Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. There's no disagreement
between us concerning the quality of the two paintings
of Pissaro, images of which you attached to your letter.
I am much appreciative of your enthusiasm for this
great art. Rightly or wrongly, I consider myself as
sensitive to the beauty of the "visual arts" as the
rest of the world; perhaps even more so. What I lack
is the enthusiasm. I suffer from chronic enthusiasm
deficiency; and I gratefully accept your offer to
let me borrow some of yours.

We've been over this ground before. I can't quote your
previous criticism of me, because that e-mail is 
stored in my Belmont computer, but here is what I 
replied on February 2, of this year:

_     My apparent "disinterest in visual arts"
_     is a misunderstanding. My concern with visual
_     arts is limited only by my own abilities.
_     I am in fact a sensitive and at times a very
_     passionate photographer, and if I have not
_     learned to draw or paint or sculpt it's not
_     from lack of interest but from lack of time,
_     energy and occasion to learn and to practice.
_     I'm disinterested only in the passive so-called
_     "appreciation" of the visual arts.

My immediate concern is an attempt to rationalize the
experience, i.e. an understanding, a theory of esthetics.

I meditate on the distinction between a landscape painting
such a Pissaro's and the physical landscape, for example
that stretches before my eyes as I sit here on the porch
writing at the computer, a scene which a can - and do 
capture in a profusion of images with my digital camera.

I meditate on the irony of celebrating Pissaro as a Jewish
painter, when according to the Jewish Bible with which I
am familiar,  God said the making of images of any kind is
a NONO.

I meditate on the incongruity of all attempts to translate
appearances into words, attempts which ignore the limitations of
adequately describing what one sees. Two disparate instances
come to mind: 1) Thomas Mann's valiant efforts in his early writings
(e.g. Buddenbrooks) to capture the appearances of clothes
and especially of facial features with ingeniously ornate
verbal accounts of baroque complexity. 2) Earlier this month
I wrote to you about Jakob Rosenberg's descriptive analysis
of Rembrandt's paintings and etchings. Rosenberg's accounts
are examples of the literary analysis of art in the style
of his teacher, Heinrich Woelfflin. It's my understanding
that Woelfflin's "Principles of Art History" served scholars
and connoisseurs who were disenchanted with a pedantic,
matter of fact, description of what's in this picture,
as a model for the poetic interpretation of art.
Woelfflin's style of Art History has been of especial interest
to me, because Karl Vietor who taught me about German literature
explained that his own symbolistic (?existential) interpretations
of literature were patterned after Woelfflin.

The circumstance that I don't relish the prospect of limping 
my way through crowded museum exhibitions doesn't mean that I'm
not as passionate about the fine arts as is consistent with my
not being a draftsman, a painter or a sculptor.

Jochen