Dear Cyndy,

Your foot, I hope, is improving and is mindful of its
responsibility to assist you in fulfilling your
grandmotherly obligation to attend Joanna's commencement
exercises. Please keep me informed about how your foot, -
and the rest of you, - are getting along.

The weather forecast on the Internet predicts a 60%
chance of thunderstorms for a location 36.67 degrees North
and 81.66 degrees West, elevation 3592 feet, which is
as precisely as I can place it, the position of our house
here in the mountains. Since the thunderstorms almost
always announce themselves with loud claps of thunder
that roll across the ridges some minutes before the rain
starts falling, Margaret and I took a chance and hung out
the laundry. As of now the sun is still shining, albeit 
through a thin haze. Dense foliage of maple, wild cherry
and locust trees masks the horizon, but between the leaves
one gets a foreboding glimpse of gray. Maybe if I borrowed
Margaret's hearing aids, I could hear the distant thunder.

Before hanging out the wash, I applied a coat of white primer
to two L-shaped stands on which, after the paint has dried,
I expect to mount video-surveillance cameras.  Each stand
consists of a base of 18 inch long 2x12 untreated lumber
which I found in the basement, to the end of which I screwed
a 29 inch long 1x8" upright which will support the camera.
I braced the two boards with a section of 2x4, placed at one
edge of the 2x12 base, leaving room for a cinder block weight
to keep the assembly from moving as it sits on the lawn.

Just before starting this letter, I retrieved today's images from
Nantucket. The skies there appear leaden and no sun is shining, but the
house is still standing stalwart as ever, though my dreams concerning
it are in some disarray. For the past two or three days, I haven't 
been able to focus my mind on my novel or on my essays. Instead,
prompted by Helmut's request for a comment on John Updike's scatological
poem "Fair Helen", I've been trying to upgrade my rudimentary knowledge
about her, relying on my Internet connection and on the profusion of
literature stored on the hard disk drive of my computer. I quickly
learned that the "face that launch'd a thousand ships" was not a devise
of Shelley's or some other Romantic poet, but of Christopher Marlowe's
Dr. Faustus:

FAUSTUS. Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium--
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.--
     [Kisses her.]
Her lips suck forth my soul:  see, where it flies!--
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wertenberg be sack'd;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear'd to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa's azur'd arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

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

Am I correct when I infer the "Wertenberg" is synonym
for "Wittenberg", the same place where Hamlet and
Horatio went to college?

================
Hor. Haile to your Lordship

Ham. I am glad to see you well:
Horatio, or I do forget my selfe

Hor. The same my Lord,
And your poore Seruant euer

Ham. Sir my good friend,
Ile change that name with you:
And what make you from Wittenberg Horatio?

Mar. My good Lord

Ham. I am very glad to see you: good euen Sir.
But what in faith make you from Wittemberge?

Hor. A truant disposition, good my Lord

Ham. I would not haue your Enemy say so;
Nor shall you doe mine eare that violence,
To make it truster of your owne report
Against your selfe. I know you are no Truant:
But what is your affaire in Elsenour?
Wee'l teach you to drinke deepe, ere you depart

Hor. My Lord, I came to see your Fathers Funerall

Ham. I pray thee doe not mock me (fellow Student)
I thinke it was to see my Mothers Wedding

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

Have you encountered any other references to Wittenberg
in Elizabethan literature? Does the place name have
symbolic significance? I was surprised, when I read Marlowe's
play, at the various details, which I had always assumed to have
been Goethe's invention, specifically, the name of the teaching
assistant (famulus): Wagner, and the invocation of Helen of Troy,
details which I then found already in the Volksbuch of 1580,
which presumably provided the plot for both Marlowe and Goethe.
The Volksbuch states affirmatively that Faust was on the
faculty of Wittenberg, though not your Wittenberg, or was he?
Goethe's Faust goes much further, literally and figuratively
than Marlowe's, in that he travels to the Underworld to rescue
Helen from Menelaus, - who had it in mind to sacrifice Helen for her
infidelity, - Faust to abscond with Helen, whom he "marries", to
live in a Mighty Fortress - echoes of Wittenberg - where their son,
Euphorion, is born. Goethe interprets Euphorion as the incarnation
of fused classical and romantic spirits, a hybrid not long for
this world. When Euphorion dies, understandably his mother
disappears also, and Faust returns, solitary, to the "real" world,
where he devotes his old age to: guess what? - architecture, 
building houses. (Agricultural) plumbing, in the guise of
reclaiming wetlands by building ditches was also very much on
his mind.

In my own quest for the most beautiful woman of all time, I turned
to Homer, - now finally accessible to me in Konnarock where I am
without the bilingual Loeb Library edition which hobbles me while
helping me sustain my delusion that I can read Greek. Trying to
decipher the original takes so much time that I never progress
beyond a few pages. When I allow myself the translation, I am able
not only to scan many pages in a few minutes, but also using the
computer, for example, to extract from Samuel Butler's rendering
in prose, the 70 of 25847 lines of combined Iliad and Odyssey in
which Helen's name appears.  I also looked at the German
versification of Johann Heinrich Voss which though of considerable
poetic merit in its own right, is unavoidably less literal.
My very superficial reading suggested to me that the Helen of the
Iliad is a woman haunted by her beauty and by the destruction
which that beauty has wrought upon both her adopted and her native
people. I was reminded of the lines in Rilke's First Duino Elegy:

"Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören."

(For beauty is nothing
but the inception of terror, which we tolerate barely,
and we admire it so, because it serenely disdains
to destroy us.)

The Helen of the Odyssey, on the other hand, appears,
her infidelity forgiven, as a rehabilitated housewife
at peace with her husband and her household, very much
in consonance, if one ignores the fate of Penelope's
suitors, with the Odyssey's spirit of forgiveness and
reconciliation. It's interesting that Goethe who was
such a bleeding heart and such a sissy that he couldn't
contemplate the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars and to
escape them, recused himself into an Oriental fantasy world,
should have rejected the myth of a forgiving Menelaus in
favor of the myth of a vengeful, conubicidal war hero, -
thereby creating the occasion of a successful "rescue"
of Helen by Faust, whose efforts to rescue his earlier
beloved had ended in so miserable a failure.

My dabbling in literary criticism, I suppose, is an escape
of sorts, - an escape from my Nantucket dilemma which
continues its relentless fermentation in some compartment
or other of my mind. It leaves me neither anxious nor
melancholy, but aware of a set of problems which I cannot
solve, and of no alternative other than "to proceed as way
opens." I've been getting tired and going to bed somewhat
earlier than usual, at about midnight. I sleep soundly until
about 4 a.m., when I awaken to the problem which I cannot
solve; I recapitulate its details, confirm they are insoluble,
and after about 30 minutes, go back to sleep soundly for
another four hours.

The second scene of the first act of Schiller's Wilhelm Tell
is a colloqui between Werner Stauffacher, a properous farmer,
who has just built as they would say in Nantucket nowadays,
a single family residence, and his wife Gertrud. Werner is
distraught, and Gertrud asks him, why?

Auf deinem Herzen drückt ein still Gebresten,
Vertrau es mir, ich bin dein treues Weib,
Und meine Hälfte fordr ich deines Grams.

"A silent burden presses on your heart.
Trust it to me, I am your faithful wife,
and I demand my equal portion of your grief."

What a beautiful home, she says, it is that
he has built; and he replies:

Wohl steht das Haus gezimmert und gefügt,
Doch ach - es wankt der Grund, auf den wir bauten.

"The house is framed and sheathed as it should be,
Alas, the ground on which we built is shifting."

It turns out that because the government officials are
envious of his independence they are out to make trouble for him;
and that, it seems to me, is similar to the situation in
which I find myself. I had proceeded on the assumption
that I could rely on the judicial system for some measure
of protection against the local bureaucrats. If that's
not forthcoming, where do I stand, what do I do?
Obviously, take one step at a time. There's no question
in my mind, that I should appeal the Superior Court decision.
The arguments which are beginning to take shape in my mind
are very persuasive to me, and it's of obvious importance that
I should augment and refine them with the compulsive reasoning
to which I am prone. At the same time, I must proceed on the
assumption that my appeal will fail, and prepare to answer
the question: what will I then do next?

Probably the rational course would be to hire a plumber to
tear out and reinstall the plumbing as demanded. But, conceivably,
the Town might make further demands that would add greatly to the
expense, such as straightening the sewer, already approved by the
health department. The sewer was installed (by others, not by me)
at an angle, and straightening it might arguably require
repositioning of the septic tank. I can think of various
other demands that in the absence of judicial oversight,
the Town might make, in furtherance of its project of
harrasing me in which it has already invested large sums
of taxpayers' money to pay the lawyers. In the end, the
project might become prohibitively expensive. Presumably
if Klemens ever changed his mind about wanting to keep it,
we could always try to sell the property. I may have written
you in the past, that I consider this Nantucket project a
proxy for living, getting older and older, and ultimately
a proxy for dying. It's no more surprising that I don't
know what I would do if ... one or another circumstance
prevailed with respect to the house, than what I would do
if ... I had a stoke or a heart attack or became demented,
just a little bit or a lot.

You asked for a picture of this house. I brought the camera
along, but neglected to bring the cable with which I would
transfer its images into the computer. In a few days I expect
to have surveillance images that I can send you. Meanwhile
I attach a scan of a kodachrome that was taken about fifty
years ago. The appearance of the house is unchanged, but 
the forest of trees that has grown up around it is worthy
of a fairy tale.

Please stay - or get well, and give my best to Ned.

Jochen