Dear Marion,

About thirty minutes ago, I returned home from the rendevous
at the Logan Express Terminal in Braintree, to which I had
agreed to deliver Margrit, to be received by her friend Tania 
Nicolet and driven to Tania's home in New Bedford MA. This 
expedition was far more complicated than I had anticipated,
a) because the map I had downloaded from Google was so
deceptively simple that
b) I deemed it unnecessary to take along a street atlas, and
c) the Google map was, as the Nantucket lawyers characterize
my arguments, "just plain wrong," for failing to show the
correct exit from Interstate 93 to the Express Terminal.
As a result I went astray, - like Doehring in search of
the Norquay ski slopes, - and spent an hour driving around
Braintree and its crazy-quit South Shore Shopping Center.
Things became even more interesting when Margrit, who had
only a vague idea where we were going, demanded that I let
her obtain directions from passers-by. I acquiesced in
resigned passivity, letting her direct me to park in one
crowded parking lot after another, until Margrit gave up
and permitted me to find the Logan Express Terminal in my
own fashion.  It was an interesting experience, no acrimony,
no reproaches, no complaints. Very effective mutual psychotherapy.
Better, I thought to be lost in Braintree than in Detroit.

Tomorrow morning at 6 a.m., I'll set out for Nantucket.
Klemens won't come with me after all; he is too tired and
too distracted by his work. But I also enjoy going by myself.
I'm not sure the trip is necessary, since the surveillance
photos, for what they reveal, show the house to be intact;
but at the time that I decided to postpone hiring a plumber
until the last appeal had been exhausted, I promised myself
not to neglect or abandon the house, but to make a quasi-
ceremonial visit at least once every three months. I had
postponed my trip from November 1, when it was due, to
November 22, for Klemens' convenience. I expect to be back
at 10 p.m. and may be too tired to reply to any letter of
yours until the following day.

Again, I annotate your letter, to do justice to the variety
and richness of your ideas.

> I gather that in my sleepy state on Thursday night
> I managed to convey the exact opposite of what I intended. 
> You had been repeating often that I should NOT feel obliged
> in any way to read your writing,
> that you write it primarily for yourself,
> that it need not be read.

> I gleaned from your repetitions
> that you were worried that I might feel obliged to read
> the chapters and extracts that you point out to me or send my way.
> So I tried to reassure you that I would read only
> as far as my interest would carry me. 
> But I gather from your letter that what I wrote
> came across as a sort of rebellion,
> implying that you were pressuring me,
> and I was resisting the pressure. 

> But you haven't been pressuring me at all. 
> You've been vacuuming me; that must be the reverse of pressuring. 
> Don't be concerned about my succumbing to even imagined pressure
> from you to read stuff. 
> I'm too lazy to respond like that.

The foregoing being understood, I need to be free to address
some of the issues you raise by excerpts from what I've previously
written. If the German is obscure, just ask; even a quick telephone
call for translation or elucidation of one thing or another might
not be amiss.

> "The Dybbuk", a film made in Poland in 1937,
> is based on a play written by Sholom Ansky about 20 years earlier,
> based on Yiddish folk tales collected in Jewish communities in Poland,
> Ukraine and Russia.
> The film was quite amazing,
> a kind of fusion between a romantic tale and a ghost story,
> set in a Polish shtetl populated by mostly poor Jews
> plus the occasional successful "rich" man
> and dominated by a respected old rabbi
> who is surrounded by his admirers who strive to be learned
> within Jewish tradition. 
> The actors are Polish Jews speaking Yiddish. 
> The director, though he wanted to make this Jewish film
> despite the rising anti-semitism at the time,
> felt that he had to pretend that he, himself,
> did not know Yiddish, for the sake of his career.

> The story revolves around a rich man
> who is so focused on his wealth
> that he ignores his daughter's love for a young religious student and,
> after extensive haggling for a very large financial settlement,
> arranges to marry her off to the imbecilic son of a rich man
> from a neighboring town. 
> The young religious student, in desperation,
> turns to the Kabbala and invokes the devil
> for the power to retrieve his would-be bride,
> and gets killed in the attempt. 
> He then returns to earth as a Dybbuk and possesses his intended. 
> The rabbi gathers the congregation and performs an exorcism,
> bringing on the death of the would-be bride. 

> A New York Times reviewer pointed out
> that the acting style is very influenced by German Expressionism,
> which was clarifying for me since the acting seemed highly exaggerated,
> as in old theatre or silent movies. 

> The old, admired rabbi, descended from a long line of important rabbis,
> expressed doubts about his knowledge and understanding. 
> When his admirers tried to reassure him by pointing out
> that people came from all over to seek his advice and be guided by him,
> he replied that these were blind sheep
> seeking the protection of a blind shepherd! 

> When the rich father sees his daughter grief-stricken and fainting
> because he has promised her to a wealthy imbecile,
> the father, remorseful, seeks out the rabbi for insight and advice. 
> The rabbi takes him to a window, bids him look out and tell what he sees. 
> The man replies that he sees many of the townsfolk walking by outside. 
> Then the rabbi points him to a mirror and again asks him to tell what he sees.
> "Now I see only myself" replies the wealthy man. 
> "You see", says the rabbi, "both are sheets of glass,
> but one is coated with silver. 
> When a man looks at that one, he sees only himself." 

Thank you for the detailed account of all that I am missing. It's
not just my unwillingness to spend the time. I must have told you
how, when Grimm's Maerchen were read to us in Hilde Oelmann's
Kindergarten in Braunschweig, I would reflexly develop a "headache"
and ask for permission to leave the room, to walk on the gravel
paths between the flower beds. I consider myself still too
impressionable to watch films like "The Dybbuk", but I'm grateful
to you for reminding me that there is a world outside the narrow
confines of my delicate imagination.

> How terrific that you had a chance to discuss reality and film
> with Frederick Wiseman!  How did you meet him? 
> Did you often watch documentaries?  About what? 
> The earnest, honest, thoughtful openness that Wiseman
> brings to his filmmaking leads me to conclude that he is a felicitous,
> fair-minded, relatively accurate conveyor of "reality"
> within the framework (limitations) imposed by our Biology and culture. 
> So I wouldn't choose "illusion"
> as the best way to describe the fragment of life
> represented in a Wiseman documentary.
> Please tell me more about this.

One of the consequences of my practicing ophthalmology in
the vicinity of Harvard Square was that in the course of
thirty-three years, I had as patients many prominent individuals, -
Harvard and MIT faculty members, and as many Nobel Prize winners
as I can count on the fingers of one hand, - but I would consider
it in very bad taste if not indeed "unprofessional", if I 
described my encounters with them or even mentioned their
names in the context of asserting, in one way or another,
my own personality.  Suffice it to say that I came to know these
celebrities, as all my other patients, quite well, - and
considered myself uniquely fortunate to learn to understand
them in the context of their achievements and their fame.
I believe that such professional encounters helped me to
a more secure orientation in the world of law, of art, science
and of literature, to which I remained, after all, a disappointed
outsider.

It's not the fragment of life represented in the documentary that
I consider an illusion. I consider illusory my belief that absent
such documentation as Wiseman provided, I have, or can have knowledge
of the reality of which Wiseman provided me with a glimpse.

> It looks as though, despite my vaunted psychoanalytic astuteness,
> my little Doehring ploy didn't fool you for a minute.

I have vivid memories of being introduced to psychoanalysis
when I was a second and third year medical student. The topic
was obviously of great interest to me, and as can be expected,
my presumption to be capable of a critical analysis of the
analysis - and the analyst - provoked the usual aggressive
rejoinder that I was employing my intellect to repress and to
deny "the truth." I've long since recognized "psychoanalysis"
as a rather superficial presumptuous and self-validating  
intrusion into privacy and subjectivity. Its teachings seem
to me so transparently contrived as not to be worth further
consideration. But maybe I'm missing something.

> I think you might underestimate the damage
> that male hegemony has done to women over the centuries
> and in different societies. 
> To open up life's possibilities to women,
> Feminism is invaluable. 
> Of course women are not superior to men,
> should not be privileged over men,
> but women should have full human rights,
> be given the opportunities accorded other human beings in a society. 
> Clearly women are not accorded full human rights
> in many societies today--far from it. 
> And during our lifetimes,
> there has been major improvement in womens' opportunities in the West. 
> Feminism had a good deal to do with that I think.

I'm as always very much respectful or your beliefs, be they religious
or political. I ask myself, I ask you, is Feminism a belief, is it an
ideology, is it both, is it neither, or does it matter? Feminism relies
on representations of history. What comes to my mind are the characters
in the literature with which I have lived for the past seventy or so
years: Sophocles' Antigone, Shakespeare's Hermione, Portia, Cordelia,
Miranda, Ophelia, Goethe's Iphigenie, Klaerchen, Gretchen, Schiller's
Johanna, Maria Stuart, Gertrud Stauffacher, Lessing's Minna .... I know
they don't count because they weren't rich or powerful, but they were 
real and good and honest human beings, which is more than one can say
that epitome of feminist achievement Sarah Palin. The feminists, so
far as I can understand, know nothing about history, nothing about
literature, nothing about religion, nothing about music, and nothing
about life.  By way of familiarizing myself with the issue, I googled
"female goddesses", and obtained so many names that it seemed more
practical to send you the URL and invite you to look for yourself:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=female+goddesses&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10
http://www.beliefnet.com/Holistic-Living/2003/10/A-Goddess-For-Every-Need.aspx
In their zeal to propagandize, the feminists undercut their own argument:
You can't have it both ways.  You can't claim that women have always been
repressed and then prove their worth with a catalogue of goddesses which
shows that they have in fact been worshipped.

> Of course women are not superior to men,
> should not be privileged over men,
> but women should have full human rights,
> be given the opportunities accorded other human beings in a society.
> Clearly women are not accorded full human rights
> in many societies today--far from it.
> And during our lifetimes,
> there has been major improvement in womens' opportunities in the West.
> Feminism had a good deal to do with that I think.

I have never claimed to be able to "estimate the damage that male hegemony
has done to women over the centuries and in different societies," and when
you charge me with underestimating that damage, you do me wrong. If I don't
estimate, how can I underestimate? Show me, tell me. I'm open to persuasion.

> I guess when you were in your teens and twenties
> you had a lot of things preoccupying you
> besides how women were treated in American society. 
> Nonetheless did it seem at all odd that women,
> though invited into the education system,
> were restricted in the kinds of careers they had access to? 
> Did that seem just a consequence of women's lesser abilities? 

I hesitate to try to tell you "how women were treated in American
society" when I was in my teens and twenties, because I don't know.
I do know, however, how _I_ was treated in American society when I
was in my teens and twenties: I was not admitted to the careers
that I aspired to; I did not "make" as much money as many, if
not most of my classmates and professional colleagues, my manuscripts
remained unpublished, my intellectual achievements went unrecognized,
but I have no complaints. What I achieved instead is open to all
human beings, men and women, and seems much more valuable to me
than the prestige and power that society has to offer.
The rest of you spend too much time looking into the glass lined
with silver.

> But listen, don't worry. 
> I'll still be a great admirer of yours,
> even if you prove to be a bit backward on this issue.    

Thank you, but please remember
that I'm a willing candidate for "re-education"
as they call it in China.

> Dear Jochen,  You wrote:

> Dorothea's Feminism is represented as an unsuccessful
> attempt to compensate for the weakness of her character. (I have
> a similar interpretation for my sister's commitment to political
> activism.)

> Political activism was necessary to get Obama elected. 
> More political activism will be needed to enable
> Obama to accomplish much of anything.

Two separate issues:
a) the hypothetical importance of political activism.
b) an individual's political activity as an expression
of a weakness of character.

It seems to me quite possible for a person to compensate
for some character flaw with very useful and beneficial
political activity. The hypothetical value of the political
activity will not alter the circumstance that it compensates
for weakness of character.

> Gandhi, Martin Luther King, various Abolitionists,
> Nelson Mandela, Union leaders who worked to end
> deplorable abuses of workers;
> these are a few examples of political activists. 
> Were they characterized by weakness of character?

That's a non-sequitur. Assuming that much, if not most
political activism is expression of strong character does
not obviate the circumstance that some political activism
may be the expression of weak character.

The meaning and value and consequence of political
activism is an important and difficult subject, which
I will leave for another letter. Suffice it to say that
a) I like Barack Obama very much.
b) I disagree with _all_ of his policies that
have come to my attention.
Should I be politically active on behalf of policies
which I believe to be harmful merely because the
alternatives might or would be worse? In 1933 millions
of Germans supported Adolf Hitler
"nur um schlimmeres zu verhueten."
(only to prevent something worse, - i.e. Communism)

All of the foregoing, which I hope does not anger or disconcert
you, is largely beside the point. I've been ruminating about
what will happen during the weekend in Katenus's Mansion on
Main Street. It's Saturday evening, and Katenus, Elly, Mengs
and Joachim are discussing Das siebte Kapitel in its various
dimensions. I've sketched that discussion, but not completed it.
At its conclusion Mengs, and particularly Joachim express the
desire to read the entire book. They are provided with copies,
start to read, but, of course can't get through very many
pages before they fall asleep.

I had been at a loss, what Zeitverteib (distraction) I should
provide for them all on Sunday. It's going to be a dreary, rainy
day, oppressive and ominous, the evening before Katenus' (mock)
trial. Your letter provided the inspiration. A discussion of
Feminism will be most appropriate entertainment. And not just
a discussion, -it turns out that a pair of bright orange scissors
has been lost on the Schaksett beach, and its owner has gone
to the police station to find out who were the off-islanders
who were walking on the beach who must have absconded with
the scissors. So there will be visitors knocking on the door
of the Katenus Mansion, maybe police officers, maybe one or
more of the wild girls looking for their scissors, maybe
all of them. I probably won't know until I get there tomorrow.
What about you, would you like to be invited?

Jochen