Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. I very much hope that by this time
the symptoms of your vasculitis have abated and that you are much
more comfortable than when you wrote.

My day has is punctuated first by driving Klemens to his down-town
office, a trip from which I have just returned, then at 2 p.m. an
appointment with a very nice and congenial patient who slips in and
out of severe depression.

Margaret and I are well, "according to age", - my father's translation
of "dem Alter entsprechend", which I must have previously quoted to you,
and more than once. Today is our 60th wedding anniversary, a fact of
which I take notice with some reluctance, since celebration is not my
style. But I suppose Margaret's endurance and tolerance are virtues of
which I ought to take notice.

I've been reflecting, rather disproportionately I think, on the degree
of candor with which I should try to explain to Judge Macdonald four
weeks from today the propensity of Nantucket authorities to fabricate
evidence. It seems unpredictable to me how he would respond to the 
unvarnished facts. I suspect, the issue will remain uncertain until I
hear myself speaking and watch his facial expression. I'll try not to
tell him anything he doesn't want to hear.

I may have mentioned to you that partly in response to your criticism
of chapter 51, I detached from it the account of Katenuses "philosophy",
rewriting that narrative in a separate chapter, perhaps an appendix,
as a set of dialogues between Joachim and Jonathan. Although I find the
topics discussed interesting, I'm not at all satisfied with what I have
written. The past three days I've spent translating the 21 pages of
German into English, or trying to. There much work yet to be done.

The circumstance that many concepts that seem fluent and persuasive
in German, come across as awkward, stilted and implausible in English
seems revealing. I'm reminded of the challenges of translating poetry.
The ideas to be conveyed seem in many instances undivorceably wedded
to the words in which they are expressed, and I am unexpectedly confronted
with the challenge of writing - believe it or not - what must be deemed
be a poem in the English language. I've never been so deeply impressed
with the inseparability of language and meaning. I can't avoid the
conclusion that thought, - and not least "philosophical" thought is a
creature of language, and that accodingly the significance which I have
sometimes attached to such thought has been exaggerated.

I hope that by now you are well on the way to recovery from the
vasculitis. Please give my best to Ned.
Jochen