Dear Marion,

Thank you very much for your letter. Not having received
the expected e-mail, I was concerned that you might be ill.
I'm prone to anxiety, aware as I am of the fragility of existence.
Otherwise, as I've written before, the frequency of our exchanges
should be very much a matter of your convenience and your discretion.
I will answer every letter. Whether what I have to say is worth
reading is another matter. Writing has become essential to my
existence, and what does not get sent to you is buried in the novel,
first to be politely ignored, then to be innocuously forgotten.

Your complaints about the banking business strike a sympathetic
chord. Interestingly, in Chapter 43, Mengs wrestles with the
more general problem of the inability or unwillingness of the
courts to enforce the law or even to determine what the law
might be. He is less sanguine than are you about the perfectability
of human nature. He pretends to be a biologist and to contemplate
human behavior with the same detachment with which he would study
the aggressiveness of hummingbirds or the ferociousness of wolves.
Mengs also points out that human behavior is inseparable from
human thought, that the men who founded this country were steeped
in classical history and literature. It's an implausible proposition,
he thinks, that an exclusively scientific and technical education
should prepare us for the intricate intellectual and emotional
challenges, both public and private, with which we are confronted.

In this context, Mengs points out that the pivotal determinant of
our political culture is the intelligence and the sensitivity of
the electorate. The hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to
political television would be meaningless, if like himself,
voters disdained even to glance at the advertisements. Perhaps
rather than blaming exorbitant contributions, one should blame
the voters who are influenced by the political propaganda to
which they are exposed.

Jochen