Dear Marion,

Just now I forwarded to you the NY Review of Books link to a
translation of Grasses eulogy of Helmut. That publication itself
in the NY Review, suggests that there are American readers aware
of Helmut and that he had literary connections in the US. He lived
in NYC for about 8 years, and would have stayed had he been able
to garner the requisite financial resources. Helmut never explained
to me his professional work in the US, and I never asked. He made
passing references to his participation in and perhaps leadership of
workshops for translators. He never told me, and I never asked 
whether his trips to Boston had purposes other than visiting my
family and me.

Thank you for your letter, and of course, for your sympathetic
tolerance of my literary pretensions. My immediate reaction was
a quick re-reading and superfical editing of 
http://home.earthlink.net/~jochenmeyer/freunde/f052.html
These efforts confirmed my incurable narcissism: I was much
pleased with what I read. Over the years I've found that what
I thought were discoveries personal to me, had long since been
matters of established scientific practice. When I was experimenting
with electricity in the basement of the old Konnarock Medical Center
in the early 1940's, I thought I had "invented" the auto-transformer
which had in fact been an established electrical engineering technique
for decades. I mention this childhood delusion, because today, on the
threshold of senility, I am deluded by the thought that Katenuses
epistemology, i.e. his interpretation that knowledge is assimilation of
the mind to the environment and a potentially physically identifiable
process and his interpretation that learning is the dialectic of faith
and doubt, of idealization and de-idealization, - I'm deluded by the
thought that this epistemology might be an improvement over the
conventional wisdom.  Is it, or isn't it?  I don't know.

Chapter 53 is evolving in unanticipated directions. Charlotte, as I've
mentioned, wants to go to cooking school. Although she spurned Joachim's
offer of membership in the depository of twenty dollar bills in volume 2
of the dilapidated Schopenhauer edition, she has nonetheless taken the
four hundred dollars as non-refundable registration fee and tuition
downpayment to the cooking school. After she return home and reads the
contract which she has signed, she discovers to her chagrin, the
bureaucratic/academic nonsense, described in my previous letter, in which
she has been trapped.  Charlotte is furious, and rushes back to the
cooking school to recover her money. The cooking school door is open,
but the kitchen and the classrooms are empty. There's no one in sight
to berate, no one with whom to argue. Convinced that she has been cheated
of her deposit by the cooking school, and that justice requires her to be
made whole, she decides to help herself to four hundred dollars' worth of
kitchen equipment and silverware. Before she's able to escape, the buglar
alarm is triggered, the police arrive, she's arrested and charged
with burglary.

So now we're in Venice with Antonio, Bassanio and Portia. Never mind
Shylock, his role I assign to the cooking school financial officer.
Joachim will pinch-hit for Portia: he reads the contract and finds that
although it states the deposit will not be returned, there's nothing
stating that the obligation incurred by the cooking school in demanding
and accepting the four hundred dollars, must not be equitably discharged.
Joachim secures Charlotte's release, plus damages for false imprisonment.
Although Joachim and Charlotte thereafter live together, unfortunately
it will not be "happily ever after."

For lack of time, I've reneged on my resolve for parallel German and
English versions of the novel. As I write, I can't dispense with German,
although I still very much hope to rewrite it in English.  Whether I'll
ever get to the translation, is another matter. The language is the
key to the thought. I've come to the conclusion about the classical
philosophical texts of Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Husserl,
Heidegger ... that they are to an extent literally incomprehensible, but
that the obscurity of the words has an unrecognized  "transcendental"
effect, in that they all point to experiences beyond language; and that
paradoxically and perhaps perversely, it's their obscurity, their 
pointing to a reality beyond language, that makes them significant.
This obscurity separates them from such authors as Locke, Hume, Bentham
and Mill who take pride in staying on this side of the irrationality
barrier, and therefore are unsuccessful in broaching those issues of
trans-lingual meaning which might arguably be of ultimate importance.

That's enough for this afternoon. Stay well.
Jochen