Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letters. Your suggestion that wealth be
equalized by requiring the rich to donate some of their assets
to public charities is very plausible. Precisely this is what
the U.S. revenue code (26 USC 503(c)) has stipulated for many
years, even permitting the donors to retain control of the
assets by establishing "private foundations", provided they 
refrain from engaging in self-dealing and making themselves
the objects of their own "charity". It's also a technique that
I contemplated to avoid estate taxes on my own savings by 
donating the entire "taxable estate" to a private foundation
which might provide an economic stage for Nathaniel's music and or
subsidize the publication of my texts which I would, in effect,
be paying someone else to read. The generosity - or profligacy
of the "lame-duck" Congress, has spared me these legal acrobatics,
at least for the next two years.

Such programs, however, address the problem of the inequality of
wealth only tangentially, if at all. The performance of music,
no matter how inspiring, will not shelter the homeless. The
publication of fiction and fact will not feed the hungry. It's
a copout, - but I don't know what to say, - and worse, I don't
know what to do. In theory - which has never been rigorously
tested in practice, I have no difficulty in contemplating the
extension of my family - with whom I am prepared to share
everything - to any human being, or for that matter, to any
living creature with whom a direct immediate relationship is
possible. That's not the beggar by whose hostile and obsequious
eyes I am tracked as I approach on the sidewalk. Nor is it my
sister who often declared that she'd rather be dead, - and 
proved just a year ago that she meant what she said.  The more
I think about the problem, the more intractable it becomes.
======================
That was yesterday. My letter was interrupted by Nathaniel who
asked, as is his habit, on no notice at all, that I help him
transport the two kettledrums, borrowed from the music school -
of which Laura is a trustee - to help him transport the two bulky
kettledrums that Klemens and he had parked in our living room three
days ago, now to the Beech Street Senior Center to lend their
might to the punctuation of Beethoven's 4th Symphony. That done,
Nathaniel and I drove to the Fresh Pond CVS to purchase magnetic
tape for the video camera which records the rehearsal and the
performance. Then back to School Street to keep an appointment
with a wealthy, urbane sixty-eight year old private investor,
whose relationship to his ophthalmologist was cemented thirty
years ago with a stunningly correct diagnosis of a very rare
form of malignant glaucoma, who now, instead of being blind,
has normal vision and normal pressures in both eyes. Then back to
the Beech Street Senior Center to wait for half an hour while
the musicians were taking a lunch break, and finally to listen
to the unfamiliar cadences of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony and
Richard Wagner's Siegfried Idyll. Both pieces, I thought, conducted
with Nathaniel's native passion, sensitivity and humor. After
my 12 o'clock patient today, I'll go back, I hope in time to
hear more.

When I'm too tired for my own writing, I read with growing 
admiration in Vietor's study of Goethe. The book is far more
than a conventional biography, and to be critical for its failure
to explore the existential issues in Goethe's life, is to miss
the point. Vietor himself explained to me, - I remember our 
brief conversation on the steps of Widener on a sunny day in
the spring some sixty years ago, that philosophical considerations
were not congenial to him. In rereading the chapter on Iphigenie
auf Tauris and the description of the idealized Iphigenie as being
unable to tell a lie, and therefore betraying the plot of her
brother Orestes and his companion Pylades, I was reminded of Kant's
contemporaneous absolute prohibition against lying even to save the
life of ones best friend ... and reminded also of George Washington's
cherry tree confession, as being all of the same cloth: the 18th
Century's infatuation with logic and reason, it's consequent
veneration of literal truth.  I was reminded also in this context
of my recent laboratory experiment which proved conclusively at least
to my mind, that the crowning achievement of the 18th Century's
belief in reason, the U.S. Constitution's promise of due process of
law, turns out, if scratched only a little bit, also to be a lie, one
of the most majestic and magnificent of them all.  Pretending to be a
lawyer makes me feel like a fish gleefully - and profitably -
swimming in a cesspool of intellectual corruption and falsity.

Who then am I to pontificate condescendingly that I find your designs
for relieving the unhappiness and discontent of America's disadvantaged
citizens to be thoughtful, humane, and endearing. The end of promoting
universal happiness is unassailable. Devising the means to achieve or
even to approximate such universal happiness I find to be a challenge
so daunting, I don't know where to begin. I'm reminded once more of
Kant's formulation of his "Categorical Imperative" that individual human
beings should always be the ends rather than the means  of ones actions.
I find this injunction contrary to universal experience to such a degree,
that it seems to me emblematic of the artificiality and hollowness of
Kant's thinking. We need - and we use one another as means to flourishing
and surviving. It's absurd to suggest that the girl who checks out my
groceries at the supermarket, the collector who takes my dollar bills at
the toll booth, or the electrician, the plumber, that I hire, should be
for me anything other than a means to get the job done.

Speaking of which, I should now stop, proof-read and e-mail this letter,
to have time to shovel the sidewalk before my 12 o'clock patient arrives.
I hope that you are well.

Jochen