Dear Marion,

The time is 10:45 p.m., hence this letter won't
be as detailed as is appropriate, considering the
effort you have made describing gene replication.
Of course, I understand the meaning of each sentence,
but each time I finished reading your letter, I was be
unable to repeat what you had written, a limitation
of my memory which must not become the subject of
neurotic complaints but which also I cannot afford to
deny.  Molecular biochemistry fascinates me, and seems
to me to have most profound and far reaching implications
and consequences. I will continue to try to learn more.
You should not be offended if nonetheless I interpret 
the assertions of the biochemists not as fact but as
theory. I remember many months ago citing Goethe's
dictum: Das Hoechste waere zu begreifen dass alles
Faktische schon Theorie ist. "Das Faktische" to which
Goethe was referring were not the wild conjectures of
medieval alchemists and astrologers, but the physics of
Newton and the chemistry of Lavoisier, the optimistic
rationalism of the 18th Century whose prophet Alexander
Pope wrote:
Nature and nature's laws were hid in night,
God said, let Newton be, and all was light.
Goethe was not persuaded.

Most of my day has been consumed with practical projects.
I spent the morning sorting papers and tidying up my
third floor office. I've not finished, but it looks
much better. In the late afternoon, I began my plumbing
project, starting to replace the frozen, ruptured heating
pipes to the bedroom in the old part of the house.
I was pleasantly surprised to be able without much
difficulty to uncouple the radiator and to remove the
pipes protruding through the floor. I was also able to
remove the iron rods with which the ten sections of
the radiator were clamped together; but then I was unable
to separate these sections one from the other. In the
eighty or ninety years of their existence, they had fused
one into the other. Now I am left with the problem of
disposing of a very heavy (? 200 lbs. plus) radiator.
Meanwhile I will begin installing the new units, beginning
with the relocation of two electrical outlets. 

Jochen