Dear Anne,

Probably I'm inappropriately paternalistic when I write that I worry about your
finding or not finding a congenial position in the world of the law. I worry
about the exhaustion that must ensue from the concern over Dan's failing health,an issue to which almsot all physicians that I know (except Klemens) are obtuse.I'm not sure whether sympathy does more harm than good.

I started to read Montesquieu's L'Esprit des Lois from a literary perspective.
That, as you know, was the book which served as a Bible to our "founding
fathers", a pattern for both the federal and state constitutions. I'm
particularly interested in reconciling Part I, Section XXX, which institutes 
the division of powers, with the Hearing before the Plumbing Board, where the
Board: a) makes the regulations, b) executes the regulations, and c) adjudicates
the regulations, functioning at one and the same time as i) judge, ii) party, 
iii) prosecutor and iv) witness. It turns out, if I read Montesquieu correctly,
that he is a shallow popular thinker, who fails to understand the complications
which his theories engender. But don't worry, this is just for myself; 
I have no intention at all to lecture the Appeals Court on constitutional law.

Much as I lament the outcome of the recent election, I think it may promote
in the Appeals Court an atmosphere more favorable to me, to the extent that 
it might have served to sensitize the justices to the societal consequences 
of fabrication; and they may feel some urgency to demonstrate that Massachusetts
courts are not to become playing fields for Trumpists.

For an understanding of the esthetic experience of the ocean, its vastness,
wildness, and unpredictability, I refer to the notion of the sublime, 
as articulated in the 18th century by the Earl of Shaftsbury and Edmund Burke.
Whereas what is beautiful is benign and pleasing, what is sublime, e.g.
a thunderstorm, a tornado, is at one and the same time enticing and threatening
to the observer. Lightning is sublime unless it strikes you. The ocean is
sublime unless you drown in it.

I am reminded of lines from Rilke's Duino Elegy #1: 

                             Denn das Schöne ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmäht,
uns zu zerstören. 

                             For beauty is naught
but the inception of terror, which we tolerate barely,
and we admire it so much, because it serenely disdains
to destroy us.

I perceive that the absurdity of the court-room comedy is in its own way
"sublime". It is my confrontation with the mindless cruelty of society,
which I survive by my wits and cunning, just as my navigational and
sailing skills would save me from the ocean's abyss.

Best wishes to Dan and to yourself. Please keep me informed as you are able
to do so without inflicting on yourself unnecessary distress.

Jochen