Dear Marion,

It was at about 4:30 p.m., seventy years ago today that the train
which we had boarded that Sunday morning in Washington, pulled into
the station in Marion, Virginia, where we were met by Fred Kirsch.
He was the "little brother" as we would come to call him, of the church
politician dignitary Paul Andrew Kirsch in New York who had sponsored
our relocation - or dislocation into the Virginia mountains. We packed
ourselves into the small grey Ford sedan, my father next to the
Mission Superintendent in the front seat, my mother, Margrit and I
in the back. There was little room for our luggage, much of it
would be picked up later by the mission factotum, Tom Blevins.
On a narrow two lane road, then Highway 58, we trundled across
the mountain into Sugar Grove, then across a second mountain range
into Troutdale, - which prides itself on being the loftiest incorporated
town in Virginia, then on the single lane dirt road to Fairwood, -
in those days the moonshine liquor capital of Southwest Virginia.
There, waiting for us at a parishioner's house was the Reverend
John W. Ott who had conducted the church services at the Fairwood
chapel earlier that afternoon. I remember that it was very, very 
crowded with six people in that four passenger car. We must have
sat on each others' laps during the long half hour that it takes
to drive from Fairwood to Konnarock. We were lodged that night
in two of the vacant dormitory rooms at Konnarock Training School,
a very large, bark-shingled box that then stood, and today still
stands albeit at the threshold of total collapse, - at the
foot of White Top Mountain. It was a long way from Bach and Mozart,
from Schiller and Rilke, and in a way, I've spent my life trying
to find my way back.

Thank you for your letter. It would be awkward to try to deny
that much of the sense and/or nonsense that I have been trying
to articulate is falling through the cracks of understanding;
a circumstance that seems natural to me and not at all to be
lamented. Except for Klemens, I have encountered no one who
shares my interpretation of the Duino Elegies, certainly not
my mother, who notwithstanding her adulation of the writings
of the youthful Rilke, (Das Stundenbuch, das Buch der Bilder,
die Neuen Gedichte, Malte Laurids Brigge and the book about
Rodin), was unable to come to terms either with the Elegies
or with the Sonnets to Orpheus, not my father, nor my poor
sister, nor my wife. However, in my world, co-understanding
is not prerequisite to communication.

As to the reference of "die ersehnte" in the first elegy,
that must be the same as the reference of the question:
"Ist sie den Liebenden leichter?" two lines down,  which
seems more plausibly to refer to night itself rather than
to the person longed for. Yet I think it's valuable to
contemplate alternative interpretations. Goethe wrote:
"Dass ein Wort nicht einfach gelte, das sollte sich doch
von selbst verstehn." (West-Oestlicher Divan) Ambivalence
is the essence of poetry.

I very much agree with your description of knowledge
as experimentation. I have various other thoughts on this
subject which I may try to elaborate in subsequent letters.
Meanwhile, I attach my 1.8 megabyte essay which was 
written to speak for itself. Today I view the problems that
it tries to broach, quite differently. Meanwhile,
this afternoon I must come to terms with an application 
required to maintain my status as a Medicare provider.
Once that's behind me, I can write with more abandon.

Jochen