bnamenwirth@yahoo.com
December 14, 2018

Dear Barbara,

Your favorite Emily Dickinson 

I'm nobody! who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us -- don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

is very much to the point. I also find it congenial to be proud of being a nobody. So did the character who when asked by the police to state his name, address, telephone, social security number and e-mail address, turned up his nose at them and said: None of your business, "I am who I am." But then how do I answer Aesop when he scorns my arrogance, and claims it's all sour grapes, when I pretend didn't ever want to be somebody in the first place.  That's lie and makes it sound as if I really wanted to be the President.

It's ironic but inescapable that our lives, - that my life is shaped by tradition, Überlieferung, by past circumstances which are "carried over" to constitute the present, by voices and stories of cultural heroes, of "thinkers", poets, musicians of the past, echoes of which constitute the present into which I am assimilated.  I can't deny that in my youth I expected to become one of them.  When I write that my social failure has set me free to be myself, please do not charge me with bragging. 

For many years I have been aware, that whatever I write, be it an essay, a story or a poem, is implicitly addressed to a listener or to a reader. I have also observed in myself and in others, that as one gets older one talks more freely, one becomes garrulous. This by way of warning that I leave no letters unanswered, and that the only way to protect yourself from my loquaciousness is not to reply. When I write to you, I will try to address your concerns, but fundamentally I will be spilling to you whatever happens to me on my mind.  

Best wishes to Micha and to yourself for Christmas and the New Year.

Jochen