Dear Cyndy, Thank you for your letter. From the official weather reports I infer that the temperature in Hilliard has been and continues to be grim, even more so that in Belmont. But we are surviving, and so, I hope are Ned and yourself. Beginning last Friday until Tuesday, the Appeals Court web site was out of commission, but now that they are back on line, I assumed that they were still hibernating. However today's maail, notwithstanding the silence of their web site, brought a notice that the hearing has been scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on Friday, February 7. A new chapter is about to begin. Notwithstanding the circumstance that the plot of the novel has reached a critical juncture, my enthusiasm for proceeding with it seems suddenly to have withered, - I don't know why, - but I've learned from experience that forcing myself to write with a reluctant imagination is a prescription for failure. I must wait patiently until the spirit summons me. Who knows when that will occur? Meanwhile, I think you're not fair to characterize yourself as an "indolent housewife" who "can't wait for the next installment." I myself am uncertain about the esthetic - and literary - value of what I have been writing, but I resist self-censorship, and if in the end these bizarre, expressionistic phantasies turn out to be meaningless, it should not be difficult to replace them with less flamboyant narrative. Meanwhile, while waiting for "inspiration", I've been reading scraps of classical Greek literature, including Pindar's second Olympian Ode which 55 or so years ago, I partly memorized by listening over and over again to a very inauthentic recording - no one is able to mouthe the ancient language - which I made for myself when I was a country doctor, and played over and over again on a tape recorder installed in the car in which I drove across the mountains from Damascus through a sliver of northeast Tennessee and back into Virginia to home visits in a hamlet called Taylors Valley, inseparably linking my memory of Pindar's ode with the steep, narrow, winding country road which I had to negotiate to visit my patient. I've also been reading scraps of Book 6 of Plato's Republic, a few chapters in the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John, the latter in my bilingual Greek-Latin edition, pleased with the number of verses I can construe without referring to a translation or to a dictionary. I'm embarrassed to admit my lack of enthusiasm for the epistles of Paul, passages in which words seem to serve to generate a spurious (spiritual) experience rather than to reflect genuine feeling: an imbalance between a wealth of rhetoric and a paucity of meaning. My newly aroused interest in Constitutional law has led me to read a few chapters in Montesquieu's "Esprit des Lois" where I find much to think about. I was struck with Montesquieu's genetic approach, i.e. the presumption of discovery the esprit in its history, beginning with purportedly "eternal" laws of nature: - Nature and nature's laws were his in night, God said, let Newton be and all was light. Followed by the exposition of "law" from its origins in classical times ... about which I know so little and about which, it seems to me, Montesquieu doesn't know that much more. A description which provides a very shaky foundation for a speculative edifice that turns out to consist of one concept more or less arbitrarily cemented onto the next... It occurs to me that there is an analogy, a conceptual correspondence between the experience of thinking, between the discovery of ones developing ideas, and the myths of the creation of the world. Our thought, our understanding comes into being in a manner analogous to our fantasies of way the world was created. Just as the world arose from the organization of chaos, in Latin "inanis et vacuus", in Greek, apeiron, unbounded, so our understanding develops from indefinite, undefined inchaote experience. In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram terram autem erat inanis et vacuus et tenebrae super faciem abyssi et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas dixitque deus fiat lux et facta est lux et vidit deus lucem quod esset bona et divisit lucem ac tenebras appellavitque lucem diem et tenebras noctem The awakening of consciousness is like that. Thought, like the primal world, is inanis and vacuus, requiring to be "organized" by logos. Thought comes into being in a manner analogous to the mythical creation of the world. The principle of organization is variously logic, (language), or time. One event leads to - causes another; temporal juxtaposition is intuitively accepted as causal. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Language, above all, serves as the organizing principle of experience. When language is written it becomes permanent and acquires the quality of law. Language is primary to intellectual activity. In Pilate's memorable words: enunciated: quod scripsi scripsi. Because it is unchangeable, that which is written becomes law, and law appears to grow organically from linguistic experience. The separation of powers is an idealization which has led to a political artifact. It reflects the circumstance that executor, legislator and adjudicator are separate, different individuals. Notwithstanding Thrasymachus, justice is not the advantage of the stronger. It is rather a harmony aspired to, a harmony that integrates individual and social existence, and makes them both healhty if not indeed possible. Justice is the intellectual, logical framework for (individual) existence iun a social context; and because each of us exists as an individual, it is necessarily individual existence which is vouchsafed by justice. Thus I discover a concept of natural law corresponding to my own nature, fulfilling my own needs.