounting of what I did with my life when fate barred
me from becoming a musician. Perhaps the most
significant consequence of that disappointment was a
life-long struggle to find my salvation in literature, a
struggle premised on erasing the distinction between the
sacred and the profane, an effort with which I proved
myself, at least in my own mind, a true disciple of the
Reformation.
=========================================================
Letter to Rickie, mailed 11-04-05
November 2, 2005
Dear Rickie,
Notwithstanding an ingrained reserve, - or
stuffiness -, that shrinks from calling by their first-
names all but members of my immediate family, I find it
inconceivable that I should address you as anything but
"Rickie". Perhaps that is the case, because although
the Flanders found, - and find - it impossible to adopt
me, I have found it impossible not to adopt the
Flanders. In any event, I ask you to forgive me,
especially in consideration of the fact that to address
you as "Mrs. Flanders" would inextricably enmesh my
emotions in confusion, since to my feelings, "Mrs.
Flanders" can never be anyone other than your mother-in-
law.
Steven told me some months ago that I should write
to you. I did not comply with his instruction, because
what I remembered of Peter from our five months'
acquaintance sixty-six years ago was so insubstantial
that it was inconceivable that my memories would have
any meaning at all for you, who did not share our
experiences in Chappaqua and Canaan in 1939, and whose
thinking is suffused with later echoes and images of
Peter's life.
For me the situation is different. My inadvertent
encounter on the Internet with Donald and Sara Flanders'
and Richard Courant's testimony before the Atomic Energy
Commission was like an archeological discovery which
provides me with an opportunity to contemplate not only
the temporal foundations of my own life, but also the
validity, if any, of historical knowledge in general;
and it is on this point, if I understand correctly, that
Cyndy's concerns coincide with mine.
As for this letter, although it would be a pleasure
to hear from you, please feel no obligation to reply. I
know too well from experience, how awkward it can be to
try to do justice to an inherently complex set of
circumstances if one has other things on ones mind.
My very best wishes to you and your family.
=========================================================
DRAFT : NOT SENT
================
Dear Cyndy,
You write:
= Questions, questions.
= I don't mean to pry, but I am interested in you,
= in what you have become, and why, and how.
I recognize the historian in you: you need to know what
really happened, how it really was. ("wie es eigentlich
gewesen" - Ranke) Our exchanges have some resemblance to one
of your oral history projects, where the garrulous subject
keeps talking talking talking ... Except in my case, it's
writing ... on and on and on.
"Dass du nicht enden kannst, das macht dich gross,
und dass du nie beginnst, das ist dein Los." - Goethe
(That you can't stop, that makes you great,
That you can't start, that is your fate.)
Writing at least, has this advantage over talking, in that
breaking off a conversation, no matter how politely
accomplished, is never devoid of some taint of rudeness,
while for a writing, the waste-paper basket is, or should
be, ever at hand, and the delete button may be pushed or
clicked with unobserved abandon. And an hypothetical duty
to reply is non-existent, or, in any event, is absolved
among grown-ups by procrastination and the passage of time.
As children we were impatient - and lonely; but now, when
life itself has turned into interminable waiting, the
emptiness of time is more marvelous even than its
fulfillment.
I have no desire to exhibit anything, but I have no
objection to revealing - everything. I do not believe in
secrets, because secrecy distorts both that which is kept
secret and that which is purportedly patent. On the other
hand, when there are no secrets, then discourse is free to
assume the secrecy proper to it, of which it cannot be
deprived, and then, in a sense, everything becomes a secret.
The endless curricula vitae obviously reveal nothing. The
"recommendations" with which we hound each other are
meaningless. The language with which we presume to tell who
we are, is itself a secret code that conceals what it
purports to reveal, and reveals what it pretends to conceal.
The boundaries between sharing, confiding, confessing and
exhibiting are far from distinct. We all desire to be seen,
to be heard, to be understood. The people I know who
pretend to have the deepest secrets have the least to hide.
Secrecy creates for them the illusion of substance.
But I think it is unavoidable, that sooner or later, if
you want to understand about me, you will want to tell me
about yourself. I like to listen, I like to read, and above
all I like to understand.
If the exchange between us continues, as I hope it
will, then at some future time you will start describing and
explaining to me your own experiences. I am not suggesting
that you should want to do so now, perhaps never, and the
suggestion is far from a request, yet so far as an efficient
exchange of information is concerned, your lending me a copy
of something you have written, perhaps your 200 page memoir,
of which David said, that you had left a lot out, as a
reasonable place to start.
I am convinced that there are events - facets of
experience which cannot be communicated in positive
statements. (Positive protocol sentences, in the technical
sense of the Vienna Circle) That, it seems to me is the
second theorem of history; (the first being that the past
can never be directly accessible to my experience, but is
known, - if fantasy may be called knowledge - only by
inference, by indirection, through a synthetic act of my
imagination.)
Again Rilke (from the same requiem I quoted in my last
letter) referring here to an account of his friend's
suicide:
Doch dies ist kleinlich,
zu denken, was nicht war. Auch ist ein Schein
von Vorwurf im Vergleich, der dich nicht trifft.
Das, was geschieht, hat einen solchen Vorsprung
vor unserm Meinen, dass wirs niemals einholn
und nie erfahren, wie es wirklich aussah.
Yet it is petty,
to contemplate what might have been.
And there's the sheen of accusation
in the comparison that is irrelevant to you.
The event outdistances our intuition
by so great a span, that we can never reach it,
and never experience what it was really like.
The event that outdistances all intuition, if one
presumes to communicate it at all requires irony, dialectic,
analogy, parable, myth. In short, poetry.