Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter and for permitting me once more
if only by e-mail, to join you at the State Fair.  I admire
the catholicity and versatility of your interests; I admire
your ability to derive pleasure from the simple and naive
exhibitions of human - and animal experience. Scrutinized
more closely, your satisfaction with the State Fair may 
reflect that same facet of your personality that made you
so apparently comfortable at the Belmont Fairs in which you
recently participated; and, for all that, the red ribbon
may have been more appropriate than we imagined at the time. 

My own relationships to animals, when I think about it, seems
as perplexing as my relationships to human beings. My intuition
suggests that animals lead lives, and have existences of their
own, almost certainly very different from mine, and far beyond
my powers of empathy and understanding. I try, if at all possible,
to leave them in peace. The State Fair presents animals as if
they were inanimate toys. If so, that's a proposition awkward for
me to contemplate. I've broached this issue in Das Siebte Kapitel, 
not very satisfactorily, and certainly not conclusively. I've
found no author who does it justice. The musician-physician-
theologian-philosopher Albert Schweitzer addressed the question
of our relationship to animals in a book ominously entitled:
Kultur und Ethik. He propounded an ethics which he called:
Reverence for Life (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben) without being 
able to articulate how reverence for life should affect our
actions. My parents considered Kultur und Ethik gospel, even
though they were unable to make head or tails of Schweitzer's
propositions. Perhaps I'm wrong, and if so, I ask preemptively
for forgiveness if I admit that the State Fait strikes me as a
spiritual labyrinth.  Excuse me, but by any chance, is your
name Ariadne? 

The other compelling issue you raised in your letter concerned
the distribution of wealth, which is, as I understand it, only
one facet of the question: How should society be organized. I
consider this question very important, in fact so important that
I object to dismissing it with a theoretical answers such as
were given by Bentham and Mill, not to speak of Marx and Engels.
If I were to be placed in a position of authority, if I had the power
to organize society, I should surely not shirk my responsibility. But
as it is, no one has ever asked for my opinion or advice regarding 
even a single political action. My experience of politics is as
a victim of governmental extortion to fund projects that seem to
me ridiculous or worse: An arsenal of atomic weapons to destroy
humanity many times over, cluster bombs, concentration camps like
Guantanamo, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on the home front:
Health Care for the health industry, Prescription Drug Benefits
for the pharmaceutical industry, the war on drugs, the imprisonment
of a large portion of the population. You imply that I should
enthusiastically support of all this depravity. But I can't.  My
world is my family. That's where I sense my obligation to contribute
and to sacrifice. Nor am I exclusive and niggardly in defining my
family. From the time I entered medical school sixty years ago, I've
considered my patients part of my family.

But let me, at this point, divulge to you a secret: human beings want
to get away from their families (as if you didn't know at first hand.)
Human beings want to be independent. They want only Hallmark cards
and token gifts, nothing that threatens them with an obligation. A
government pension like Social Security is more acceptable by far.
Consequently my family, Margaret aside, wants to have much less to
do with me than I with them. They find the money that I have saved
for them a source of embarrassment and hold their noses when they
accept it, fearful that it might be a ruse with which I want to
purchase their affections. If those affections are not for sale,
that, I suspect, is because those affections are in short supply,
if indeed they exist.

Jochen