Dear Cyndy,

Thank you, as always, for your letter. As always, I'm sympathetic
with your wishes to have a house in Canaan, and very much cognizant
of all the obstacles in the way. Why not present the issues to your
three children and invite, not just their consent, but their active
participation in the construction project now, during your lifetime.
Their concurrence would, I should think, go a long way to satisfy
Ned's reservations concerning the project. If, on the other hand, 
they declined, explicitly or implicitly, to become actively involved,
it might be easier for you also to shelve the project for the time
being. As for myself, I consider any help that I might be able to
give you, perhaps a partial discharge, albeit vicarious, of my
obligations to Moll and Sally's family, an obligation now of 70
years' standing, the unpaid interest on which has compounded itself
annually for these many years. By the same token, the Canaan
landscape is of passionate concern also to me, a concern admittedly
dialectical to yours, but no less compelling, and as I previously
explained, I would find very meaningful the opportunity to participate
in the construction of an antithesis to the farmhouse in which I spent
the summer of 1939. Having said as much, the fact remains, that for
me, the determinative issue is always the bottom line. I would not
undertake and I would not advise you to undertake any project which is
not highly probable to turn out to be a very good investment. I would
be pleased to walk across your land with you any time that suited you;
having a plot of the land in hand, would help. If, when you visit
Cambridge, you have time and humor, I would be pleased also to
drive you to Acton (just outside Concord) to look at a model Deck
House. Meanwhile, I hope you will be able to be relaxed and meditative
about the project. I have experienced life as a sequence of obstacles,
of problems to be understood and to be resolved by understanding. Of
the real estate projects I have entertained over the past sixty years,
perhaps 90 percent have failed to come to fruition, - failures for
which I cherish a secret gratitude; I have no regrets.

In addition to writing letters and appending to my unending novel,
I've been reading snatches of various Greek texts, Herodotus'  History,
Book 1, Book 1 also of Plato's Laws, Hesiod's Works and Days, as well
as his Theogony. All this is possible, because I've discovered how to
download the Greek texts from the Tufts University Perseus website
and store them as "pdf" files in my machine. The translations, of course,
are also readily available. The Theogony I find fascinating as a mirror
not only of Greek theology, but also as a demonstration of the propensity
of language, of words, of names, to generate images and myths. Specifically,
I find enchanting the tale that there was a union between heaven (ouranos)
and earth (gaia) from which sprang time, (chronos), whereupon chronos
assaulted and dismembered his father ouranos. If heaven is space - and
what else do were perceive up there, - then the notion that time dismembers
space expresses the genial intuition of some unnamed and unsung prehistoric
Einstein who discovered relativity long before his namesake found a job
in the Swiss patent office.

And on that note, I'll stop and try to get back to my work. Please
stay well and give my best to Ned.

Jochen