Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. In response to your comment
about your questions remaining unanswered, I have, in an attempt
to do my duty, extracted from your most recent three letters
all questions and various statements implicitly inviting comment.
My answers are probably more than you wanted to know.

1) "I am wondering if we could 
introduce an alternate love for Joachim."

==> You'll remember my answer when I remind you of my comments
about the spiritual value of being in love with a witch.

2) "... we lived on Pemberton St.
If you want to see our early-McKinley house,
just drive by number 24, a little off Mass Ave."

==> I looked up the exact location on the Google map.
24 Pemberton Street is an area in North Cambridge
where many of my patients lived. Search of my computerized
patient directory yields four addresses on Pemberton Street.
At the intersection of Pemberton St. and Rindge Ave. was the
optometrist's office of Dr. Lewis Palosky who was well disposed
and referred many patients to me.  Nowadays I seldom have
occasion to visit that part of Cambridge, but when I do, I'll
take a look at No. 24, and a photograph as of any other
historical site, - if I don't forget.
 
3) "If you are going to Virginia in early April,
I hope I can continue our correspondence.
Somehow, I don't quite believe in that place,
even though you have sent me pictures--
purportedly of the house. But let me know, ok?"

==> The place is very real. The date of our going is
somewhat uncertain, but it will be after the April 5,
hearing.  Much will happen between now and then.

4) "Did the lawyer ever reply?"

==> I forwarded his letter, and appended my comments.

5) "I think your cousin follows your train of thought better than I. 
I'd like to meet her some day.  What is her field? 
I know you told me, but I have forgotten."

==> Marion (nine years younger than I) who is now fulfilling for me
the function of my sister, has a PhD in biology, I believe from Cornell,
and was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin.
When she was denied tenure, she sued, claiming sex discrimination.
She had a strong case but an unsympathetic judge. For several years
past she has been working as a research assistant in the Pediatrics
Department of the University of Minnesota Hospital. She collects and
distributes to research projects all over the country, diseased livers
that have been obtained at the time of transplantation. I've never
asked her about prior employment, but remember now her telling
me that for a period of time she worked, quite successfully, as
a talk-show hostess. Her father, my Onkel Fritz, a successful
business executive in pre-Hitler Germany, became in the US,
a conscientious, hard-working certified public accountant, whose
diligence in applying the tax code to his customers' affairs
severly limited his professional success because his efforts
often led to higher taxes ...  His wife, Margot, a flamboyant
business woman in her own right, and much more successful than
her husband, traveled across the continent as a sales representative
for a firm selling womens' hats. Margot was sceptical of all Kultur,
and prohibited recitations in her presence of the poetry that was part
of Onkel Fritz' German-Jewish heritage.  Margot was correspondingly
resentful of my parents' cultural pretensions and prodded her husband
to make an issue of my father's accommodation to American Lutheranism
as a "betrayal" of the Jewish tradition. 

6) "Are you now working on the next chapter?"

==> Yes, at this juncture with a deficiency of inspiration. I have
expanded and rearranged Chapter 51, which now includes two episodes
of Charlotte's storming out of the house, first in protest to
the family bank of $20 bills hidden in the volume of Schopenhauer;
the second time, in disdain of Katenuses philosophy. Chapter 51
concludes with a reproduction of the notes that Elly slipped to
Mengs just as he and Joachim were leaving the Mansion to return home.

Chapter 52 now consists entirely of the three dialogues between
Mengs and Joachim, which you deemed too verbose and whose speakers
Marion thought were too bland. These dialogues as well as the
notes from Katenus are all subject to editing and improvement. I
decided rather than being deleted, they should be left for an
hypothetical reader who might find in them a useful introduction
to topics worth thinking about. 

Chapter 53 describes Charlotte entering the renovated building on
Mass Avenue in North Cambridge just above Porter Square where a
Cooking School is being installed. She won't last. I'm toying
with various satires on academic pretensions. I don't know yet
whether they will have her take a SCAT (Scholastic Cooking
Aptitude Test) or what the course requirements will be,
e.g. cooking humanities, cooking in Ancient Greece or Imperial
Rome, perhaps Philosophy of Food, and of course, basic sciences,
maybe a course on Theory and Practice of Natural Agricultural
Fertilization.  Not until their third year, are students permitted
to turn on the electric stove. As a matter of fact students don't
get to cook an entire meal until they've taken three additional
years of graduate school cookery and written a cookery thesis.

Chapter 54 will be the account of a philosophy conference in a lecture
hall on the top floor of Widener, where Jonathan presents Katenuses
theories - with catastrophic results. Of course Joachim will be there.
So will Charlotte, albeit uninvited, hectoring Jonathan and deflating
his academic pretensions. I wish I were sufficiently knowledgable to
introduce and satirize representatives of contemporary philosophical
fashions. I'll try, but I doubt that I can pull it off. The resulting
rupture between Charlotte and Jonathan will plunge Joachim into an
emotional crisis that I dread to contemplate. I have no choice.

7) "Good to get the  house painted. I hope it didn't cost a fortune."

==> Cost of materials:$272.25; agreed upon costs of labor:$1007.70
or $251.88 a day for 4 days. However, I paid the painter an additional
$475.25 as a gift, because I considered him to be socially and
economically disadvantaged and his proposed charges much too low.
He was obviously poor and desperately in need of work. I didn't want
to take advantage of him. My total cost: $1765 was, judging from
previous experience, less that one third of what a more conventional
arrangement would have cost. Besides the $475.25 comes out of funds that
I withheld from Harvard College, Harvard Graduate School, Harvard Medical
School, Mass Eye and Ear Infirmary, the American Cancer Society, the
Sierra Club, the Salvation Army, the Gingrich, Santorum, Romney and Obama
presidential campaigns, Moveon.org. The painter was not a bureaucracy nor
a charitable cause, nothing but himself, a poor human being barely able
to get by. 

8) "And far better that HE should fall off a ladder than you."

==> It's an ethically unanswerable question. I'm 82 and he's 46. 
Assuming each of us were killed and would otherwise have died at
the age of 83, I would have lost only one, but he would have lost 
37 years. I'm not prepared to argue that my life is more than 37
times valuable than his. But he and I each in his own way made sure
that the issue did not need to be contempleted: He, by having his
wife sready the ladder on which he was working, - eminently reasonable
since most ladder injuries are caused not by the painter falling from
the ladder, but by some unforseen circumstance causing the ladder to
fall. I, by purchasing (for $99 plus tax) a roofer's harness with
supporting rope, which would have safely arrested a fall from the
narrow pitched roof in front of the dormers that required painting.
I'll attach a photo of the painter in the safety harness with his
wife holding the rope, - just in case.

9) "Perhaps I have leukemia.  One of the first symptoms,
I'm told, is tremendous fatigue."

==> My general practice days are so far in the past, and there's
been so much medical "progress" in the meanwhile, that my answer
probably is not worth any consideration at all. It's my impression
that the tortures of leukemia are not from the disease but from
the presumption to cure it. I doubt that I could find a hematologist
who has experience with untreated leukemia. My impression is that
leukemia would end with painless hemorrhage and secondary infection
neither of which would be excruciating in the absence of treatment.
The answer of course is in Cantata #106 to which, if I understand
correctly, leukemia is essential obbligato.

10) "How did Helmut get a photo of the Hamburg?"

==> He bought the photo from a dealer in Hamburg. He also gave
me a photo of the boat, Die Hansa, with which my father arrived.
I suspect there is in today's Germany, an active market for photos
of the pre-Palin, I mean the pre-Hitler era.

11) "How long a journey was it?"

==> 8 days. We left Bremerhaven in the early evening of March 23,
and arrived at Pier 46 on Manhattan's West Side in the morning of
March 31, 1939.

12) "Did you have trouble getting visas?"

==> Not for my mother, Margrit or myself. My father's passport had been
confiscated after a fatal accident on the Autobahn (Interstate) near
Giessen. My parents were returning from a final pre-emigration tour
of southern Germany, when my father struck a deaf pedestrian who had
wandered onto the limited access highway. Then came the Kristallnacht
of November 9, 1938. While my father was in Buchenwald, my mother
negotiated successfully with the Staatsanwalt (district attorney) for
the release of the passport, by threatening him with hell-fire if he
didn't cooperate.

13) "What has happened with Nathaniel and the Ninth? 
I do hope he has taken your advice and opted for a more
do-able program. I was particularly struck with your idea
of the voice parts being taken by an organ. That would make
a very interesting (and possibly great) presentation,
and probably unique."

==> Nathaniel is still working on the assembly of chorus and
orchestra. Whether he'll succeed remains to be seen. But here
as always it's not the success, but the effort that matters.

14) "Have you ever noticed that we tend, you and I, NOT to answer
each other's questions?  Let's alter that habit. I don't ask just
to hear myself talk, and I doubt if you do either.  So--what would
you like to know?"

==> I'll let my answers in this and previous letters, speak for
themselves. As for my questions, I'll defer to Faust:

Dass ich erkenne was die Welt
im Innersten zusammenhaelt,
Schau alle Wirkenskraft und Samen,
und tu nicht mehr in Worten kramen.

That I might understand
the structure of the inmost world,
perceive the seed and how it grows,
stop all the rummaging in words.

I would like to become the literature expert
who has no time for questions, because of being
busy reading between the lines.

Please give my best to Ned.

Jochen