Dear Marion,

Your letters are deserving of enthusiastic accolades.
I am much impressed and much appreciative of the quality
of your perceptions and of your thoughts. As you are aware,
I am remiss in that I cloister myself within the confines
of my own experiences and spend my life repeating my thoughts
and ruminating on my ideas. If I live long enough, some day
I will surely try to emulate you, and vicariously become a
mounted shepherd for thousands of sheep that spend their
summers in the Western mountains, or meditate on what it
would mean to earn a little extra cash by lending my name
to a sham marriages that might serve as an instrument to
make a real marriage possible, in glorious contempt for
society and its institutions, and especially for the
officials, those spiritual cripples whose life is the law.

I'm appreciative also of your suggestion that as you age
you learn to accept the complexities of life, - which is 
as much as to say that the superseded hypotheses of 
simplicity were unrealistic and misleading. I can't deny
that there is an element of disappointment in coming to
terms with the failure of the ideal. However far more
important is the recognition that idealization is an
essential und fundamental human trait which none of us
is able to escape, and that understanding the limits
of the ideal, i.e. Entidealisierung, is the ultimate
task of thought.

One of the questions that occurred to me on the long
drive from Belmont to Konnarock, is whether there is
some relationship between the reflective, meditative
expression of the human face which more than any other
quality of his work is responsible for Rembrandt's
glorious fame, and the circumstance that he seems to
have had a compulsive need to look into the mirror,
to contemplate his own appearance as is suggested by
the fifty or so self-portraits he made, - as if he
were looking for traces of his own feelings, of his
own inwardness, to use that existentialists' term.
Curiously then, the depiction of thought and feeling,
which is some times conspicuously absent from his
self-portraiture, seems to be projected to his subjects.
Undeniably Rembrandt could not have illuminated
the faces of others with feelings that he had not
himself experienced. Perhaps, when Rembrandt gazed
into the mirror to paint a picture of himself, he was
harvesting that spirituality which was his ultimate
gift to the world.

Time's up. If I'm to function tomorrow, I must to bed,
sooner rather than later. So good night. Sleep well
yourself.

Jochen