Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter, and for your tolerance of my
epistolary irresponsibility. I am forever experimenting
with ideas, which largely on account of my poor memory,
now in its eightieth year, I must put in writing. I should
however, have more sense than, foregoing all all self-censorship,
to disseminate them over the Internet.

I am embarrassed to have made comments about Darwin's theories
on the basis of such very limited knowledge. Once I have
filed with the court all the required documents, I will
take some time to learn more about Darwin's and about more
modern evolution theories; although I know it to be presumptuous
to assume that I can absorb in a few days a subject to which
others devote an entire lifetime.

My only current thought is that "survival of the fittest" is
a bit of a tautology, that where there is a struggle for
survival, obviously whoever survives will have been the fittest,
and whoever is fittest will survive. My very tentative surmise
is that what has been so offensive to Darwin's critics all along
is the notion of man's descent from the apes; and that is an
hypothesis that I have no problem contemplating with equanimity.
It's often seemed to me that the original sin was not eating
forbidden fruit, but flattering oneself with the assumption that
man was somehow qualitatively different from and superior to the
other animals, when the converse is so obviously true.

I looked up the seminal Anaximander quotation in Wikipedia, then
copied what Hermann Diels thought it meant, and finally experimented
with a translation of my own.

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.
(Wikipedia)                 

Anfang und Ursprung der seienden Dinge ist das Apeiron
(das grenzenlos-Unbestimmbare)
Woraus aber das Werden ist den seienden Dingen,
in das hinein geschieht auch ihr Vergehen nach der Schuldigkeit;
denn sie zahlen einander gerechte Strafe und Busse 
fuer ihre Ungerechtigkeit
nach der Zeit Anordnung.
(Hermann Diels)

The beginning and origin of what exists is the apeiron,
whence is the genesis of things that exist,
and into which they perish according to their debt,
for they pay to one another justice and recompense
for their injustice
according to the ordinance of time.

Time, as I interpret Anaximander, is an expanse which
is bounded at its origin and at its end by the indefinite
and indeterminate apeiron. The apeiron as the boundary of
time creates an expanse over which time does not move,
but is constant, a timeless present, which I find intuitively
persuasive. I am also captivated by the coincidence of
existence and debt. Our liability arises not from what
we do or fail to do, but from the mere fact of existence,
a debt that is paid in full, and painlessly, as we merge
once more with the apeiron. I think its a magnificent
subjective cosmology.

My subjective experience (Erleben) of time is largely the
result of musings about memory, of whose limitation I am
much aware, quite specifically in our attempts to reconstruct
the lives of our parents sixty and seventy years ago. As
I've said frequently, I don't trust my memory, and I don't
trust the tapestries of the past that it presents to me.
The documents, the letters that I retrieve from the filing
cabinet, don't help. As literary documents, they have their
own present in the effect they have on me, while making the
past of which they are relics seem even less accessible,
less immediate than before. 

Accordingly I consider history to be a form of literature,
albeit highly stylized, which is similarly incapable of
resurrecting the past, but must content itself with a 
make-believe facsimile, persuasive only to the child who
lives in an unbroken present that is not fractured into
past present and future. As for Darwin, I have no problem
with contemporary observations which may or may not be
reproduceable.  What disconcerts me is the invitation into
a theatre of the past to contemplate imaginary scenes which
are not only inaccessible from the present in which I live,
but which could never have been observed by any human being, -
because these scenes are imagined for eras when human beings
were not yet living on earth. That overtaxes my imagination and
my intuition. But as I wrote above, I will try to learn more
about evolution theories, and promise, at a later date to
recant all my mistakes as I am able to identify them.

Please don't spend time with the intricate German of
my novel. I will summarize and translate the relevant
portions. Should have done that long ago.

And now to sleep. Depending on my progress with the law,
maybe more tomorrow, and maybe not.

Jochen