June 9, 2011 Dear Cyndy, The letter below was ready to be sent yesterday, when I received from Mr. Pucci the Inspector's Condemnation Report, by which I've been distracted ever since. I was up last night, or rather this morning until 4 a.m., then slept four hours and continued thinking, planning, writing. Literature is my panacea; when I write, my troubles vanish. For the next few days, I must concentrate on making life interetsing for Mr. Pucci and Mr. Ciamataro; hence my letters to you may become transiently sparse. Please forgive me. I will send you a copy of the death sentence for my plumbing; it's probably not worth reading. Jochen Dear Cyndy, It's my sense of mental economy, my undisciplined mind, or my impending Alzheimer's disease which persuades me to write a turn-around answer to your letter, while your questions and my answers are still vivid in my mind. I know from experience that in two or three hours, if not sooner, everything will have faded. Nathaniel, about whom you asked, has just returned from Cuba where he spent a week as guest trumpeter with the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra. The story: The conductor, Fernando Cortese to whom Nathaniel is well known from his many years playing trumpet in the Boston Youth Symphony, was unsure about his resident Harvard trumpeter and invited Nathaniel to come along as trumpet insurance. Whether Nathaniel played first trumpet in all the concerts, in some, or in none, I haven't yet been told; Nathaniel did disclose when he telephoned two nights ago, that Fernando had invited him to conduct the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra in rehearsal playing the second movement of the Ninth Symphony. Nathaniel obliged, wearing a YALE t-shirt to the amusement of his players. It's tomorrow, Friday June 10, I believe, the due date for the still outstanding Nantucket inspection report that Nathaniel is scheduled to fly to Baku, Romania, to participate in a two weeks' conducting seminar and workshop. Following, he will spend a week in Germany. At his request, I've given him some suggestions about where he might go, given him names of friends and acquaintances. What he's finally decided to do, he hasn't told me. Following the week in Germany, during which I hope he can avoid the EHEC (entero-hemorrhagic-escherichia-coli) epidemic, Nathaniel will spend a week in London, participating in a "master class" in symphony conducting, given by a flamboyant patron of his from the New England Conservatory, Benjamin Zander. Nathaniel will then come back to Belmont and prepare his Belmont Summer Music Festival Concerts. I believe he is planning to have his orchestra perform the Pastoral Symphony and something else which I can't remember. I expect to be his audio recording technician. You ask about my intimations of mortality. It's constantly on my mind that I won't be around forever; as a matter of fact, I don't want to be around much longer, because above all, I don't want to be incapacitated, mentally or physically, - would like to go with all my faculties intact. More on this subject, if you're interested in a letter to my cousin: http://home.earthlink.net/~ej1meyer/2011/d110514.00 I may have pontificated to you in some earlier letter about adopting Rilke's imperative that each one of us has a need of his/her own death, much as he/she has a need of his/her own life. Rilke, following Kierkegaard, was trying to draw a distinction between the objective appearance of death, which is very frightening, and the subjective experience which can be both consoling and liberating. The contemporary cultural environment, epitomized by "Obamacare" makes it inordinately difficult, if not impossible, to accept death as a gift and a blessing peculiar to oneself. Both as a physician and a patient I expand Rilke's postulate of personal idiosyncratic death to illness as well. Each of us needs to domesticate the disease to ones own spirit, a task to which the complexities of modern medical diagnosis, prognosis and therapy also create almost insuperable obstacles. I've recently been much impressed by the degree to which it is the physician who infects the patient with the disease, transforming experiences of discomfort, pain, weakness and wasting, that would otherwise be received and accepted as natural concomitants of life, into a spiritual monstrosity that must be forestalled, prevented, detected, named, measured, treated, eradicated, conquered, all ultimately to no avail, with the consequence of stealing from the patient what little meaningful existence remains to him. I know well enough, that Harvard Medical School should rescind my diploma if it knew of my apostasy. Having spouted off instead of answering your question about our health, I can report that both Margaret and I are relatively well, according to age, as my father would have translated, dem Alter entsprechend. Margaret has labile hypertension which I measure frequently and treat with medications ordered from CanadaDrug and from Costco in Waltham. She also has had for years, urinary incontinence which she manages with aplomb; years ago she was advised to have a surgical operation by a "specialist" to whose office she never returned. My ailments, megalomania aside, include heartburn, nowadays rechristened GERD (gastro-esophageal reflux disease) by the gastroenterologists, who could hardly file their exorbitant Medicare claims for the more simply named ailment. I manage quite well with a very effective over-the-counter drug called omeprazole. I also have inexplicable swelling of both legs, exacerbated by long hours sitting at the computer, which also makes worse the inexplicable swelling of my head which I've had for years. Some letters ago you mentioned the possibility of irate Nantucketers frustrated by their failure in court, torching my house. That's a possibility I've thought about, would consider it a natural phenomenon akin to a hurricane or a lightning bolt about which I choose not to moralize. I tell myself, however, such a catastrophe is relatively unlikely. While Belmont vaunts itself as a "Town of Homes", Nantucket might call itself the Island of Vacant Houses, whose government has, I suspect, a deeply engrained propensity to protect the property on which the locals depend for their parasitic existence. I'm also struck by the +irony of the video cameras inside and outside the house, to which I have affixed labels supplied by the manufacturer warning of "24 hour surveillance", where I in fact recover each day only five seconds of imagery, just enough to reassure myself that the house is still there. Stay well, and give my best to Ned. Jochen * * * * * *