February 20, 2011

Dear Cyndy,

Thank you very much for the photo of your wintry house.  It's difficult to convince myself that you really dislike winter as much as you profess. In my experience, winter is sublime, in the sense in which Edmund Burke and the Earl of Shaftesbury used that term. I like the enormity of winter, and maybe in time, you'll come around to my point of view.

The last several days I've spent working assiduously on my novel, an effort from which I derive progressively more satisfaction.  Having substantially completed chapter 44, I retreated to the preceding chapter which I had not finished.  In chapter 43, Mengs falls asleep and in a dream finds himself in total darkness, wonders whether he might indeed have died, and be experiencing his own grave. As he adapts to the darkness he finds himself in a cellar whose walls are lined with shelved boxes labeled as containing legal records of great import.  However when Mengs opens these boxes one after another, he finds them either totally empty or filled with illegible trash.  Offended and disappointed, he advances into the adjoining room which he discovers to be a dungeon filled with mounts of garbage and still shackeled to the walls, the remains of prisoners. Terrified he looks for an exit, but in vain. The path through the ocean of debris leads to a cubicle with a chair and a desk, on which has been placed a sheaf of paper, a collection of pencils, and an instruction booklet on how to escape the dungeon, as well as a printed copy of an LSAT (Law School Admissions Test), requiring him as prerequisite of freedom, to write an essay on the imperfection of law as an expression of human nature.

The composition of this essay I found on account of its generality to be an unexpected challenge. I lacked a framework of particulars to provide substance for my theories. I experimented with a quasi-geometrical style, short balanced sentences as if I were composing a poem of logical propositions. I expect to return to the topic in the hope of making considerable improvements. What I have now would be sufficiently puzzling, - if there were a reader -, to provide a stage for an emperor's new clothes predicament, a set of statements about whose meaning and significance, if one took them seriously, one could argue, and onto which one could project ones own preferences and prejudices.  However, it's all "academic", because no reader will show up.

For the time being, I've gone on to chapter 45, in which I invent a dream by one of my protagonists, Maximilian Katenus, giving a speech in Stockholm on being awarded the Nobel Prize. It may turn out to be a difficult project, but an interesting one; I'll find out. I've just started.

I'm giving some thought to the hearing on March 3, of the Nantucket case. If anything has happened, if an inspection has been made, I haven't been informed. My conclusion, which I'll present to the Court is that it's unavoidable that because of the plumber's unconditional dependence on the inspector, the two should be in collusion. There's nothing that I, or for that matter the Court, can do, except to set aside the regulations and let me do the plumbing as I originally requested. We'll see what happens.

Stay well and give my best to Ned.

Jochen

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