Dear Cyndy,

Some afterthoughts on my last letter. - Staircase wit as usual.
The Goethe poem "Die Sonette" is, in the mathematician's words,
recursive poetry. It's a sonnet about sonnets, and the stylistic
constraints of that most demanding canon of versification are
treated by Goethe as symbolic of the constraints that govern life.
Goethe was a master of making a virtue of necessity. That's how
he was one of the most conservative of German writers; he was unable
to confront the terrors of existence, he was unable to write a
tragedy. Even with Faust, where he made the earnest pretense to be
existentially serious, he labelled its first divisions:
Der Tragoedie erster Theil (The first part of the tragedy),
Goethe ends up writing comedy, - "Lustspiel" - play of pleasure.
Faust is the ultimate feel-good drama both for its protagonists and
for the audience. From this perspective, it becomes obvious why Goethe
failed to recognize how much more deeply the writings of his contemporaries,
Hoelderlin and Kleist, penetrated into the secrets of existence.
Perhaps Goethe's obtuseness to Hoelderlin and Kleist was a matter
of self-protection. An encounter with them, might have paralyzed
him or led him, like Faust when confronted by the Daemon he had
unwisely conjured up, to the precipice of despair.

The other topic on which I had further thoughts was my satire,
the irony with which I dismiss the pretensions of the crowd of
lawyers, - or more accurately - of judges and law school professors
to intellectual sublimity. Satire and irony are the masks behind
which I hide my despair for the reality with which, ultimately,
I cannot cope, the reality that the sententious pieties and the
pretended intellectual rigor are but props on the stage where
the judges strut and preen, a stage, as you so astutely imply,
that is all that shields us from emptiness and chaos.
Wisely or otherwise, I try to survive by clambering onto their stage,
just another mountebank, foolishly assuming that I have a chance
at besting them at their own game.

I'm charmed by your account of Ned's ambivalence to visitors. That's
just how I feel. From time to time, Margaret reminds me that when we
first encountered each other, my immediate goal in life was to become
the lonely tenant of a Forest Service Look-out Tower, and spend my days 
contemplating the landscape. Please give my regards to Ned.

Jochen