November 17, 1999

Dear Margrit,

Thank you for the check.

In response to your question about our plans: the children have talked from time to time about wanting to go to Konnarock in one of their upcoming vacations; I think there are two in the course of the winter and one in the spring, but I don't know the dates. Klemens has been so busy that I have nmot found occasion to ask him about his plans.  I doubt that he has any.

As for Margaret and myself, we are both preoccupied with our projects, she with taking care of the children and I with the completion of the addition. Our trip(s) to Konnarock hinge largely on your wishes and the needs of the Konnarock house.  If we were wanted and/or needed, we could come at just about any time on short notice; but if our coming made you uncomfortable to the extent of having to find refuge in Janice Gable's prefabricated house, as was the case on our most recent visit, then it would make more sense to avoid the gratuitous family drama and to schedule to coincide with one of your temporary absences.

Our recent disagreements have occasioned for me much thought and some remorse, and I am quite prepared to accept not only some, but, in fact, all of the blame. Purporting to find the fault outside of oneself seems to me an entirely unproductive excersise. The flaw, as I understand it, is my lifelong compulsion to create a very close emotional and intellectual community, first with Mutti and Papa and yourself, then with Margaret and Klemens.These efforts have been entirely successful only so far as Margaret is concerned. Mutti and Papa and Klemens have all been, each in his way, ambivalent, but other members of the family, Laura, her parents, Margaret's brothers and sister are made uncomfortable by the sort of person I am.  This fact neither embarrasses nor saddens me.  seems to me no cause for surprise.  Each of us is different.  and each of us lives his own separate, lonely life, and each of us dies alone.

Community - Gemeinschaft - is a goal to which we strive; which is almost impossible to attain, and is more likely than not an illusion.  Paradoxically, it is the search for community that demonstrate the differences and provokes interminable conflict.  arguing, fighting, envious, hostile.  Heracleitus is quoted as having said that strife is the father of all things.

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Dear Margrit,

Thank you for the check.

You ask when we are planning to come to Konnarock.  The children have talked from time to time about wanting to go to Konnarock in one of their upcoming vacations; I think there are two in the course of the winter and one in the spring, but I don't know the dates.  I raised the issue when talking to Klemens last night, but he gave me no answer.

As for Margaret and myself, we are both preoccupied with our projects, she with taking care of the children and I with the completion of the addition. Our trip(s) to Konnarock hinge largely on your wishes and the needs of the Konnarock house.  If we were wanted and/or needed, we could come at just about any time on short notice; but if our coming made you uncomfortable to the extent of having to find refuge in Janice Gable's prefabricated house, as was the case on our most recent visit, then it would make more sense to avoid a gratuitous family drama and to schedule our visit to coincide with one of your temporary absences.

Our recent disagreements have occasioned for me much thought and some remorse, and I am quite prepared to accept not only some, but, in fact, all of the blame. Purporting to find the fault outside of oneself seems to me invariably an unproductive excersise.

The cause, der Grund, as I understand it, and I am more than willing to admit it to be a fault, is my lifelong compulsion to create a close emotional and intellectual community, first with Mutti and Papa and yourself, then with Margaret and Klemens, and most recently with Laura and her children.  To this end, I have disdained the conventional instruments of association, the church services and the seders, the birthday and Christmas (and Hannukah) parties, the Christmas cards and the exchanges of "presents".  All of these seemed to me to be travesties of the more compelling relationships essential to me which I spent my life trying to create.  Curiously, even my medical practice, where I cared for each patient as if he were potentially a (close) friend, reflects the same passionate efforts at socialization.

To Laura, and if I interpret you correctly, to you, these efforts have proved an embarrassment.  Laura would rather have her children stunted by watching television than to have them cared for by Margaret and myself; you would rather seek shelter in her "trailer" as you call it from Janice Gable than to share the six bedroom house with Margaret and myself for the few days that our stays in Konnarock would overlap.  I understand that you need privacy, but the need is not for privacy from the legion of your "friends" in whose houses you readily accept accommodation, the need is for privacy from me whom you "cannot stand".

I interpret your proposed disposition of your old red car as an expression of your hostility to me.  The facts speak for themselves.  When you were "in residence", because you needed the single garage space for your new car, the old red car was parked outside, exposed to wind and rain.  When you travelled with your new car its garage space became available for the old one, you insisted then in garaging the old car, even though I suggested that leaving it outside also during your absences would provide the house with substantial additional protection against vandalism. The fact that you refused my suggestion indicates to my mind either extraordinarily poor judgment in practical matters, - since the $300,000 house is incomparably more valuable than a car ripe for the junk yard for which you would be lucky to receive fifty dollars, - or a measure of hostility to me personally, that made it more important to you to insult my feelings than to make your contribution to the protection of the house.  It is worth remembering that this is in fact the second time that you have acted in this manner, the first being when you caused a car that you had inherited from Mutti's estate, which I had integrated into the electronic security system of the house to be hauled off to a garage in North Carolina where Bill Neese was to disassemble it as an educational exercise in automotive engineering.

My anger at you, however, arose not from your refusal to make the car available as a decoy, but from your expressed intention, when the car could no longer pass inspection, to make a gift of it to Lindy Sheets, rather than to myself; and this in the face not only of what I had done for you in preserving the house, in preserving your portion of Muttis estate, but even in the face of the fact that I had given you (paid for) the car in the first place.  That is when and why I called you a bitch.  That was gratuitous, and I apologize, but I cannot conceal from myself the fact that, for better or worse, there occurred then a transformation in our relationship.

Why how did that come about?  You say it is because I am arrogant, for example, because in not leaving, as you request, unsecured a broken garage door, which I consider to be hazardous, I substitute my judgment for yours.  That may be a symptom of a deeper problem.  I think both you and Laura consider what I am and what I do in some respects superior to what you are and to what you do.  Please note that the judgment of my presumed superiority is a judgment made not by me, but by yourself (and Laura respectively).  It is not my judgment.  I am what I am, and I do what I do; and I do not purport to assess the value of what you do or what Laura does, (except insofar as Lauras conduct adversely affects the intellectual and emotional development of the children.) It is you who perceive in me a superiority that is oppressive to you, unbearably oppressive: that is why you are so unhappy with me.  But there is nothing I can do.  Even if I invested all my energy in appearing mediocre, so as to make you comfortable with me, that effort would be the ultimate affirmation of what I was purporting to deny.  (There is a remedy, but it is beyond your reach.  In Goethe's words: Gegen die groszen Vorzuege eines anderen gibt es kein Rettungsmittel als die Liebe.)

I have learned that Jesus' command that we love one another (even as he has loved us) is no less visionary than his promise of resurrection and eternal life.  For love in this dimension is also beyond human nature.  In order to maintain ones integrity as a human being, in order to be able to live with oneself one needs at times to reject, to dislike, to hate ones neighbor.  Indeed, the more involved one is in the world, je mehr man in die Welt verstrickt ist, the more one needs selective rejection of others to maintain ones own self-respect.  One might plausibly argue that paradoxically the unconditional love which Jesus preached is both necessary and possible only for the individual who has previously rejected the world, i.e. his fellow men, in the process of securing his salvation.

Dein Jochen