Dear Cyndy,

Before I forget, I need to add to my previous comments,
the observation that the literature on sorrow, suffering,
human catastrophe is so diverse and multifarious
that when one immerses oneself in the texts, one is tempted to
conclude that literary criticism, - or literary theory -, has
been inadequate, and has fashioned a mental cabinet of pigeon-holes,
into which none of the texts that tradition has bequeathed will fit.
Prometheus Bound is a static tableau, where Oedipus Rex is a
dynamic process; and neither is like anything else I have read.
The writings of Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller,
Kleist, Ibsen, Chekhov, are all different beyond comparison.
What they have in common is the humanness they depict, -
and the labels with which teachers of literature presume to tag them.

If the style in which I write, will sometimes seem - or be - 
verbose, it's because experience is complex and often confused,
and style ought to reflect what exists and not create a simplistic
pseudo-reality of its own. Much of what is to be described defies
simple expression, and must be triangulated from multiple terms
the aggregate of which will seem unnecessary - hence verbose - to
a reader who is intent on simplification at all costs. It's become
habitual with me, when dissatisfied with the precision of a particular
expression, to resort for synonyms, definitions and translations to
Internet dictionaries. When, more often than not, the most appropriate
term is not immediately apparent, multiples that seem redundant to the
(casual) reader, may find their way into the text.

Another characteristic of my writing, of which I have become more
conscious over the years, is an attempt to convey meaning with
sentence structure as well as with the imagery of individual words.
I strive to let the course of the sentence itself recapitulate in
miniature the experience which it seeks to convey. I write for example:
"The telephone just rang. It was Klemens telling me he would be
back a day early, so I'll be leaving Belmont at 6:30 p.m. joining
the evening exodus to New Hampshire to be at the Manchester Airport
in time to await his 8:45 p.m. arrival." This is obviously verbose. 
Why not, instead: "At 8:45 p.m., I'll meet Klemens at the Manchester
Airport."  That says the same thing, or does it? Am I tricking myself
with the conceit that the length, intricacy, and convolution of my
wordy sentence is an image, however faint, of the traffic jams through
which I'll be threading my way as night falls, when the headlights,
like the sentence itself, prove not nearly as crisp as I would like
them to be?

Admittedly the style in which I like to write tends to be decorative
and in that respect is reminiscent of the Baroque, a tradition about which
my feelings are contradictory.  The charm of baroque music, more than any
other experience, expresses for me what it means to be conscious, what
it means to be alive in the interval of time which the music defines.
The baroque graphics of Rembrandt, Ruisdael, Vermeer, dwell, as I see them,
in a temple of their own.  On the other hand, the ornate decorative
extravagances of baroque architecture, especially the functionally
meaningless interior embellishments, - make me feel as if in an alien
environment from which I need to flee.  On a visit so some Bavarian church,
they provoked from Klemens the comment: "This sort of place always makes me
feel as if someone should clean it up." a sentiment that, if I understand
correctly, was institutionalized by the Quakers and the Calvinists. I'm
sympathetic if you have the same reaction to (some of) my writing.

At this point I stopped to await your reply to my previous letter.

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

I very much hope that Joanna receives a favorable reply from Bryn Mawr.
Your account of her involvement in public affairs reminds me what
a cripple I am in matters politic.  I wish Joanna well.  As for SMR,
I think rewriting would be well worthwhile if it entailed a chance to
see you. Had I been your student in college, I suspect I would have
submitted some very poor papers if that's what it took to get some
personal attention. Maybe it's not too late. I'm touched by your
willingness to look at a few pages of The Sources of Doubt, especially
since it's a literary genre basically uncongenial to you. The 645 pages
are double-spaced and have wide margins. More economically displayed,
with 400 words per page, it would come to only 290 pages. That's still
an awful lot of verbosity to negotiate. I'll look over the text and try
to find a few tidbits to make palatable for you. Preliminary attempts
to convert some of the pdf images into text files using an optical
character recognition (OCR) program were unsuccessful; I'll try again.

I've been adding to my novel. Describing what I think I understand about
who we are and how we live is satisfying enough; but there's no end in
sight, and no expectation that what I write will ever be read by anyone.
That makes it somewhat of a travaille de fou. I've also been pursuing
my interest in electronic medical records about which I wrote you. The
bureaucracy is suffocating; untold committees deliberating about what
should be done while secretly convinced that it can't work. On the Internet
I came across a very complete set of specifications published by something
that calls itself grandiosely "The Certification Commission for Healthcare
Information Technology". They specify the design of the program and is
that specification is the biggest obstacle to its composition. I don't
endorse the CCHIT specifications, but I find it a challenging exercise
to try to write programs to implement them. Whether I'm skilled enough
and whether I am willing to spare the time is another matter. In the past,
I've found programming computers intellectually and emotionally quite
satisfying.  Intellectually, because there's no limit on ingenuity,
inventiveness and persistence; emotionally, because the computer is so
wonderfully responsive and the sentences addressed to it have an immediate,
dramatic effect. They are meaningful because they work!

The essay "Forgotten Men" which I am attaching was written in 1946
for G.B.A's English A course. It describes the village store in Konnarock,
which is still standing. It's the old railroad station built perhaps a
hundred years ago. If you're interested, you can find another perspective in
http://ernstjmeyer.ddns.net/notes/bean_salad.html
The proprietor was a man named T.L. Waters, about whom I have more
stories to tell. After my parents had read the paper which I am sending
you, they started to refer to him by a new nickname: Der Geier (the vulture).

Stay well. Please give my regards to Ned, and - I hope - my congratulations
to Joanna.

Jochen