Dear Nicola,

Thank you for both your letters. Changing my mind is engrained in my spirit,
I do it all the time, but with respect to the trip about which you ask, it
seems unlikely that I will want to go, because of a set of countervailing 
considerations of which the risk of being kidnapped by physicians is not 
the only one, albeit at the top of the list.

I'm much impressed by the cogency and the obscurity of the forces which 
control our society. When I try to talk about such topics, I get lost in
generalities. Better to submit to the discipline of writing unambiguously
and if possible, concisely.

I find it useful to explore in depth and to expand in breadth, Schopenhauer's
notions that our World is Will and Representation - die Welt als Wille und
Vorstellung, because the topics to which you allude, "medical kidnapping" and 
"fake medical journal articles' both become conceptually tractable when
considered as expressions of "Vorstellungen", i.e. conceptual representations
whose roots in community experience are obvious, as is their incompatibility
with my own (subjective) intellectual and emotional experience (Erleben).

For the resolution of the incompatibility of social with individual existence,
I rely no longer on reason and logic, inasmuch as we live in a
profoundly illiterate and irrational age, corrupted as we have been by
television as the purveyor of political, societal and economic falsehood.
Rather I look to a non-idealistic instrumentalist pragmatism as the thread
that might show me the way out of the labyrinth where the Minotaur of the 
Masses is licking his (her?) lips in anticipation of devouring me.

Thanks in part to Verizon's help in facilitating solitude by refusing to
repair 617-489-1043 - from which if you try to telephone, you will receive
a busy signal (how appropriate!), my writing in the past few days 
has been extraordinarily productive and I want to press on with it as 
vigorously as I am able. If you want to talk to me, try, in this order:
617-489-1043, 617-548-5768, ernstmeyer@earthlink.net.

Stay well and contented with the world and with yourself.

Jochen