Dear Cyndy,

This letter's primary purpose is as a "welcome home" on your return
from your odyssey to Amherst. I wish there might have been a possibility
for Margaret and myself to be helpful to Jane, but I acknowledge that
absent the opportunity, that sentiment is mere empty rhetoric.

Margaret and I spent yesterday driving 175 miles to Readfield in Maine
and 175 miles back, nine hours of driving for a 3 hour visit with
Margaret's brother Alex, Alex's wife Winnie, his fifty year old son, Tom
and Tom's permanent, live-in girl friend whose name I don't know. It was
and unusually congenial visit, and a telephone call this morning from
Alex persuaded me that all parties thought the event well worth the effort.

Thursday's hearing, of course, is very much on my mind. Far from anticipating
that encounter with Justice, as an ordeal to be feared, I look to it as a an
opportunity to perform, an oral examination of sorts where the roles of
professor and student will be exchanged. I have serious doubts about whether
I can give Judge Macdonald a passing grade even in Elementary Justice. But
then, I'm told that pride goeth before destruction and an haughty spirit
before a fall.

In addition to the hearing, I've been preoccupied - if one can be preoccupied
by many matters at once, by the necessary inspection and repairs to the 1997
green minivan, to the 2005 blue minivan, preoccupied by Charlotte's avenging
herself on the cooking school by stealing $400 worth of cooking utensils,
preoccupied by the argument that maybe Martin Luther's evangelical hobby horse,
"the just are saved by faith" was nothing more than an advertising gimmick,
a freebie so to speak, "No indulgences, no payments ever if you sign up for our
cruise to Heaven before it's too late."  I suspect that originally the "faith"
that was to replace (Mosaic) Code compliance, was "belief" in  parthenogenesis, 
belief in post-mortem revitalization and belief in science-fiction space travel,
in addition to belief in a series of most improbable historical events.

I was startled to think that "faith" so defined is essentially a rejection of
"reason", a reflection of the circumstance - in Rilke's translated idiom -
that we are not reliably at home in the conceptual world (of the textbooks
and the encyclopedias) - and that the "faith" which was Luther's stock in trade,
was in fact a species of scepticism, an expression of doubt, whose spiritual
consequences may not prove so different from the Zweifel an der gedeuteten Welt
(doubt about the interpreted world) which I've been peddling all these years.
What remains to be clarified is whether the intersection of these two species
of doubt in the art of the Baroque is anything more than an aesthetic illusion.

But now, I must get to work. Be happy, be very happy to get back!
Jochen