July 12, 2020

Dear Alex,

Thank you for talking with me - and listening to me for more than an hour.  Thank you especially for the reference to the account of the Maine Hermit, a story which I think has substantial literary merit and which impressed me as very remarkable and memorable to an extent that I don't know what to think or say, except to quote Hamlet to Horatio: There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy. I was especially struck by the sophisticated comment about Thoreau's two years at Walden Pond as being the exercise of a dilletante.  The experience of the Maine Hermit puts my own Belmont Hermitage in a perspective that makes it - and me - look somewhat more than just a little bit ridiculous.

Please feel no obligation to comment on or even to read the attached translation of the first chapter or my second novel. If you do look at it, let me explain that the untranslated German poetry is the text to which Beethoven composed the last movement of his Ninth Symphony.

Thank you again. Love, Jochen