Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. I admire its brevity and succinctness,
embarrassed as I am by my own addiction to words.

We also have frequent power outages in Konnarock, often, but not
always associated with thunderstorms. Usually power returns after
only a few minutes.  Several years ago, however, when the house
was unoccupied, there was a power failure which lasted several days
and was unrecognized because it affected only us. As a result
the meat stored in the chest freezer in the basement spoiled,
impregnating the insulation with odors that we have never been able
entirely to eradicate. The video-surveillance system which I have
just installed will, of course inform me, - by failing to function, -
if the electricity goes off, provided I adhere to a schedule of
daily monitoring. If we were here for protracted periods of time,
I would probably install a portable generator to provide intermittent
power to the pump in the well and to the microwave oven as well as
a set of deep cycle batteries to supply the computer and the lights.
That's what I did on Nantucket before we had electricity from the grid.
Generators, batteries, inverters are like toys for me.
I've enjoyed playing with electricity since I was a child.

You ask which of Thomas Mann's novels I like best. Tonio Kroeger, a
quasi-autobiographical short story, and Felix Krull, a long fragment
of a novel that seduced its author to such extravagances of the
imagination that he was unable to finish it, and turned instead to
the composition of the Magic Mountain. Tonio Kroeger is the portrait
of the artist as a boy and as a young man which depicts the social
and emotional isolation of a child condemned to be different from
his peers, - a boy who saw in his future "a thousand different pathways"
all the while knowing that each of them was an impossibility, and
who, having become a respected artist returns to visit the home
of his childhood only to be interrogated by the police who mistake
him for a notorious criminal. "Felix Krull" is the ultimate
Teutonic "Bildungsroman", - novel of character development, of
which Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" was the prototype, but unlike
Hans Castorp whose seven years in the sanatorium ostensibly make
of him a person of depth and maturity, Krull's journey is into a
life of deception and petty thievery, the monumental satire, as I
read it, of the exigencies of society which corrupt us all.

Margaret and I have decided to leave here on July 1, staying overnight
as we usually do in Grantville, near Harrisburg PA, and arriving in
Belmont the following day, before the holiday surge in traffic.
I have a few patients scheduled in the following week, and I will be
impatient to get started on the paper work for my appeal. Once that
is done, I hope, perhaps unrealistically, that we can come back here
at the end of the summer. Tomorrow or the next day, I'll start assessing
the function of the oil burner to try to ascertain whether it might be
possible for us to stay even after the weather turns cold.

I keep thinking about your plantar fasciitis; and if telepathy is
for real, you should be getting better. Please give my best to Ned.
Jochen