Dear Cyndy,

By now your guests have left, Ned has probably recovered,
you are anticipating your cataract surgery on Monday, and 
I want you to know that I am thinking of you, and will be
thinking of you. If I were more conventional, I would tell
you that I would be "praying for you". Such assurances have
always sounded tawdry to me, and I would be surprised if
you wanted any one to pray for you, even if he were Pope
Benedict himself, and perhaps him least of all. Even if it
reflects adversely on my own surgical skills, I confess 
to have long since come to the conclusion that the "success"
of the "operation" depends on the patient as much as on the
surgeon, and ultimately, only on the patient. When they
wheel you into the operating room, my thoughts and hopes
and wishes will accompany you.

Here, things are quiet. I may already have written that
last Tuesday, Feb. 17,  I mailed to the court the Memorandum with
the supporting exhibits, of which I was so proud.
A few minutes ago, when I checked the court records on the
Internet, these hadn't been docketed yet; but I will wait
another week or ten days, before I accost the clerk with 
duplicates. I have the impression that the personnel in the clerk's
office subject the cases that are brought to them to informal
(and illegitimate) preadjudication, by the simple procedure of
failing to file documents that they disapprove of, or consider
adverse to the public welfare or dangerous to public health or
just plain unpatriotic. They make life interesting.

Every morning I take pictures of the Nantucket house by remote
control. Looking at them gives me much satisfaction. The
camera to the rear (north) of the house has, for inexplicable
reasons, started to function again , and I append an image
it took this morning that shows a grey, threatening sky.
In the foreground, the mounded trench in which Klemens buried
the video cable. The absence of ruts suggests that there
have been no trucks or automobiles. The daily reassurancer
that the house is undamaged is so satisfying that I am planning
to install the same system in Virginia, especially since Jeanne,
the lady who took care of my parents as they died, has broken
her right wrist and for a matter of weeks or months, will not
be able to drive up to the house to check on it for me.

Last evening, Klemens and his family came back from New
Hampshire skiing, with all bones intact, much to our
relief. This morning I drove him to work, pausing for
an hour for a conference at the Dialysis Clinic in
Somerville for which he has some responsibility. While
I sat in the waiting room, I started again to read
Aristotle's Metaphysics. I read for thirty minutes; then
I slept for thirty minutes. I was looking for an answer
to the question: "What is metaphysics?" That was what
the Harvard interviwer wanted to know sixty three years ago,
when I was applying for admission. Apparently my answer
wasn't good enough, because it required some arm-twisting
of the admissions dean by the Germantown Friends School
principal before I was accepted. 

After I told the story to Nathaniel in anticipation of _his_
Harvard interview, (he's been admitted to Yale, and will
hear from Harvard in about 5 weeks) it occurred to me
that judging from his Prolegomena to any new Metaphysics,
Kant was too embarrassed to make explicit what _he_ thought
Metaphysics might be, to wit, the translation into
(pseudo)rational discourse of the truths that the Pastor
proclaimed from the pulpit every the Sunday morning. It was
the impossibility of such translation with which Kant struggled
to come to terms. The proposition which I am trying to test
by reading Aristotle, is that there are inherent limitations
to linguistic expressions of experience; that Metaphysics
is the denial of these limitations in the effort to
surmount or circumvent them; and because the limitations
are inexorable, Metaphysics always fails.

I don't know, of this is a good place to stop; but it
has to be, because Metaphysics is no substitute for supper,
and I'm hungry. Please give my best to Ned. As for yourself,
I've said too much already.

Jochen