Dear Marion,

Thank you very much for your inspired letter about the animals.
It's obvious how much you care for them, and for that reason
alone I must mute and bury the scepticism to which I am all too
prone. I mention in passing illustrative of my perplexity 
concerning this matter the paradox that it's our custom not to
crush (even) a single insect, ant or fly or wasp or lady bug
or grasshopper; but to trap him or her or it with a glass or
wide-mouthed bottle, then to slide a piece of cardboard or
heavy paper over the opening and deport the unwelcome guest
onto the lawn or sidewalk outside the house. And yet, I have
no compunction about poisoning a colony of termites who are
eating away at the house, or spraying a wasps' nest, especially
if one of the tenants has had the audacity to sting me. My 
father, impressed as he was with Albert Schweitzer's evangelism
of reverence for life, was especially troubled by an inability
to draw the line between good animals and bad animals, between
squirrels in whose antics one takes delight, and rats or mice
whom one exterminates. I won't discuss lice, fleas or bedbugs,
except that they too are creatures of the Divine with which we're
unable to make peace.

Just as the naughty Republicans are about to eviscerate the
Estate Tax to a degree where it no longer threatens me, I've
come to a troubling conclusion about my own legal efforts
in this - and in other fields. That conclusion is as follows:
Law is a species of language. The meaning of language derives
from social agreement. Words and sentences mean what "everyone"
thinks they mean. As is so often the case, meaning can be very
obscure, and the sense of words then becomes a matter of 
convention, sometimes a matter of governmental fiat. Tax avoidance,
as distinct from tax evasion is a project of skillful verbal
composition, so as to project a favorable meaning onto concepts
that are inherently confused or obscure. That is a difficult and
perhaps even somewhat dangerous undertaking, because the government
officials want their money very badly, and have no scruples about
doing violence to words, to language and to common sense, when
it suits their purposes. The estate lawyer's task then is to create
situations where the government is trapped in its own logic.
That obviously is much easier said than done.

I spent much of the day composing a letter to a friend of Margrit's
Margret Steinrueck in Berlin. For reasons I don't understand, I
found writing in German unusually difficult, although, in the end
what I produced was passable. I know that the time will come when
I will no longer be able to write well, if at all. I wonder when that
occurs, whether I will be aware of my failure, whether anyone will
tell me, or whether, in the end, it will make any difference at all.

I hope you are well and happy and not too cold in St Paul.
Jochen