Dear Marion,

My resolution to devote this last day in Konnarock
solely to preparations for the trip north does not
survive the charm of your letter. I need to answer it
before the ideas that it provokes have evaporated.
It's not that the contest between facts and theories
kept me awake last night, but when I was not asleep,
instead of counting sheep, I tried to count facts.
The dismal truth: I couldn't identify a single fact
that was not a theory in facts' clothing.  I thought about
gravity, starting with the brick that slipped from my hand
to strike my toes, about its density, weight and hardness;
about the force of gravity that was nominally a constant
but also varied depending on the composition of the earth
far under my feet. I thought about the fact that the acceleration
of gravity is the same for all objects, but the resistance of
the air slows the descent of the leaf, unless there comes a
wind which mocks gravity and blows it higher than the tree
top from which it fell.

Gravity, I concluded was not a fact but a theory. Then what about
the sunrise whose timing the astronomers calculate to a fraction
of a minute, but only on the assumption that the terrain is
flat, no hills or mountains, trees or houses permitted to get
in the way, not even to mention a bank of clouds which would
block the sun completely. Let's exclude entirely the issues raised
by the propagation of light whose speed varies with the medium
through which it passes. I was looking for facts, and I'm not
being sarcastic when I confess that lying in bed, gazing at the
bedroom whose features were gradually taking shape as dawn
progressed, I couldn't identify a single fact. Please help:
please tell me a fact which won't turn into a theory as soon as
I think about it. But maybe right there, I've hit on the secret.
A fact remains a fact only so long as one can restrain oneself
from thought. It's thought which is the culprit, which turns
facts into theories.

The wall of numbers: about that too I'm apologetic as about
almost everything that I try to do. In my twenties, I started with
the assumption that the ultimate function of thought was to enter
into a coherent pattern, a system. I tried, in that 1960 composition
that I wrote you about, but in retrospect it seemed contrived.
Valuable, if anything, were occasional insights which more likely
than not would be masked by the attempt to fit them into a system.
As is my habit, I made a virtue of necessity. What I couldn't do,
needn't be done, in point of fact: shouldn't be done. I thought I
remembered Nietzsche's writing: Der Wille zum System ist der Wille
zur Luege. That's not exactly what he wrote, but close enough, I
forget the original. Kierkegaard, who spent months in Berlin listening
to Schelling's lectures (Hegel had died.) also vituperated against
the System. While I couldn't come up with a system, I found it easy,
pleasant and flattering to write down from day to day what was on
my mind, on the rationale that if there was indeed a system it would
make itself apparent without advertisement. Then, in Chapter 1 of
Die Andere, Mengs disclosed his surmise that it was the reader's
spirit projected onto a text which would give rise to a system. In
the back of my own mind, I entertained the possibility that when at
some future date I ran out of ideas, I might go back, review, correlate
and systematize the fragments that I composed from day to day. Admittedly
an illusory expectation since in old age, my logorrhea proves to be
incurable.

It's a hopeless situation. My computer's calculations are virtually
instantaneous. Behind the wall of numbers are 3124976 words, 8928.5
printed pages (at 350 words per page) or 29.76 volumes of books, at
300 pages per volume. (These numbers include the two novels.) Obviously
I've written myself into the ground. I can't possibly edit all that stuff,
don't even have time to read it. Be careful. As my mother used to say:
Neugierige sein gewarnt. (Curiosity is dangerous.)

You ask about the possibility of searching for discrete topics behind
the wall of dates. If I thought it worth the effort, I could write a
computer program with which the web site visitor could search all the
files on the site for a given word or a specific phrase. I have
copies of them, as you can imagine, on my machine and here, since I 
use the Linux operating system, I have the simple command "grep" (get
regular expression) which will scan all the files for a given word
or phrase. To give you an example, since we were on the subject, 
I entered the command: "grep amtidighed diary*/d*", where the asterisk 
is a "wild card" which will retrieve strings of all characters. (By
omitting the initial "S" or "s", I obtained citations both with the
lower case and the upper case character.) Here's the output:

diary06/d060102.00:Metanalysis und Samtidighed
diary06/d060326.01:Gleichzeitigkeit, Samtidighed also.
diary07/d070224.01:postulate of Samtidighed (Gleichzeitigkeit, simultaneity)
diary10/d100205.01:reminded of Kierkegaard's fervent insistence on spiritual Samtidighed
diary97/d970708.00:Samtidighed: dieser in Kierkegaard's Einuebung im Christentum
diary97/d970708.00:Vielleicht meinte Kierkegaard mit Samtidighed eine solche
diary97/d970712.00:contemporaneity with Christ (samtidighed) is
diary97/d970712.00:     denne Samtidighed er Troens Betingelse
diary97/d970712.00:     i Samtidighedens Situation
diary97/d970712.00:does he mean by Samtidighed?

It's not a perfect method, but it is a start.

The word "Samtidighed" (Gleichzeitigkeit, contemporaneity) is the key
to Kierkegaard's assault upon history. The original reference was
to Lessing:

"Kann es einen geschichtlichen Ausgangspunkt geben
fuer ein ewiges Bewusstein; inwiefern vermag ein solcher
mehr als bloss geschichtlich zu interessieren;
kann man eine ewige Seligkeit gruenden
auf ein geschichtliches Wissen."

The threshold concepts with which we must contends are
"ewiges Bewusstsein" and "ewige Seligkeit."  Inasmuch as
these terms are never mentioned in the Voyage of the Beagle,
and are quite extrinsic to both the special and the general
Theory of Relativity, I should have to start from scratch
to try to explain to myself and to you what they might have
meant to Lessing and to Kierkegaard.  But with such a complex
topic, I'm afraid, Marion, that I've bitten off more than I
can chew on the eve of our trip back. I hope for the time 
and the energy to try to do justice to them once I've landed 
right side up, in Belmont.

Jochen