Dear Nikola,

Thank you for sending me a copy or your letter, which if I understand correctly
you composed for another recipient, and sent to me because you thought I
might be interested. You were correct, I am interested, and I thank you for
giving something more to think about. That something more is first and 
foremost my own ignorance. Many of the modern composers to whose works
you allude with such elegance, I have not even begun to try to "understand",
without any notion about what I should think, or even how I should try to
think about them. I am, as you know, very much aware of my age, only five
months short of 90 years, very much aware of my difficulties walking, or
even standing, and cognizant that I must assume my mental abilities to
be similarly on the threshold, - no not of decline, but of collapse.

I may or may not have mentioned to you that among my ambitious presumptuous
and pretensive pipe dreams is to write a cycle of "Sonnets to Chronos"
in shamefully disrespectful parody of Rilkes "Sonette an Orpheus", and in
preparation for this project practicing to meditate about Time. The more
I think about it, the more inescapable it seems to me that by its very
nature, time is a stream in continuing flow, which not only has neither
discernable beginning or end, but is not susceptible to and will not admit
divisions or interruptions