Dear Cyndy,

Another  month  has  almost passed.  Ach wie fluechtig, ach
wie nichtig, ist der Menschen Leben.   (Bach  Cantata  #26)
(Ah how fleeting, ah how futile is the life of men.)

1. Chorus [Verse 1] (S, A, T, B)

Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig
Ist der Menschen Leben!
Wie ein Nebel bald entstehet
Und auch wieder bald vergehet,
So ist unser Leben, sehet!

Ah, how fleeting, ah, how empty
Is the life of mortals!
As a mist which quickly riseth
And again as quickly passeth,
Even thus our life is, witness!

2. Aria (tenor)
So schnell ein rauschend Wasser schießt,
So eilen unser Lebenstage.
Die Zeit vergeht, die Stunden eilen,
Wie sich die Tropfen plötzlich teilen,
Wenn alles in den Abgrund schießt.

As fast as rushing waters gush,
So hasten on our days of living.
The time doth pass, the hours hasten,
Just as the raindrops quickly break up
When all to the abyss doth rush.

     (The translation is not mine, but one of several on
the Internet.  It's not raindrops which quickly break up,
but the cascading stream which disintegrates into drops
when the surface tension is no longer sufficient to
maintain a cylindrical configuration.)  This wonderful
tenor aria with a presto flute accompaniment mimics the
cascade of a mountain stream.  I associate it with the
brook that comes down the side of Franconia Ridge,
paralleled by the equally steep Falling Waters Trail.
It was one of our favorite destinations in the White
Mountains when we were still able to clamber up the
hillsides through the woods.

     Being productive, being creative, then, if you believe
the text, is to try ones hand at the alchemy of presuming
to make permanent what is fleeting, in other words, to make
something of nothing.

     It's not surprising that the 1948 essay on Prometheus
Bound was not a hit with you.  I won't say that I am proud
of it; I'm incapable of taking pride in anything.  I'm not
proud of being an American, and I'm not proud of being a
German.  Not proud of being a Jew, and not proud of being a
Lutheran, a Quaker, an Agnostic, an Atheist, a Pantheist or
a Deist.  Not proud of my parents or grandparents, of my
sister, my wife, my child or my grandchildren, not even
proud of my daughter-in-law and certainly not proud of
myself or of my little essay.

     As I reflect on that effort and on the college course
for which it was written, I recapitulate some of the
embarrassment that wafted through my life like the breezes
of spring in those vernal months in 1948, just sixty-one
years ago.  The most immediate occasion for embarrassment
was the circumstance that we were expected to read, to
understand and to interpret Aeschylus' text in translation.
It's an understatement to admit that in translation
something is lost: in translation everything is lost, and
replaced with an artifact, admittedly an artifact that
might be just as valuable as the original, but an artifact
nonetheless, qualitatively different, absolutely different,
from what it purports to replace.  The English translation
of Prometheus Bound, - whose effort it was, I don't
remember, - grated even then on my (literary) sensibilities.
The unambiguous, unpoetic proletarian style seemed
incongruous with the mythical obscurity and profundity
which I divined in the original.  I was embarrassed also by
the lecturer whose presentations were conscientious,
serious but seemed uninspired.  In retrospect I ask myself
whether it might have been melancholy that was weighing on
him.  I assumed that he was aware of the awkwardness of the
translations but accepted them as an unavoidable compromise
in order not to remain marooned in the English-speaking
universe.  The only other play that we read which I
remember with certainty was Ibsen's Enemy of the People. If
forced to guess, I would hazard that in addition we read
King Lear and Racine's Phedre.  Comparative Literature 3,
was the only course I took with F. O. Matthiessen.  My
other contact with him was an essay on Nietzsche which he
judged in the Barrett Wendell Prize competition. The books
which I chose as my reward were the three volumes of Werner
Jaeger's Paideia.  Incidentally, the only final examination
during my college years of which I have any memory was the
one for Matthiessen's course.  I wrote an impromptu essay
on An Enemy of the People.  My thesis: that Ibsen was not
an ideologue, neither radical nor reactionary, but like the
Captain Horster of the play who uncritically offered to Dr.
Stockmann the use of his house for a town meeting, so Ibsen
without taking sides, presented the public with a stage on
which each person could present himself and his views.
Matthiessen must have agreed since he gave me a good grade.
His consistent endorsement of my work made me feel that
there was a bond of understanding between us, but I have no
recollection of ever having had an opportunity to talk with
him.  But I do have a very vivid memory of the morning of
April 2, 1950 in Union Station in Washington, waiting for
the train to Virginia, when I saw the bold black newspaper
headline that trumpeted his suicide the day before.

     I consider the Prometheus paper a big improvement over
the one on Beethoven.  The two efforts reflect the
differences between an historical and a literary
interpretation. In the high school essay, I accepted
Beethoven's self-pity and his Romantic dramatization of his
own life at face value, as a reflection of an ultimate
reality.  What else could I have done?  At age 15, I had
barely experience of my own. Fortuitously, the obscurity of
myth that envelops Prometheus is an impenetrable obstacle to
so naive and simplistic an interpretation; and the virtue
that I now see in the Prometheus essay is that it
succeeded, inspite of the vulgarity of the translation, in
revealing in the exclamations and lamentations of
Aeschylus' characters, experiences that are universally
human, that bind even us in our ultra-modern world to the
lives of our ancestors in an almost prehistoric antiquity.
Perhaps its the impending hearing for Meyer v. Nantucket
Building department et al, which makes me very sensitive to
the circumstance that sixty years ago, I overlooked the
most significant implication of the drama, the importance
of Prometheus' explicit declaration, the last line in the
play: "Behold I suffer injustice."  What hurt Prometheus
more than the chains and the nails was the absence of justice.
We have a long way to go to catch up with the ancient Greeks. 
Nowadays we take injustice for granted. One of my Law School
professor patients (Leonard Boudin) once confided to me: The
Government lies.  The Government always lies. The ultimate
tragedy that the Prometheus drama confides to us is the
explicit corruption of the world order, which we, like
Prometheus, are unable to admit. Aeschylus' play is a
monument to the treachery and malice of Zeus, a truth
that is beyond the capacity of even the Old Testament prophets.

     Now that I've gotten these paragraphs out of my system,
I'll put them on hold until your next letter confirms that
you haven't changed your mind and still want to read them.

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

Thank you for your letter. I'm pleased for you and for the
rest of the family that Joanna was accepted at Bryn Mawr.
Thank you also for asking me to send you as e-mail attachments
more of my prose. I've discovered, meanwhile, that I summarized
some of my work in a relatively short essay (60 pages) which
was rejecteds in 1961 by a journal "Phenomenology and Phenomenological
Research." I renege on my offer to send you selected tidbits,
because the process of selection would prove a temptation
to rewrite the whole thing, - a slippery slope onto which
I mustn't venture. I can justify the size of the attachment
by pointing out that the file with its 1775480 bytes is smaller
than the 2 megabytes which it cost to transmit the admittedly
much more edifying image of your enchanted wintry, snow-covered pond.
As always, there's no obligation to read anything, and the delete
key is readily at hand.

Stay well, give my best - and my tax-symapthies - to Ned.
Jochen