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 than 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 had assumed
that they were still hibernating.  However today's mail, 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.

In spite of 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 l'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.
I discover myself a closeted Creationist. Please don't tell anyone.
Our thought, our understanding, come into being in a manner
analogous to our fantasies of the 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 inchoate experience. The account of "creation"
in Genesis is not the story that tells how the world came to be.
Rather it is the story of how from day to day the world reveals itself
to us as we, trying to understand it, recapitulate our individual experiences.

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:  quod scripsi scripsi.
(Luther's text is a big improvement over St. Jerome:
"Was ich geschrieben habe, das habe ich geschrieben.")
Law appears to grow organically from linguistic experience.
Because it is unchangeable, by virtue of its permanence
what is written becomes law.

That's surely more, much more than you wanted to read, but as
in other projects, self-censorship is not my style. My hope:
that the cold weather has not totally enervated you and has
left Ned and yourself prepared for the slow but inevitable onset
of spring.

Jochen