Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter. I very much hope that the improvement
in your cough continues. As I wrote before, I feel helpless in the
face of your medical problems. There's nothing I can do. Talking
doesn't help.  Presuming to give advice under such circumstances
would be foolish.  I have two comments: 1) your judgment about the
disadvantages of carrying with you a heavy portable oxygen tank
seems to me better than that of the doctors who are persuaded
by guidelines of one sort or another to write a prescription
for 'round the clock supplemenmtary oxygen. 2) don't use oxygen
when driving.  The Massachsetts authorities at least, would
consider it a pretext for revoking your driver's license, and
that sort of solicitude from Big Brother is the last thing you
need.  Please continue to keep me informed about these medical
matters and please feel free to telephone at any time.

Thank you also for your advice about attempts that I might make to
find a publisher or otherwise attract attention to what I write. I
will think about your suggestions and keep them in mind. At this
juncture, I feel too diffident even to try, concerned that even the
effort would be too much of a distraction. I confess that nowadays
I write to please only myself, and I would be the first to admit
that under those circumstances you also should feel no obligation
to make the effort to read my texts. Of course, I'm pleased and
grateful if you find it worth your while.

I'm much dissatisfied with Chapter 51. The dialogue about theory
is not persuasive, and I've decided to delete it in its present
form. I'm presently preoccupied with the composition of a somewhat
formal essay on epistemology and ethics which I shall ascribe to
Katenus and which, to facilitate the avoidance of ideas by potentially
allergic readers, will appear in a separate chapter or in an appendix.
Perhaps the ideas will obtain an existence of their own and may become
topics of discussion or dispute, but without the need for further
detailed exposition.  I'll send you the URLs as the effort proceeds,
and you may then read or not read as suits your convenience.

Last night, I couldn't find Margaret's hearing aids. Rebekah,
who was keeping house next door while Klemens, Laura and Leah
were skiing in New Hampshire, had invited us for dinner. To
make conversation possible, Margaret and I both wore our hearing
aids, and afterwards Margaret asked me to put hers away, and
so I did, or thought I did. An hour later the 2x$350 miniatures
could not be found. We spent two hours searching in all the rooms,
in all the closets, on all the shelves, in all the bureau drawers,
where I might have absentmindedly placed them. Without avail.
The $700 replacement cost was serious enough, but even worse was
my obvious loss of memory. I had no inkling of having placed the
hearing aids anywhere at all. There was nothing to do but go to bed.
I slept fitfully, my mind skipping from the lost hearing aids to
the hearing, six weeks from now, in my Nantucket controversy,
wondering whether I would have the wits to pull it off. In my
imagination I spoke with my friend, the harpsichord maker whom
in the first two decades after we moved to Belmont.  I would
regularly visit in his shop. The last time I was in his shop,
he told me he was going out of business because a physician whom
he had consulted had advised him that he was developing Alzheimer's
disease. I think doctors are at their most destructive when they
pretend they have prophetic powers. As a matter of fact, in this
week's medical journal there is a strong recommendation that _all_
elderly patients be subjected to formal psychological testing
for possibly incipient dementia, even if, and especially if, they
have no signs or symptoms and appear in perfect mental health.
My response is nothing but contempt for my profession. This morning,
Margaret found one of the hearing aids on the floor in front of
the shelf where we store medications. That's where I must have
inadvertently deposited them last night.s A few minutes later,
behind a bag stuffed with recyclable paper, I found the other
hearing aid. My lost memory, unfortunately, I still cannot find.
Maybe, if I'm patient, it too, will show up.
Good night.
Jochen