Dear Cyndy,

It's been raining all day; I've been sitting at my desks in my third
floor study, working on computer programs and gazing now and then
through the large uncurtained windows. The trees are still bare; the
sky is gray, and rain has been falling intermittently all afternoon.

Thank you for your letter. I'm pleased for you and Joanna and Elizabeth
that Joanna was admitted to Harvard. (So was Nathaniel.) I remember how
fateful my own admission to college once seemed to me. In the sixty three
years that have since elapsed, I have observed with some embarrassment,
how much the pivotal importance that I once attached to that event
has diminished over the years, possibly because what it seemed to
promise me, and what I promised myself have remained largely unfulfilled,
and left me toying with the thought that I would have become the person
that I am, nothing more and nothing less, even if I hadn't gone to college
at all.  Witness my childhood playmate Helmut Frielinghaus, whose parents
were too poor to send him to the university, and who is now sitting at his
desk in Hamburg, - as I sit at my desk in Belmont, I writing computer
programs, and he, an enthusiast for the American literary scene,
translating the poems of John Updike into German. 

Yesterday I had an e-mail from him, asking for my help with two poems,
one of which I was able to retrieve from the Internet:

Country Music
February 1999

Oh Monica, you Monica
In your little black beret,
You beguiled our saintly Billy
And led that creep astray.

He'd never seen thong underpants
Or met a Valley girl;
He was used to Southern women,
Like good old Minnie Pearl.

You vamped him with your lingo,
Your notes in purple ink,
And fed him Vox and bagels
Until he couldn't think.

You were our Bill's Delilah
Until Acquittal Day;
You're his-tor-y now, Monica,
In your little black beret.

Helmut was puzzled what Updike might have mean
when he wrote:

And fed him Vox and bagels
Until he couldn't think.

I replied that I thought Vox was a pun on lox, (Lachs,
smoked salmon) and that the line was corroboration of
the earlier one:

You vamped him with your lingo,

I ask myself what is to be gained by, - what is to be
learned from packaging in poetry the banalities with
which we are surrounded and by which, to some extent,
we are trapped. Perhaps I'm missing something.

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

I consider it an expression of your affection that you should
trouble yourself to read my juvenile essays in abstract
thought. Please don't let what I have written annoy you,
and put it aside as soon as you have more edifying things to do.
Instead of sending you, - or offering to send you -
more of the texts that I have scanned into digital images,
it seems better that I should send you just the table of
contents of my long essay, and a list of the shorter items
of which I have images.  You may then instruct me what,
if anything more, you wish to see.  In addition, I'll append
to this letter some notes that I made since I last wrote.
These again may not be worthwhile for you to read. 

Please stay well, and give my best to Ned.
Jochen

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

These are high school and college essays
of which I have digitized images:

Goethe's Egmont (1948)
The Importance of Family (1946)
My father's account of me to the Dean of Freshmen (1946)
Nietzsche's Madness (1948)
Paradox in the Nucleus (1946)
Plato_v_Wagner (1946)
Strikers (1946)
Turn_of_the_Screw (1946)

I have not (yet) scanned into the computer
my college thesis on Lou Andreas Salome
and various other high school and college
papers.

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

It's embarrassing that it took me sixty years to arrive at an
interpretation of Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound that I now find
essential. Perhaps that embarrassment should be outweighed by
the circumstance that at age 79 I am still able to recognize
an omission and to change my mind.

Prometheus Bound sheds light not only on the Greeks' deep
yearning for justice, and on their courage to recognize that
it does not exist. The play also sheds light or casts shadows
on the other competitive or complementary culture, the Hebrew-
Christian tradition. If the Greeks were able to accept at
least a Manichean world view in which Zeus as the Olympian
CEO could be abysmally cruel, the Hebrews required a deity
that having virtually destroyed mankind, makes gestures of 
reconciliation with a rainbow, having tortured Abraham with
the directive to murder his only son, then arranges for the
last minute rescue of Isaac and compensates Abraham with untold
progeny; a deity that oppressed its chosen people with a plethora
of laws, then commissions his "son" to extricate them from the
legal morass he had devised, arranging the sacrificial
crucifixion, and thereupon idemnifying the victim for his
suffering on the cross by arranging for resurrection, ascension
and investiture of celestial power "at the right hand" of God:
a hair-raising curriculum vitae for a supposedly loving god.
Isn't it remarkable that theodicees have been required only for
the ills that befell mankind in post-Biblical history while
the divine malevolence and cruelty so vividly depicted in the
Biblical sagas has consistently been justified - by faith.
The difference between Prometheus and Jesus is that Jesus declared
his crucifixion to be just, whereas Prometheus declared 
his crucifixion to be unjust. The crucifixion of Jesus is represented
on the part of Jehovah, as an act of personal sacrifice, as an act
of love for humanity, cf. John 3:16. whereas the crucifixion of
Prometheus is represented on the part of Zeus, as an act of malice
and vengeance.  Perhaps the reality is the same and the differences,
not so great as they seem, are merely a matter of different styles
of mythology.

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

A benefit of rummaging in old letters and essays
is the perspective that I gain about what I have done
and what I am doing. With respect to the Sources of Doubt
about the Conceptual World, I see the contradiction,
the paradox and the irony of proclaiming scepticism of
that world while adding to that which is to be doubted,
yet another layer of concepts, e.g. the reification of among
other terms, ethical and esthetic consciousness. Even when
I first set out to write, I perceived the need of
communicating an understanding, a sensibility, a way of
seeing and hearing, an intellectual and emotional functioning,
rather than another schema, another table of contents
or another catalogue of facts or another compendium of "models."
I didn't know how to accomplish such communication then,
and I don't know how to accomplish such communication now.
As a matter of fact, the circumstance that I've spent fifty years
lugging around with me my suitcase stuffed with papers which
no one will read suggests not only that I failed in my attempt
to explain myself, but that such explanation is in fact impossible:
Because it is the nature of the subjective, or of subjectivity,
to be intractable to communication, except to a very limited degree
in music and poetry. Perhaps it was wise that I gave up trying.

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

It may be too late, but perhaps it's still worthwhile
to reflect on the limitations of the effort of my youth
concerning the origin of doubt. At the time I wrote that
essay its theme seemed to me to be the central issue of (my)
existence, perhaps even the only one worth consideration.
Today I see more broadly that, however important, it is
only one of several, perhaps of many topics worthy of attention.

The most immediate, compelling and cogent comment is to recognize
the transfiguration of Doubt as the most elaborate and ambitious
of all sour-grapes enterprises. That the doubt which I proclaimed
was the essential compensation and cover for my despair, not so much,
disillusionment of failure, in Goethe's "dass ich erkenne was die Welt
im Innersten zusammen haelt," (Faust - That I should recognize the
innermost forces that constrain the world) as Nietzsche's:
"Wenn es Goetter gaebe, wie hielte ich es aus kein Gott zu sein.
Also gibt es keine Goetter." (If gods existed, how could I stand
not being a god.  Therefore there are no gods.) When I discovered
myself incapable of universal, comprehensive knowledge, I declared
that such knowledge was illusory. A monumental instance of sour grapes.
(The same criticism, incidentally, is apposite also to Kant's Kritik
der reinen Vernunft, und to Schopenhauer's Die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung.) One might ask whether resentment of ones cognitive
failures might not be at the root of the kind of theoretical
investigation in which I indulge. Such self-critcism might lead
to an understanding at a deeper level of what it means to know.

The conceptual world, of course, is the world described by language.
To disparage that world is to disparage language, and language will
ultimately wreak its revenge for the disparagement. To say anything
at all, I had to say it in words, and in the words of which I availed
myself there would inhere the same deficiencies that I was trying
to circumvent. I was contradicting myself: In positing ethical and
esthetic consciousness as sources of doubt about the conceptual world,
I was at one and the same time asserting the cogency of that which I
proposed to doubt, unless I was able to convince myself and my reader
that consciousness, ethical and esthetic, was somehow distinct from
the conceptual world.  Perhaps so, but in that case I shouldn't write
about it. As soon as I wrote about it, it would become part of that
world which I was denigrating.

Clearly, what was in order, if what I had in mind was to be communicated
at all, was a different use of language, - or perhaps a different medium
of communication altogether: an issue which raises the question: whether
to some purposes, for some ends, communication is necessary, possible, or
even desirable.

The issue: to what extent does my essay have the effect of suggesting,
demonstrating or even inculcating a different style of thought,
a different mode of awareness.

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

Reviewing, as I have been, the writings of my youth
has at least this value, that it gives me the opportunity
to reconsider what I attempted, what I envisioned; and
to understand now the manner in which I failed. The course
of time has made that failure inescapable, but the success,
if it may be called that, is implicit in the circumstance
that I am still here, that I survived: that the body, the
mind are still here, with a certain limited amount of wealth
associated with the name. But mine I consider not an unusual
but perhaps a universal fate: Wer spricht von siegen?
Ueberstehen ist alles? (Rilke: Who speaks of victory;
Only survival matters.)

Articulated differently: Just as when one is old the world
no longer appears as it did when one was young, so the hopes
and ambitions of youth are consumed, transformed in the process
of living. 

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

The quandary decribed in the essay about the Sources of Doubt
is a verbal, or if you will, a literary construction, pointing
to what I propose to be a common experience. To what extent
that experience is common and to what extent that experience
is personal is another matter. Also uncertain is whether that
experience is genuine or whether it is imagined. Intensive
preoccupation misleads to the assumption that the uncertainty,
the paradox, the incongruity of which doubt is the emblem is
universal. This assumption is most likely in error, because there
is no reason to assume that by virtue of the circumstance that
a concept transiently dominates my mind that concept should of
necessity also dominate the world. At the same time, as an 
illusion, such a presumption is eminently plausible.

One may speculate about what problems, what issues, what
(experiential) dilemmas might, under different historical
circumstances, assume a comparably important role to that
which doubt concerning the interpreted world presently has
in my own thinking. I'm not sure such speculation would be
fruitful, because the salient characteristic of my doubt is
its passion, the unconditional necessity with which I feel
compelled to doubt. Arguably such passion might present
itself about other issues as well, but it cannot be conjured
up at will.