Dear Cyndy,

Presumably you returned to the ophthalmologist today
for a post-operative examination, and were assured that 
the operation went well, and that the recovery is progressing
as it should. Then this surgical ordeal at least is behind you,
and there is at least the possibility that you can live
happily without further eye operations.

Much of the day yesterday, I spent assembling another "desktop"
computer, so named to distinguish it from the "laptop" - although
actually the machine I put together stands not on the desk
but on the floor. Rather surprising to me, notwithstanding the
ubiquity of these toys, I could find only one store which sold
the parts that I needed.  The new computer, neatly put together,
functions as it should, but its use is complicated by planned
obsolescence. The new hardware will not "support" some of the
"legacy" software on which I have been relying for years.
I must scout around for "updates", again more work, but also 
an interesting exercise, from which something is to be learned.

==============================

That's what I wrote yesterday. I don't remember what interrupted,
or what distracted me. Last evening I watched and listened to 
the state of the union message. We don't have a functioning television
set, but, to my surprise, the Internet rendition from CNN was 
flawlessly smooth. I was startled by the promiscuity with which
the dignitaries hugged and kissed one another, but much appreciative
of the quality of the presidential rhetoric. While the mispronunciations
and malapropisms of our previous leader always struck me as indicative
of intellectual mediocrity or worse, unfortunately the converse 
does not obtain. Fluent discourse, at least in my experience, does
not assure profundity or validity of thought; and to the extent that it
molds consensus, reminds me of its antithesis: the voice that cries in
the wilderness which is arguably anything but eloquent.

This morning I received your letter. Thank you. It's good that you're
comfortable after the operation. Perhaps you won't find it necessary
to have the second eye operated on after all. In a sense, issues of
surgery, perhaps because they are of such import, resemble prisms
in that they demonstrate the breadth of the spectrum of sensibility
and judgment among us; differences which are collapsed, so to speak,
by the conceptual consolidations of the language with which we communicate.
We invariably assume that the words on whose meaning we implicitly agree
unite us, whereas actually they serve to mask and conceal differences
that cannot be expunged.

Stay well, and give my best to Ned.
Jochen