Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. I'm keeping my fingers crossed
for Sam and Victoria. Old cynic that I am, I would be 
surprised if anyone pays attention to Federal regulatioms.
The arrogance and nonchalance with which the government ignores
the laws and regulations with which it tyrannizes us is
not to be underestimated. I suspect that if Victoria and Sam
prevail, and I hope very much they do, it'll be because
the dice of inscrutable political tensions within the school
have rolled in their favor. Please keep me informed.

Only forty-eight hours from now, I will be turning the car around
for the 5/8 mile drive down the gravelled road to the abandoned
store and abandoned post office which is all that remains of
Konnarock, a booming company town a century ago, a blooming emblem
of Lutheran missionary zeal and love-your-neighbor charity half
a century ago, and currently a wannabe resort community that can't
quite get started.

For me, departing from Konnarock is an exercise in spiritual
archeology if ever there was one. After becoming marooned here on
October 15, 1939, the first escape was the short 120 mile drive
to Roanoke the following year, when I was ten years old, and my
sister twelve, where the sight of real electric street cars rumbling
down the middle of the street on their shiny rails, just like in
Braunschweig, was proof that the disappearance of the civilized
world was only temporary. The distinction between Zivilisation und
Kultur had not yet been made to dawn on me.  That first departure
was a going home, a vestigial return; and in the sixty-nine years
that have intervened, the trip out of Konnarock, usually as it will
be tomorrow, across Iron Mountain via Chilhowie, but in other years,
before that road was so greatly improved, up the valley in the shadow
of Mount Rogers across the gap, through the broad pastures of
Fairwood via Troutdale, that journey, in memory at least, has
alternated between leaving home and going home, depending on the
season of the soul in which it occurred. Sometimes the sorrow of
leaving my parents was unalloyed, sometimes it was mixed with the
relief of escaping family tensions, sometimes it was overshadowed
by the anticipation of an impending reunion with Margaret, and in
later years it was always tinged with the guilt of the survivor,
and with the knowledge that inevitably one of the fairwells from
my parents would be the last. When day after tomorrow we drive down
the hill, both Margaret and I will be poignantly aware, that we may
never return.

The preceding paragraph may have its explanation in the fact that
I write it two days after turning 79 years of age. I spent much of
the weekend reading in the Gutenberg Edition Internet translation,
- which I can't trust because I don't understand it completely,
and in my arrogance, I wonder whether the translator did, -
some pages of the Ethics and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of
Spinoza who died aged only 44. When, sometime in my adolescence,
Spinoza supplanted Thomas Edison as my role model I understood that
I had grown up. Reading him for my birthday celebration, I was pleased
that I was still capable of learning. The epistemologic significance of 
"more geometrico" the geometric method which Spinoza deployed, had
never occurred to me. This morning I interpret it as a linguistic
device with which Spinoza sought to make objective, his fantastic
intuitive apperception of deity as the pantheistic substance that
permeates the cosmos, - a dream, or some would say a nightmare, -
that led to his excommunication. Arguably that geometric method served
an analogous function for its inventor Euclid, who used it to make
explicit the admittedly far more accessible intuitions of spatial
mathematics.

It's now 12 minutes before 9, and our roofers still haven't showed up.
They've left two trucks on the lawn, and a garage full of expensive
equipment, a compressor and a molding machine for flashing, so I don't
need to worry that they might abscond. And, - as if my prose had
conjured them up, - here they come.

Soon I too will have to start packing. Margaret has already begun,
and you may not hear from me again until, God willing, we're back in
Belmont.

Stay well and give my best to Ned, and my best wishes to Victoria.

Jochen