Dear Marion,

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin
of little minds, and if only to demonstrate the dimensions of mine, 
I disdain being consistent by holding on to this e-mail until yours
has arrived.

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 farewells 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 Project 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 some pages 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.

If Spinoza expresses his intuition - Erleben - of the pantheistic
deity-substance in terms of a geometric method, this transposition
does not, at least for me, obviate the obscurity, but changes a
poetic image into a verbal, logical construct.  If the intuition -
das Erleben - of infinite, omnipresent deity is ineffable, unsagbar,
beyond language, then coercing it into a geometric style, for me at
least, does not make it less unintelligible, but transforms it into
a potential emperor's new clothes scenario, where eminent professors
pontificate declaring they know exactly what he meant. As for myself,
I freely admit that what Spinoza might have wanted to express by
attribute and mode, terms which he adduced to give substance to
substance, is not at all apparent to me. If I were enrolled in a
college course and had to prepare for an examination, I would jot
down, and memorize all his references to these terms, until, in
the end they acquired by a kind of semantic inbreeding, intuitive
significance of their own and I might then with shallow honesty
declare that I thought I knew what I was parroting and what
Spinoza was talking about. But real understanding, if it were
ever to come, would be months or years in the future.

As I read the Tractatus which is written in plain, expository style,
I began to wonder, whether when I explained his identification of
God with Substance, I had inadvertently and unconsciously plagiarized
Spinoza, who wrote:

"Seeing then that our mind subjectively contains in itself and partakes
of the nature of God, and solely from this cause is enabled to form notions
explaining natural phenomena and inculcating morality, it follows that we
may rightly assert the nature of the human mind (in so far as it is thus
conceived) to be a primary cause of Divine revelation. All that we
clearly and distinctly understand is dictated to us, as I have just pointed
out, by the idea and nature of God; not indeed through words, but in a way
far more excellent and agreeing perfectly with the nature of the mind, as all
who have enjoyed intellectual certainty will doubtless attest.  Here, however,
my chief purpose is to speak of matters having reference to Scripture, so
these few words on the light of reason will suffice." (Tractatus)

And not only that, in my jolly confession of faith in a unitary Christianity-
Judaism, or Judaism-Christianity, I seem also, inadvertently to have
paraphrased Spinoza:

"(45) This makes it indisputable that the other prophets did not hear a
real voice, and we gather as much from Deut. xxiv:10: "And there arose not
a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses whom the Lord knew face to face,"
which must mean that the Lord spoke with none other; for not even Moses saw
the Lord's face. (46) These are the only media of communication between
God and man which I find mentioned in Scripture, and therefore the only ones
which may be supposed or invented. (47) We may be able quite to comprehend
that God can communicate immediately with man, for without the intervention
of bodily means He communicates to our minds His essence; still, a man who
can by pure intuition comprehend ideas which are neither contained in nor
deducible from the foundations of our natural knowledge, must necessarily
possess a mind far superior to those of his fellow men, nor do I believe
that any have been so endowed save Christ. (48) To Him the ordinances of God
leading men to salvation were revealed directly without words or visions, so
that God manifested Himself to the Apostles through the mind of Christ as He
formerly did to Moses through the supernatural voice. (49) In this sense the
voice of Christ, like the voice which Moses heard, may be called the voice
of God, and it may be said that the wisdom of God (,i.e. wisdom more than
human) took upon itself in Christ human nature, and that Christ was the way
of salvation. (50) I must at this juncture declare that those doctrines
which certain churches put forward concerning Christ, I neither affirm nor
deny, for I freely confess that I do not understand them. (51) What I have
just stated I gather from Scripture, where I never read that God appeared to
Christ, or spoke to Christ, but that God was revealed to the Apostles
through Christ; that Christ was the Way of Life, and that the old law was
given through an angel, and not immediately by God; whence it follows that
if Moses spoke with God face to face as a man speaks with his friend (i.e.
by means of their two bodies) Christ communed with God mind to mind.

(52) Thus we may conclude that no one except Christ received the revelations
of God without the aid of imagination, whether in words or vision. (53)
Therefore the power of prophecy implies not a peculiarly perfect mind, but a
peculiarly vivid imagination, as I will show more clearly in the next
chapter. (54) We will now inquire what is meant in the Bible by the
Spirit of God breathed into the prophets, or by the prophets speaking with
the Spirit of God; to that end we must determine the exact signification of
the Hebrew word roo'-akh, commonly translated spirit." (Tractatus)

That's what Spinoza wrote and believed; it's not what I write or believe.
Nothing is further from my intention than to proselytize, to convert you,
to persuade you to any conviction, or to induce you to become a Spinoza
disciple. I merely want to assert that when with my mental eraser I rub out
as spiritual graffiti the line between Judaism and true - as distinct from
ecclesiastical - Christianity, I am not a religious nut, but may reasonably
claim to be in the most respectable company of that certified card-carrying
Jewish intellectual, Baruch Spinoza.

Jochen