Dear Cyndy,

The trip was altogether uneventful. If it seemed a bit
more strenuous, old age probably accounts for the difference.
At about 7:20 p.m.,
we arrived at the supermarket in Chilhowie, - here it's
called "Food City" -, where we replenished our food supplies.
The sun was setting as we drove across Iron Mountain.
We reached the house at about 8 p.m. 
and found everything in good order. 
The lawn, which on recent surveillance images
I thought looked a bit scruffy had been freshly mowed.
Since the driveway is at the basement level behind the house,
there were many bags and groceries to be carried upstairs.
I attached to the computer the scanner and the printer
that I had brought along. All the equipment seemed
to be functioning as it should. And there, on the mailbox screen
appeared your welcoming letter. Thank you. Tomorrow morning,
I'll decide whether to resume production of the voluminous legal
filings which I may never need, or whether to spend time editing
my essays, - such as they are, and spinning out my novel for which,
as I've frequently noted, there is no end in sight.

Wednesday, the first day of the trip, we listened first to Schubert's
song cycle, Die Winterreise, which to my mind, is never out of season;
then to Don Giovanni whose refusal to repent strikes me as I get older,
to be the ultimate act of integrity for which, if I were the judge,
all his sins would be forgiven. On Thursday, which has by now become
yesterday, we listened to Cosi fan Tutte.  I was surprised that I had
forgotten virtually all of the Italian libretto which I thought I had
learned three years ago. My memory is not what I would like it to be.

The trip south, took us, as always, just a few miles past Heyshott
and the Flanders Farm. In the car I had packed your notes about your 
childhood there, so as to be able to read them again in the place where
I spent much of my childhood. In my mind there tumbled round and round,
as in an ineffective clothes dryer, the memories of that summer
with the Flanders, the memories also of the many journeys
back and forth, to and from Virginia. 

I thought about your comments about memory. There is an interesting difference
between our thoughts in this regard. For you, if I understand correctly,
the transient, fleeting, private recapitulation of an event, a scene,
or a feeling tends to merge and ultimately to fuse with the collectively
maintained history of the past from which the isolated subjective recollection
ultimately derives its meaning. This, it seems to me, is the quintessential
interpretation of memory for the historian.

The occupation - and preoccupation - that has absorbed much of
your life is the synthesis of history, the composition for the benefit
of your students - and yourself - of narratives, stories, histories
that are the ultimate apotheoses of memory, in which the remembrances
of each of us are fused into a common reality: - as in your essay about
The War.

My concern has been the opposite: to analyse, to dissolve the
communal myths into the individual fantasies of which they are constituted,
among them my own, - and to try to learn to accept the reality that it is
only in my own fleeting recollections
that the past is ultimately accessible to me.

My own evaluation of memory and history are rooted in an observation
of Rilke's which I may have cited to you before:

"Das was geschieht hat einen solchen Vorsprung
vor unserm Meinen, dass wir's nie einholen,
und nie erfahren wie es wirklich aussah."

"That which occurs has such advance over our surmises,
that we will never catch up with it,
and never know what it really looked like."

An unpoetic, albeit literal translation. The metaphor is
of a race, in which what happens is always so far ahead
of the observer who chases after it makes a vain effort
to discover its true appearance. Such was Rilke's
interpretation of his inability to understand the motives
and to assimilate the experience of a friend's suicide.

An even more compelling interpretation of the limits
of historical knowledge was articulated by Lessing at
the end of the eighteenth century, when he asked how it
was possible to base ones concern about ones "eternal
happiness" with the vagaries and uncertainties of an
historical account.

The notion that the vicissitudes of individual existence
should somehow be sublimated into a state of "everlasting
happiness," i.e. salvation of the soul, has, to put it midly,
become so unfashionable as to be almost incomprehensible
to the sophisticated contemporary reader. What is to be
gleaned from this legacy of religious passion, is not a 
an instruction manual or a road map of the path to paradise
or to heaven, - but rather an ultimate and uncompromising
concern for the value and validity of ones own existence;
a concern in the absence of which that existence becomes
an exercise in frivolity.

It is as an expression of your seriousness about your
own existence that I interpret your notes about The Farm.
I'll leave it at that for now, and ask you to give my
regards to Ned.

Jochen