Dear Marion,

Welcome home. Now that Thanksgiving is behind Hanukkah-Christmas
looms.  I've spent my days working and thinking. This morning
the pious exhortation of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure,
which I haven't looked at for decades, surfaces in my mind:
"These rules should be interpreted so as to effect substantive
justice."  That's a contradiction. Interpretation of law is
the antithesis of law. Interpretation is inherently arbitrary.
To the extent that laws require, or even authorize interpretation,
laws repudiate themselves. We live in a lawless society. q.e.d.
The law is a very thin veneer so as, at critical junctures, to
become incognizable.  "Crime" is not the expression of the "evil"
that lurks in the soul. "Crime" is a consequence of the incongruity
of "law" with human nature. The criminal is not "bad". He (or she)
is stigmatized for being insufficiently intelligent and astute to
negotiate the obstacle course which the law describes, unable to
find his - or her - path out of the legal labyrinth. All this is
mere prologue to a lengthy disquisition, - which would lead me too
far afield if I pursued it.

For Thanksgiving, Margaret and I drove about 45 miles south to
Sharon MA, where we had dinner with her sister Janet, a very
intelligent and articulate woman, two years younger than
Margaret, who moved to Sharon some time ago to live with
her daughter Ann. Ann, who is a struggling environmental
lawyer, was away for the holiday, having taken her two college-
aged sons to have turkey with the father of her ex-husband,
whom she divorced because she decided after some 15 years of
marriage that she didn't like him after all. It's a sad and
difficult story, but then, so is life itself.

Janet has now been widowed for about thirty years. Her husband,
Robert Bingham, a journalist who started out working for "Time",
then moved on to become managing editor of Max Ascoli's "Reporter",
and when that magazine expired, found his niche as managing editor
of The New Yorker. Being extraordinarily good humored, Robert was
able to put up with, and perhaps compensate for, William Shawn's
eccentricities. Unfortunately, in the prime of life, Robert
developed a glioblastoma of the brain and died. Janet carried on
valiantly without him.

After dinner, while Margaret and Janet talked about family and 
childhood, I remained at the dinner table with one of Robert's
many books from the bookcase behind me. Not surprisingly, Robert
was very literate, much interested in contemporary American history,
and an admirer of Franklin Roosevelt. The volume I chose was one
from Arthur Schlesinger, Jr's Roosevelt biography, fascinating to
me for Schlesinger's vivid description of the atmosphere of those
dramatic days of the nascent New Deal, and particularly of the
persons, with names so very familiar, Francis Biddle, Frances Perkins,
Henry Wallace, Rexford Tugwell, Henry Morgenthau - whom Roosevelt
enlisted to help him govern the country. I'm left with the impression
that Schlesinger was a frustrated novelist, the teller of a story that
competes with history. I've often been struck by the truth and the
irony, that the Germans have only one word: Geschichte, to designate
both story and history, both fiction and fact, as if the two were
indistinguishable. Mys own tenuous, indirect personal connection with
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is his wife, who was for years a patient
of mine. In thexs introducttion to the Roosevelt biography, he expresses
eloquent and affectionate gratitude for her help. By the time she was
my patient, he had divorced her.
Jochen