Dear Cyndy,

Your reply to my note of February 23, reporting your reaction to the rectivation
of my Nantucket litigation, has give me to think. You wrote:

"Good grief, how long is this going to go on??
But they know not their opponent if they think you will give up. 
Will Klemens continue in your stead after your demise?"

This morning, as I awoke, I remembered how, in medical school, I would desert
the afternoon "clinics" - which I found intolerably tedious, in favor of
the seminars in which Werner Jaeger permitted me to participate.
One of these seminars concerned a Hellenistic text "About the sublime"
(Peri hypsous) by an author whose identity even today has not been established.
The text was "rediscovered" in the 17th century in a French translation by Boileau,
and then became a favorite topic in 18th century England, the subject of treatises
by both Edmund Burke and the Earl of Shaftesbury, (I don't know in which order.)
distinguishing the Sublime from the Beautiful. Most likely you encountered the
concepts in your teaching. Napoleon is quoted as having said.
Du sublime au ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas. The concepts entered the German tradition
in Kant's Critique of Judgment and in Schillers Essay "On the Sublime". (Über das
Erhabene) The notion was also of interest to the New England Transcendentalists:
Emerson characteristically wrote:

"Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, 
dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, 
with new power, with an advanced experience 
that shall explain and overlook the old."

I haven't taken the time for a scholarly review of the Sublime. It was originally,
I believe, a primarily rhetorical concept whose interpretation changed over the centuries.
The contemporary meaning, if I understand correctly, refers to the esthetic satisfaction
derived from experiencing a potentially overwhelming and destructive phenomenon of
nature in the face of which the observer nonetheless feels secure. The thunderbolt 
which does not strike you, the tornado which does not destroy your house, the
hurricane that roils the oceans, so long as it doesn't drown you, are all of them
"sublime". All this in the context of your question:
"Good grief, how long is this going to go on??"

I compare the legal landscape of which my lawsuit has unexpectedly opened for me
an awesome view, with the violent surf of the North Atlantic that I can see from
the second story of the Nantucket house, half a mile - far enough away - to be
confident that several hundred years will need to elapse before the waves start
lapping at our front porch. The legal landscape strikes me as similarly appalling 
in its destructiveness, the mendacity and fabrication of evidence of the Inspector
having infected the Town government like a medieval plague, now spreading to the  
plumbing board and its lawyers up to and including the Attorney General
of the Commonwealth, about to invade to the Superior Court and the Appeals Court,
until the illusion of integrity of the judicial system, like a tawdry cosmetic 
on the face of the prostitute, has disappeared entirely from the face of the 
Leviathan. I admit that finding this process of de-idealization an awesome spectacle 
is perhaps an index of my megalomania and an index of my folly.

Jochen