To: Barbara Namenwirth <bnamenwirth@yahoo.com>^M
November 26, 2018

Dear Barbara,

Thank you for your politeness of refraining to correct my confusion of Mount Horeb with Mount Hebron. Soon after I had sent my letter I became aware of my mistake, and am pleased now for the opportunity to correct it and to prove to you that I know how to read. As a matter of fact, correcting mistakes has become a familiar pasttime. The older I get the more mistakes I make, and the more time I spend with corrections and apologies.

Thank you for your letter. Your request "Please tell me/us a little more." raises the question, more about _what_, and entails inherent hazards.  Loquaciousness is one of the symptoms of senility.  It's likely that any answers you get are longer than you expected.  Absent more specific questions the best I can do is to tell you what is immediately on my mind. An article in the New York Times about the prevalence of loneliness steered me to a "UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3)", induced me to test myself, and to try to ascertain whether it applies to me, and if so, to discover the dimensions of my loneliness. I conclude, that the UCLA pigeon-hole is not for me, and that, to put it mildly, I am a somewhat awkward individual.  Your letter, and especially its invitation to a reply, takes some of the edge off what otherwise might be called loneliness, and obviously points me in a healthy direction. (I wonder if you can tell in reading this letter which sentences have been written with a naughty smile.)

In Marion's first letter to me:
Subject: Great Talking to You!
From: "Marion Namenwirth" <namenwir@umn.edu>
Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2009 20:01:59 -0500
To: "Jochen Meyer" <ernstmeyer@earthlink.net>
which begins on page 3 of the collection I left with you, Marion explains how her parents felt about Marga and Heinz and in the process Marion unburdens herself of an account of the dynamics of the relationship between Margot and Fritz.  I consider the perplexities and challenges of family dynamics an ongoing, fundamental and inescapable facet of my experience (Erleben), which, while it may be alluded to as a process in time past, is not susceptible to contemporary accounting.  In the software engineer's language one might say that certain experiences (Erleben) cannot be described in "real time", if only because of a spiritual pseudo-quantum effect, in that the dynamics in issue are subjective experiences (Erleben), which are amplified, attenuated, altered and or distorted, if not indeed incited and instigated or quenched and extinguished by any attempt to communicate about them in words.  Such matters can only be told in poems or in novels.

So that's what you get when you ask: "Please tell me/us a little more." Confounding Mount Horeb with Mount Hebron was merely the threshold of my confusion.  I need to be straightened out about Buddhism. Will you help?

My premature December greetings to you both.

Jochen