Dear Anne,
  
Thank you very much for your letter. I am acutely aware of the burdens of Dan's
illness weighing on both of you, and I begin by sending both of you my best
wishes.

The thoughts which I tried to convey with my last letter reflect my personal
view of the world, of human nature, of the law, and of the courts. My personal
opinions are nothing that the Court wants to hear. I will keep them to myself.
As I wrote in my letter: I have no intention of confiding in the Appeals Court.
The criticism in your letter is not of my legal "case". It is a criticism of 
me personally, of the sort of individual that I am. I'm not offended. On the
contrary, I thank you. I'm incurably vain, flattered by whatever attention
I can garner. I'm inured to criticism; it doesn't trouble me.

If I were bringing the suit de novo, I might adopt your legal approach.
But where the litigation is of 12 years' duration, it has unavoidably
been redefined by the courts. In fact it is now the case which the Appeals
Court has articulated, not I. At this juncture my strategy will be to
hew strictly to the matters as stated and restated in the Appeals Court
decisions, to introduce no new issues, to provide the Court the occasion
to implement its prior orders. The Court will form its own opinion of me 
by extrapolating from my brief. It will look down on me, and ask itself 
how it can use this case brought by a dissheveled, deaf, toothless, crippled, 
but obviously not entirely witless old man to buttress its own precarious 
position in its unending competition with the inferior courts, with the 
Executive and with the Legislature.

I have no idea what they will decide. Foolishly or otherwise, I'm not 
afraid, cushioned as I am by my sense of humor and irony and historical
perspective. Many years ago, when Nathaniel and Benjamin were small, I
would look out of this window to watch them playing Minutemen and Redcoats;
and when I close my eyes now, I see myself, notwithstanding your sober
clarion call to sobriety, playing solitaire the ancient game of Massachusetts 
justice, standing like an accused Salem witch in the Court of Oyer and 
Terminer, with witnesses on all sides ready with spectral evidence; and the 
judges, all of them, wearing black robes emblazoned with gleaming swastikas.

And now it's time for me to ask whether you will ever write to me again.
Once more, my  very best wishes to Dan and to yourself.

Jochen