Dceember 4, 2011

Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letters. My best wishes, of course, for your trip to California. December 8, though four days away, will be here overnight, or so it seems to me, and then four days later, you'll be back and start forgetting the details of your trip. The following day, December 13, is the date of a possibly decisive hearing in my Nantucket case. In preparation, I have been exercising my emotions in all dimensions: how will I react if the judge is hostile and orders my plumbing destroyed forthwith - then of course I would embark on another 24 months' appellate odyssey. What will be the consequences if I'm constrained to provide more evidence? Discovery, as the lawyers call it, requests for the production of documents, interrogatories, requests for admissions, depositions in Barnstable, Hyannis or on Nantucket itself? More engineering consultation? A veritable nightmare in bright daylight. And if I win? Be careful of what you wish for is the motto for that possibility.  If I won, I'd have to install first of all a disconnect switch for the electric hot water tank, then have a wiring inspection with or without my electrician, Rex Rowley, then have a framing inspection, then install the fiberglass insulation in the outside walls, then the insulation inspection, - and every inspection of course fraught with the possibility of unreasonable rejection and appeal. Then drywall and tile-board installation, plastering - which I can't do - and tiling of four bathrooms and an entrance hall. Next installation of spiral stairs oak flooring, inside door, finish capentry, all presumably by myself at age 81 and counting. What madness! Where will it end?

Aunt Priscilla's memorial party a week ago is already fading from memory. I'll attach another pdf formatted obituary biography of her to this e-mail - if I don't forget. Afterwards I spent hours with correspondence from the academic year 1949-1950, an exercise which made the past almost as compelling as the present, if not more so. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I tackled and dismantled the electric organ, for me a sad event to which no good-byes that I can conjure up will do justice. Thursday, Klemens e-mailed an invitation to join Laura and himself on a Saturday trip to New Haven for a G&S Gondoliers' performance conducted by Nathaniel who has been made "musical director" of the Yale GandS Society. Of course we accepted this invitation which was in fact 25 years overdue, the first time since his marriage that Klemens has _ever_ asked us to accompany him and Laura on a trip. 4 a.m. - and midnight junkets to Manchester, Providence, Logan airports don't count.

On Friday I drove to the Newton Library to borrow a DVD, CDs and a piano score of the Gondoliers. I listened to perhaps 20 minutes of the sound and leafed through the score, - but the music reminded me of nothing I wanted to remember. I never bothered with the DVD.  For the 140 mile auto trip, we took the new Minivan. I stowed the middle seats into the floor, providing a luxurious expanse for stretching the legs, much appreciated by my arthritic right hip.  Margaret read the NY Review of Books. I had my laptop plugged into a dc-ac inverter and spent the 2 1/2 hours each way on Schiller's Johanna von Orleans. On the trip down the winter sun tried intermittently to blot out the sometimes hazy text.On the trip back the computer screen glowed bright in the spacious darkness, as I let myself by guided by Schiller's sensitive and insightful imagination through the inscrutable ancient myth. I had, of course, read this play many many years ago, but so much water had in the meanwhile flowed down the Loire and the Seine that I remembered nothing.  Reached the conclusion that I had vastly underestimated Schiller's literary genius, but that it was not too late for me to begin the study of German literature, von Neuem.

It was my first visit to the Yale campus. I was much impressed, with the architecture, with the apparent vibrancy of this enclave of intellect in a cultural oasis. We were joined by my brother-in-law Peter who is now on the verge of retirement as a Yale hematology professor, and his wife Letty, a graphic artist. Nathaniel who had met us at one of the massive wrought iron gates, led us down paths far more labyrinthine than those of the (Harvard) Yard, into the miniscule auditorium of Morse College, and advised us not to sit too close to the orchestra lest its sound drown that of the voices on the stage. I don't know whether it was intoxication with novelty, or my unaccustomed hearing aids, or my grandfatherly prejudices that provoked me to ask myself whether Nathaniel might not have discovered some sort of philosophers' stone by virtue of which Sullivan's music was transmuted into that of Mozart. Some passages of of this operetta remained, understandly, incurably pedestrian, but others exhibited that remarkable grace and fluency and lightness that we have come to consider unique. The dancing and the choreography were impressive. Nonetheless the characters, without exception, were pathetic for their lack of pathos, like wooden dolls, marionettes, unaffected by the fateful fortuity that purportedly shaped their existence. The difference between W.S. Gilbert and Lorenzo daPonte came to mind.

It was a 2:00 p.m. Saturday matinee performance which we had attended.  Nathaniel would conduct an evening performance at 8:00 p.m., the last for this production. But in the interval he invited us to the Saybrook College where he lives, for dinner in a monumental neo-gothic dining hall.  Klemens paid for the six guests with a credit card. I never found out how much; but it can't have been cheap. The food was exquisite: broiled salmon with lemon-parsley sauce, baked potatoes, broccoli, with cheese cake and coffee for desert. Joined by a Chinese friend of Nathaniel's the eight of us sat in a circle around a table so large as to almost accommodate eight cafeteria trays. As more and more students arrived, the background noise made conversation, at least for Margaret and myself, almost impossible. After a while Nathaniel, who was sitting diagonally across, circled the table, drew up a chair next to me, said he would speak directly into my ear, so that I could understand, and launched into a long animated conversation in his newly learned German which, since he thrives by hearing, is expectedly good. We talked about his conducting. He asked about the outcome parameters of my Nantucket project. I urged him to become familiar, albeit in a non-professional way, with the vagaries of the law, because Nantucket and other critical legal problems would challenge him long after I could no longer help with their resolution. Finally, good-byes were said all around.  Nathaniel went off to get ready for the 8 p.m. performance. Then, in the chilly air of a moonlit early winter night, Laura, Margaret and I, waited at one of the wrought-iron Saybrook College gates, for Klemens to drive up with the car. This afternoon, I find nothing better to do than to write it all down.  

Jochen

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