Dear Alex, Again, thank you very much for your telephone call; again, I apologize for so much ineffectual talk. My life, and I assume that of everyone else, is sometimes shadowed with disappointments. One way of dealing with such disappointments is to bury them in silence, not to talk about them; that's what all the other members of my family do. Another way of coping with disappointment and despair is prescribed in the Bible: (Numbers 21) 6 And the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. 7 Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the LORD, and against thee; pray unto the LORD, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. 8 And the LORD said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. 9 And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived. For many years now, I have considered the injunction "Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole:", especially in contradiction to the prior prohibition in Exodus 20:4 of making any image: 4 Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. as a divine commandment authorizing, instituing art, not only sculpture and painting, but literature, prose and poetry which creates a verbal image of what hurts or threatens me, as an anodyne protecting me from disappointment and despair. I consider my mentioning such matters in telephone conversations with you as an hypothetical first draft of a poem or of a story or of a novel which never materializes. This in respect to personal, professional, family and political disappoinments which, I deem like other illnesses, rightly or wrongly, to be inescapable facets of human nature. I plan, if I live long enough, and if my mind, such as it is, holds up, to compose descriptions of the political processes by which Otis Air Force base on Cape Cod is turned into a Nazi style concentration camp to protect society against dissident thinkers. At the same time, I am much aware of how painful such a description would be to those who believe that engaging in the political process, participating in demonstrations, writing letters to the newspaper or to the congressman, perhaps oneself running for public office, is the constructive path to the betterment of our country. I have been reading a book by Albert Schweitzer which he started before the 1st World War and finished after the war, in which he laments the pitiful state of the world for which he blames the failure of philosophy (sic!) to address the world order (Weltanschauung). He argues that philosophy must become a popular pasttime, - I suppose like jigsaw puzzles or computer games, so that the consitutent members of a democracy will learn to think, and having learned to think will elect a more virtuous government. To me the emblem of the hopelessness of all this, is Schweitzer practicing what he preaches not at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge or at the Sorbonne, but in the jungle of Equatorial Africa. Love, as always, Jochen