Dear Marion,

Thank you for your description of early spring on the prairie.
Thank you also for your invitation to visit Wisconsin. At this
juncture it seems unlikely that Margaret and I would want to accept,
principally because the impaired mobility of old age makes the
effort of traveling less and less worthwhile, and because we are
beset with a variety of other obligations, primarily Nantucket
where I want to complete the wiring as soon as possible, so as to 
be ready for insulating and plastering whenever the plumbing
has been approved. The plumbing approval, of course, may be a
long way off.

Our plans for the near future hinge on Margaret's willingness and
ability to accommodate herself to staying in a cold, unfinished house
on Nantucket a few days at a time while I finish the wiring. As of
tonight, she hasn't decided what she wants to do. Meanwhile, I'll
try to resume work on my novel.

As I sat in the back seat of the taxi from the wharf to the Nantucket house,
gazing on the bleak landscape of the wintery moors, with an uncommunicative
driver listening to albeit soft popular music on the radio, there occurred
to me the theme of chapter 45, - that dream in which Katenus is awarded
the Nobel Prize in literature, but declines to travel to Stockholm,
wherupon he dreams that the Svenske Akademien will come from Sweden to
bring him his check and his medal. I have described Katenus' trip
on a mixed freight-passenger train into the mountains, ( parody of
Hans Castorp's trip to Sanatorium Berghof) and the fortuitous
favor by an old acquaintance who takes him in a rusty pickup truck
from the railside where he has been deposited by the train's conductor
to the house on the mountain top which Katenus considers his primary
and ultimate Zuhause. While I was being driven across the Nantucket
plains I thought that chapter 45 might become an account of ultimate
loneliness, symbolized by the distinction of the Nobel Prize, the
mountain top mansion without any visitors: Elly, the affectionate
woman, for reasons not yet invented, stays away.  Mengs and Joachim
don't show up, the Svenske Akademien has changed its mind, its
members won't come after all, and the prize will be awarded to
the chief of police, - I've forgotten his name -, for his chronicles
of Nancy Drew, he can't come because he will be in Stockholm,
and not even the two policemen Buddy and Billy who made so uncouth
an arrest of Katenus, are willing to show up; but since Katenus
has prepared his acceptance speech, he feels he must deliver it
no matter to what audience, goes to the pasture and preaches
his secular sermon to a herd of goats who don't even bother to stop
munching the grass to listen to what he has to say.

You, at least - no invidious comparison intended - take the trouble
of reading my letters. Thank you.
Jochen