Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter with its review of "A Serious Man".
I'm much aware of my spiritual parochialism, and it's good of
you to give me a glimpse into what goes on in the rest of the
world.  The truth is, I'm as impressionable as a small child;
even the sterilized banalities of NPR are sufficient to frighten
me.  I'm too timid to confront the emotional turmoil on the
movie screen, - or for that matter, on television, and much
as I regret it, I'm afraid I'm too old to grow up.

Thank you also for your criticism of my letter to Ashley Brown
Ahearn. I mailed it on Saturday, but I wish you had told me
specifically what you felt was too aggressive and/or bombastic.
I would like to think that the forcefulness of my writing is
in my ideas, not in the way I express them, - but maybe I'm
wrong.

Tomorrow morning I'll go to the Newton Library which gives me
access to a database of legal documents, quite comprehensive,
of which I can get printouts for 10 cents a page, - as opposed
to subscribing to the service myself, which would cost $45 for
one day or $85 for one week. Meanwhile, I have spent the weekend
writing. My reply brief is essentially complete, - except for
the case references which I consider window dressing. For any
one at all serious, it's the philology of the absurd. In the
first place, because the cases reported are selected by the
judges themselves, and the abstracts are concocted to justify
their decisions, with but a faint relationship to reality (and
to truth.) The citations are similarly dishonest, - akin to
intellectual "sound bites," - one latches on to a catchy phrase
and twists its meaning to ones own purposes.

I'm attaching what I concocted this weekend. My Narcissus propensity
is in full bloom, and I derive much satisfaction from rereading
and rereading and rereading what I've written, and on each reading
it becomes more persuasive to me. That's not going to be satisfactory
in the long run. My task now is to practice for equanimity in
defeat the way an athlete practices for a competition. My goal is a
state of non-chalance that makes me indifferent to winning or losing, -
the Stoic ataraxia  - a mood that lets me address the next task without
giving the previous one another thought.

Stay well, and be as contented as circumstances permit.

Jochen