Dear Marion,

Nine a.m. has come and passed, but the local would-be 
contractor with the back-hoe, who promised to be here at
8 a.m. has not shown up. His project: to dig from the well
to the house a 30 inches deep trench to receive the flexible
water pipe and the No 12-2 electrical cable presently
streched across the lawn to provide us with a temporary
water supply. The original pipe of thin, brittle plastic,
was installed when the well was constructed, perhaps fifty
years ago. It was apparently damaged last summer by a heavy
state highway truck, overloaded with calcium chloride
solution. The truck had lost its way and backed onto our
property, over the buried water line.  Ever since, water
has periodically trickled to the surface of the driveway.
Initially I had toyed with the wishful thought of a spring,
such as, for example now regularly percolates through floor
of this basement after a heavy rain.  However, when last
Tuesday, as we arrived from Belmont, I saw the road to be dry,
and ten minutes after having thrown the switch to the
submersible pump, there was water seeping out of the ground
more actively than ever, I had to confront that I was faced
with a major repair, which is now complete, except for
lowering the pipe and its accompanying electrical cable,
into the trench, once it has been dug.

Thank you for your report about "Agrarian Utopia", which like
much else that you write, fulfills the need of broadening my
perspective. Thank you also for your thoughtful comments about
Rembrandt and his self-imagery. My own understanding is that
human actions, and the doings of the artist in particular,
flow all of them from the unconscious; and that ones verbal
accounts and descriptions constitute a secondary, derivative 
reality, remote from the original. I am able to "explain"
nothing at all. The best I can do is to observe and to
collate. The composite image that ensues is the only reality
that is accessible to me.

This afternoon, Margaret and I drove again to the cemetery
at the foot of White Top Mountain, where we buried my parents'
ashes and where we propose to do the same with Margrit's.
To facilitate the engraving of a similar stone, I took along
crayons and a few sheets of paper to make a "rubbing" of the
flat 12x24 inch granite slabs that we had placed for my parents.
It was a bright, cloudless day. A brisk breeze swept over the
graveyard and the surrounding fields. The graveyard is
maintained with meticulous zeal, an immaculately manicured
lawn, with many elaborate, ostentatious monuments, some in
deplorably poor taste.  Many of the names were familiar;
classmates with whom I went to school, one Athern Brown, who
had confided to me one morning in Sunday School that he would
shoot my father the first time he encountered him in the
woods, a threat which I was too frightened to report,
feeling that if I kept it to myself, it might not come true.
I found also the grave of Charlotte Shumate, who had been
my first secretary when I started my Damascus practice in 1956.
I recognized on the gravestones the names of many patients
of my fathers and and some of my own. The simplicity of my
parents' flat inconspicuous markers is remarkably different.
To the very end, "etwas Besonderes." My father had, in fact,
directed that his grave should not be marked at all, but I
disregarded his wishes in favor of Margrit's who wanted a
marker which as she said "the grandchildren would visit."
(Understandably indifferent, they have never come.) I'm next.

Jochen