Dear Nikola,

As usual, I have been thinking about you often, passionately hoping and
wishing that you are well. Your letter reassures me. Thank you for writing it.
I am now not only figuratively but also literally alone. All my family is on
Nantucket. The fact that not only do they do not need me there,
but realistically, do not want me there, plunged me Friday night suddenly
into a pit of black despondency, from which I emerged - alive - after a
few hours struggling with compulsive thoughts, with the conviction that
I have been living too timid a life, that I should accept, perhaps even 
welcome the hazards of traveling both to Nantucket and to Konnarock.
I thought I would wait a few days, until Klemens has returned from Nantucket
(Aug 22)  and I have had a chance to speak with him, and until you have
re-established yourself in Boston.

In an e-mail this morning, Klemens indicated that he and I should go 
together to Nantucket in September. Whether he will also offer to accompany
me to Virginia, I don't know. I hope it's not too rude of me to confess that
if Klemens declines, you are my second choice for a traveling companion,
assuming that both of us are physically and emotionally up to traveling.

Meanwhile I have been reading and thinking. I may or may not have mentioned
that I finished reading Mann's Dr. Faustus, to conclude that Mann exploited
his topic and his characters in a display of literary pyrotechnics, without
resolving - or even addressing - the contradictory mysteries of good and 
evil, of health and illness, of herd mentality and "divine" inspiration.
That, of course, is a critical judgment biased in my favor and very much to
my own benefit. Next I turned to the second part of Goethes Faust which
I have neglected for no less than 70 years. I found on my shelves the
copy of my teacher Karl Vietor's monumental biography of Goethe, which
Vietor completed sin 1949, the bicentennial anniversary of Goethe's
birth and 2 years before Vietor's own death, a volume bound in black linnen,
which Vietor inscribed for me with a quotation from Goethe: "Die hoechste
Wirkung des Geistes ist den Geist hervorzurufen." (The highest effect of
the spirit is to evoke the spirit.) Vietor interprets this second part
of Faust, much of which was composed between Goethes 78th and 91st year,
(1827 and 1831) as a continuation of Goethes continuing search for
the spiritual reality of Faust's self-realization as navigating a path
between the buoys of Good and Evil, while I interpret Faust II dialectically
as a mirror in which I see the spiritual world where the ageing poet
spent the final years of his life, the same meaning which my present 
writing has for me. Again, like Dr. Faustus, Goethe's Faust II is an esthetic
mosaic, and where Mann's mosaic is a demonstration of his literary skills,
Goethe's mosaic is an exhibition of his subjectivity, of his
subjective experience (Erleben).

I send to you my very best wishes for your well-being and happiness,
and to your parents, my regards.

EJM