Dear Marion,

Thank you very much for your letter, dated December 14,
which I found in the mailbox this morning. I am grateful 
to you for your candor and especially for your sympathy
with Margrit. If I understand your letter correctly,
there is no disagreement between us.

It's been colder in Belmont than in St. Paul. This morning
the temperature was 8 degrees F. Our house is comfortably
warm. I sit happily at my computer in front of the window,
gazing, when words or ideas fail me, at the cloudless blue
sky, and the swaying branches of the tall maple trees, "bare
ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang," but where
now the squirrels are scurrying back and forth on their
apparently mindless missions. The pallid winter sun is setting
behind the rooftops of the houses on the south-west side of
School Street. Before long it will be dark, and another
cold night will have begun.

My immediate project is chapter 39 of die Freunde, on which
I have been making some slight progress. To write without
expectation of being understood affords relief from the
anxieties that attend ordinary discourse, burdened as it
is with the obligation of proving itself intelligible.

Jochen