Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. Given its purpose, I well understand 
that the trip was strenuous. I doubt that your staying overnight
in Belmont, if we had been there, would have made the project any
less arduous. As for the commencement speaker, it's perhaps from 
ignorance and/or from prejudice that I consider her to have led 
Harvard to the nadir of American culture. What kind of response 
to her commencement address can you imagine from Emerson or from 
Thoreau, or for that matter from Henry or from William James? 
Is it conceivable, considering his cosmopolitan view of our 
existence, that Herman Melville might have nominated Queequeg 
to give the Harvard Commencement oration?

Meanwhile, closer to home, I've replaced numerous burned out light 
bulbs in ceiling fixtures, cleaned the bathtub in the pink bathroom
and opened up its almost entirely occluded drain, and done lots of
laundry with impeccably functioning washer and dryer.

On the legal front, I've been reviewing such arguments as I might
make on June 18th. At this juncture, I'm mesmerized by the patent
absurdity of the hypothesis that in any specific instance the 
"plumbing code" should be anything more than the arbitrary determination
of the Inspector, insulated from judicial review by his unwillingness
or inability to report his findings and his reasoning, and by the
inspector's legitimate power to retaliate against any plumber who 
challenges his rulings by refusing to issue further plumbing permits  
to that plumber and thereby destroying his business.

With the 53rd and 54th chapter, the novel has taken a daring and 
perhaps hazardous turn with the revelation that the cooking school,
grandiloquently named Altheia University in which Charlotte is 
enrolled is in fact an institution which turns its students not into 
cooks but into upper class prostitutes. Its curriculum remains 
unchallenged because its trustees and its faculty are recruited 
from the state's executive and judicial branches. Specifically 
the attorney general and the assistant attorneys general, the appeals 
court judges, the trial court judges are all of them active  
managers and beneficiaries of Aletheia University's programs. 
Charlotte's enrollment in that university must obviously have
profound consequences for her relationship to Jonathan and Joachim,
but just what these consequences will be is not yet apparent to me. 

My best wishes to Ned and to yourself.

Jochen