Dear Marion,

When I wrote last night, or rather very early this morning,
that the queen's question: Bin ich gerochen - Am I avenged?
referred to the murder of Sarastro, I was probably wrong.
The desired vengance, I vaguely remember, was the infanticide
of Tamino and Pamina's child, which rather than killed, was
entombed in a macabre fashion. So far as I'm concerned the plot
of Goethe's Magic Flute extension is the stuff of psychoanalysis,
and leaves me unenchanted. However, Goethe's poetry that you
quoted is magnificent. I'm not certain that your ear is sufficiently
attuned to the German to glean all its glory. The primary emphasis
of the text that you quote is on darkness as the expression of
destruction and death. Goethe was famously enamored of colors
and light. Remember the quaint dispute about his dying words:
whether he said "Mehr Licht" oder "Mehr nicht."

This morning I spent repairing my 2005 Dodge Grand Caravan minivan
which Rebekah has been driving at the farm school where she is
vacationing from Harvard. The left windshield fluid spray had not
been working for years, a defect which went unnoted on the annual
inspections and which never bothered Klemens or myself. But poor
Rebekah is a compulsive perfectionist and insisted that the fault
be repaired.

Between the car's hood and the windshield, there's a plastic cowl
on which the two nozzles are mounted and through which the windshiled
wiper shafts protrude. The diagnosis required removal of the cowl.
Removal of the cowl required removal of the wiper arms. The wiper
arms are so firmly mounted on tapered fluted shafts that they must
be detached by means of a special tool, a screw-driven extractor
analogous to what one uses to pull the cork out of a bottle of
Beaujolais.  The economic issue: was it cheaper to buy the extractor
or to turn the project over to a repair shop. I drove to the auto-
supply store in Watertown to find out. Maybe the device was available
for rent. To my pleasant surprise, the very youthful and somewhat
disreputable sales clerk invited me to purchase a new extractor for
$30, use it at home, and return it for full credit.  I accepted the
suggestion, repaired the car, returned the extractor and rewarded the
store by purchasing two new wiper blades for about the same price.
The nozzle had not been, as I assumed, obstructed, but the plastic
tubing from the pump had become detached. Once the defect was exposed,
reestablishing the connection was trivial.  Now the car is repaired,
and I feel as if I had done something far more useful than spinning
fiction fantasies.

Next I'll get the surveillance pictures from Nantucket and Konnarock.
Then I'll resume my literary fabrication. I'll report to you what
happens.

Jochen