Dear Georgette,

Thank you for your letter. If I answer it promptly, I do
so not because of any urgency to what I have to write,
but because my memory is fleeting, and if I let days go
by before I respond, I will have forgotten, and may even
be unable to reconstruct the context.

Thank you for offering to mail me your novel. Once I have
read it, I will write to you, and of course return the
typescript.  Thank you also for telling me about your
parents. As you can perhaps infer from my letters, I am
in awe of the difficulties that you have survived, and
my chief concern is that I should not inadvertently in
some way or other make your life even more difficult with
my questions and comments.

When I contemplate the world around me, I am impressed by
the pervasive dissatisfaction that seems to emanate from
the relationships between human beings as individuals no
less than from the relationship of the individual to the
group. The implicit idealizations that seduce us to the
expectation of idyllic friendships, idyllic marriages,
idyllic careers, it seems to me, make our lives unnecessarily
more difficult.  Much better, I think, to accept that life
is awkward and painful, and derive satisfaction of surviving
even if we cannot flourish. I hope the resignation implicit
in my comments will not perturb you.

The pictures of Margrit which Klemens posted on the Web,
led a teacher in the Nibelungen Realschule in Braunschweig
to write to us about the history of my family. If you're
interested, you may look at
home.earthlink.net/~jochenmeyer/aw/aw_index.html
But please feel no obligation to do so.

Jochen