Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. To connect your computer to the Internet
by wire as distinct from wireless, get a Category 5 cable (a glorified
telephone cable); plug one end into the jack on your computer; plug the
other end into the wireless router. Your computer's software should
recognize the difference between the wireless and the wired connection
and adjust preferentially to the wired connection, even in the presence
of a wireless signal.

As for how I feel? It's difficult at best to calibrate ones own psyche,
all the more so where Margaret has died after so complex an illness and
I have invested myself in her care for so many years. Provided I don't
spend time brooding on the hundreds of photos that I have of her, or
reading her voluminous diaries, or rereading our correspondence when
we were falling in love, - provided I try not to remember, provided I
manage to forget, I feel indecently well; as usual: smug, arrogant and 
self-satified. I'm also aware that I'm skirting the edge of a Grand 
Canyon and will be doing so for months or years to come.

My admiring pen pal in Heidelberg, Niels Holger Nielsen, has been nudging
me to try to write poetry, and I've begun to acceed to his suggestion.
His applause is such that even if there were no Internet, I could almost
hear it across the ocean. Rilke once wrote that the poetry which one
writes absorbs, transforms and relieves what is painful, an observation 
which my experience confirms. By forcing them into the iambic pentameter 
of an Elizabethan sonnet, I can confront scenes and events which otherwise 
I couldn't contemplate. I wish the stuff were in English so I could send
it to you to read.

Thank you and Ned for your invitation to visit you in Hilliard. Fpr a day or
two after Margaret died, I was manic, thinking about traveling to Germsany,
Austria, Switzerland, Italy, France, and the Canadian Rockies ... stopping
on the way in Hilliard to see you. Now that I've become sober, I'm unsure,
diffident because of the unpredictability of my health at age 85. If I ever
came, I'd bring a sleeping bag or stay in a motel. I'd never make work for
you of any kind.

For the time being, however, I have no plans to go anywhere. The house needs
to be swept and put in order. Closets, bureau drawers and book shelves
rearranged. I have one volume of fiction and two volumes of Nielsen
correspondence ready for the Amazon.com self-publishing venture, of course
without expectation of any readers. I want to experiment with more
sonnets and elegies, and unavoidably I must follow Charlotte into the
bedrooms of Judge Lemuel Adams to whom she will prostitute herself in
order to win freedom for Katenus. 

My thoughts proceed to my own Nantucket litigation which Justice Linda
Giles of Suffolk Superior Court has sentenced to indefinite confinement
in limbo, - refusing to issue a judgment against me which would be reversed 
on appeal, and refusing to issue a judgment for me because if she did, 
her toilets would never ever be repaired again.

That's all I have to report this evening. Please give my best to Ned
and stay as well and happy as you are able in a world so vile it precludes
our loving each other, at least according to Shakespeare.

Jochen

A post-script about Hamlet. Shakespeare got it backwards. Supposing I 
were Hamlet Sr. and Gertrude whom I loved (as I know how to love)
ran off with Claudius, frankly I wouldn't want to live. And if I 
didn't want to live, I'd want to die. I can think of no better way
to die than in my sleep, in an orchard, lulled by the fragrance of
the apple blossoms. As for the tragedy of ones dying without having 
confessed ones sins, that's nonsense, and Shakespeare knows it. So
Claudius deserves recognition for having done his brother a favor.