Dear Cyndy,

Thank you for your letter. From my concern about your long silence, about your 
health, and from feelings of guilt for having neglected to make inquiries, 
I had begun a letter to you which remained a fragment and which has now been 
superseded.

I am becoming a true historian: I now live in the past, in the ever-revolving
consciousness of my idyllic marriage which I can not only not forget, but
which I feel compelled to audit, assay and reconstruct in memory. I survive
because the past is much, much more immediate to me than the present.

Margaret and I, as I may have mentioned, had the habit of preserving all
correspondence; and now the room across the hall, where Margaret died, is
littered with boxes of letters, so numerous that I can't possibly read them
all in the foreseeable future.

Images of the letters which Margaret and I exchanged during our courtship, 
I scanned into the computer years ago. But now, to facilitate hypothetical
publication, I need to convert the image files to text files. To circumvent
the need for typing on a keyboard, Klemens bought for me a laptop "gaming" 
computer, powerful enough for "speech recognition". The machine understands
both English and German. I've been spending my days reading aloud  to the
computer, the correspondence in those tumultuous days between Margaret, my
parents and myself. I am able to reconstruct the past, my past, in such detail
and with such precision that my preconceptions fade its reality becomes 
progressively less accessible to me. No matter how often I reread her letters, 
no matter how accurately I memorize them, Margaret will not come back. In the 
context of my understanding that the past cannot be brought back, my great need 
for the past induces me to start talking to myself, to tell myself a story of 
the past, an history. History is the story that I tell myself of the past. Die 
Geschichte die ich mir erzähle ist Geschichte. The language itself tells it as 
it is: History is a story; Die Geschichte ist eine Geschichte.

Chalk it up to my obtuseness, when I contradict you to argue that the ultimate
historical truth is that ALL history is existentially unreal. Hence Kierkegaard's
insistence on Samtidighed, Gleichzeitigkeit, simultaneity, as preconditon for
real (religious) experience. Hence all "History" is misconception, or at best,
misunderstanding. I know that I have failed the course, that you have no choice 
but to give me an "E"; but in 3 months I'll be 86, old enough, finally to admit 
that I am a(n intellectual) failure.

Nathaniel is living at home. With an appointment as an  "assistant" to a 
well-known Boston conductor Benjamin Zander, Nathaniel seems finally to have 
gotten a foothold on a low rung of the tenuous career-ladder of which he is
dreaming. For him, the future is very uncertain.

Not so for me. My future is certain. There's no doubt where I'm going, 
and I can't wait to get there.

Best wishes to Ned and to yourself.

Jochen