Dear Marion,

Thank you for your account of the Folk Music Concert.
As someone whose musical experience suffered cultural
arrest with Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn,
I praise and admire the catholicicity of your tastes,
mildly envious that I cannot share them.  However,
by now my spirit has become sufficiently sclerotic
so as to preclude all possibility of repentance.  The
best I can do at this stage of my life is to try to
understand.  Perhaps the narrowness of my devotion to
specific instances of art is a function of its intensity. 
Far from being a virtue, that intensity may be a fault.
Hofmannsthal wrote:

Leicht muss man sein,
mit leichtem Herz und leichten Händen halten und nehmen,
halten und lassen . .
Die nicht so sind, die straft das Leben,
und Gott erbarmt sich ihrer nicht.
_                            Rosenkavalier I,1

It's not criticism, if anything it's in a spirit of tempered
admiration that I note a similarity in your esthetic and political
judgments, both of which exhibit levels of tolerance that are
beyond me. I reiterate my determination to try to replace judgment
with understanding. However the tapestry of your account of the
political world and your own relationship to it is so colorful and
so compelling that I don't know where to begin to try to do justice
to it.

To what extent the world is good, to what extent it
is bad, who or what is responsible for the world's
inadequacies, and how they should be remedied, and by whom,
these are obviously very ancient topics, historically
impervious to solution. I don't think that either you or 
I have an answer. I am not, as you know, an evangelist for
science, and I don't believe that science in any of its
branches has revealed to me "the truth". The most important
concept I have gleaned from the scientific method is that
truth is independent of value, that truth is neither "good"
nor "bad", but that the sole virtue of truth is being true.
In a truly "scientific" perspective therefore, the history
and the evolution of social institutions, traditionally
so gratifying and so threatening to us, appear very different
from what we have been taught to believe.
 
More on this topic later, if and when I can rise to the occasion.
Jochen