An excerpt from a letter to Marion:
===================================

"Rundbriefe", those circular newsletters ostensibly addressed to
everyone seem to me to be addressed to no one; I consider them
derogatory, dishonest, and not worth reading. I never do.
To invite my correspondent to look at a text stored on the Internet
does not resolve the contradiction of plying him with the missives
I compose for others.  But the older I get, the more frequently
contradictions seem to get ahead of me.

.....I'm about to forward to Nathaniel, Micha's criticism of
Nathaniel's Dvorak performances. Please tell Micha for me, -
and by proxy for Nathaniel - of our gratitude for the care with which
he listened to, and the candor with which he criticised Nathaniel's
efforts. With no intention of mitigating that criticism, I would
point out that at least some of the imbalance of the sound might be
attributable to the haphazard placement of the microphones, which is
my responsibility, and which was dictated in part by considerations of
safety, i.e. concern lest the decrepit Belmont "seniors" who constituted
the audience should trip over the microphone cabling.

Over the years I have become more and more appreciative of criticism
up to and including Mr. Ciarmataro's, as being more constructive and
existentially more truthful than "appreciation" and praise. Perhaps
it's because I consider my life to be quintessentially a series of
failures - my childhood separation anxiety protracted well into adulthood,
my failure to become a physicist as I had hoped, my failure at academic
literature, my failure at academic philosophy, my failure at academic
medicine, my failure as an eye surgeon, as an essayist, as a novelist,
my Nantucket failure, - I resemble a bacterial organism that has developed 
antibiotic resistance, I now experience criticism as the objective
characterization of my failure to be nourishment essential for my
survival. Rilke provides me with the alibi:

Wen dieser Engel überwand,
welcher so oft auf Kampf verzichtet,
der geht gerecht und aufgerichtet
und groß aus jener harten Hand,
die sich, wie formend, an ihn schmiegte.
Die Siege laden ihn nicht ein.
Sein Wachstum ist: der Tiefbesiegte
von immer Größerem zu sein.
_                  "Der Schauende"