Dear Marion,

Your e-mail just arrived. Thank you as always for your candor.
While they are on my mind, I want to make notes of my initial
impressions. To mail this letter, I probably will wait 'till
tomorrow, when I've had time to make comments that are more
substantive. I'm charmed, fascinated by your efforts to cast
me in a role that masks the dilemma which my arguments pose,
or should pose for you.

Firstly, your faulty observation that I "derive so much naughty
pleasure from not voting." The contrary is the case. I invariably
regret not being able to vote in Belmont because I'm registered
to vote in Green Cove, and I regret not being able to vote in
Green Cove on account of my absence from the area, because I
enjoy the drama. The presiding officials have usually been patients
of my fathers, sometimes of mine; and although I may have forgotten
them, it's flattering and consoling that my father's efforts and
to a much lesser extent my own, are still echoing, however faintly, 
in what was once the Green Cove Health Center where my father for
many years, and I for a few months, conducted well-baby clinics for
the State Health Department. As for the scheduling of our trips,
you underestimate the degree to which this is determined by Margaret's
wishes rather than mine; and if she decided she wanted us to stay
through November 2, to vote, I would comply with her wishes without
objection.

Secondly, your comments about my "feuding" with Margrit. For other 
reasons, I've recently spent a few hours rereading the heart-rending
correspondence between us - you and myself - in the months preceding
and in the weeks following Margrit's death. It may be the acme of
self-deception to be convinced that I did NOT feud with her during the
four or five final decades of her life; that I became progressively
more respectful of her social and political proclivities because
they were hers, not because I deemed them edifying or constructive.
I won't venture onto the thin ice of psychoanalysis to ask of what
significance it might be to you to postulate the existence of a feud
where Margrit's rejection of me was so explicitly unilateral. Looking
back on her life, I now contemplate it as a tragedy that evolved from
her inability to make realistic assessments of the characters with
whom she shared life's stage and made it necessary for her to escape
into a world of futile political activism from which she received
only illusory rewards.

As for my own reflections on contemporary political processes in our
society, rightly or wrongly, I consider them scientific attempts to
understand and to interpret the world in which I live and in which I
must act. I find it incongruous to demand of any person that he or she
derive satisfaction from casting one out of one hundred million votes.
That incongruity, the dissatisfaction and the despair which it entails,
is the most critical issue posed by our culture, a dilemma which cannot
ultimately be plastered over with pious platitudes. I find it to be
a paradox worth thinking about.

Jochen