Dear Nikola,

Your letter, for which I thank you, appeared in my e-mail box just as I was about to go to bed, where I've spent the last 11 hours, some of the time dreaming, some of the time sleeping, some of the time thinking, and some of the time planning my answer to you.

My most immediate response concerns writing. It would, of course be presumptuous to tell you how or what to write, but I can't help but to delude myself that it might be helpful for me to say "what I would do". Whatever my state of mind, I would write, regularly, daily, every day, If not l'art pour l'art, then l'ecrit pour l'ecrit, writing for writing's sake, and write whatever was on my mind, no matter how incongruous, ridiculous, absurd or - cross my heart and hope to die - untruthful. If nothing else a letter, even if only to me, and that letter, of course, needs only to be written, not to be sent.

If writing is impossible, the alternative is to meditate, to dream, to think.  I have been thinking about the philosophy of the philosophers of German idealism, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, whose words are paroles pour les paroles, in fact, paroles en l'air, words undefined and often contradictory, words which are imbued with meaning, such as it might be, by their readers. It's a phenomenon which demonstrates that thought is based on language, that language is social, and that to a large extent, though not entirely truth is the vapor of words. The monumental meaning ascribed to the texts which those authors composed is an expression of the readers' faith.  Faith redeems not only, as Martin Luther pointed out, the soul. Faith also redeems the spirit, that is, the mind.

When I contemplate the monumental effort which the faithful readers of Kant and Hegel must make to secure their membership in the philosophical elite that "understands" this philosophy, I am reminded of the efforts, perhaps too half-hearted, which I myself have made to "understand" mathematics, efforts which have been unsuccessful and unsatisfactory. I ask myself, what if any, is the difference between the impermeability of my understanding to various mathematical theorems, proofs, and exercises, and the impermeability of my understanding to the philosophical texts that I have cited. If "making sense" of Kant is "only" a matter or the intelligence, effort and the faith I apply to the task, why isn't my "making sense" of Gauss, Goedel, Frege ...  similarly "only" a matter or the intelligence, effort and the faith I apply to those tasks.

Underlying these questions is my belief that the mind assimilates itself to the thoughts and theories to which exposes itself, which it impresses on itself, and that the validity, the truth of these theories is in (large) part a social phenomenon in that such "truth" facilitates the individual's functioning as a member of the group, as an animal in the herd.

With these considerations, I plunge deeply into the other issue you raise: politics. I do not vote in Massachusetts, because I have for many years been registered to vote in Green Cove, Virginia, an unincorporated hamlet, 5 miles from my house.  Virginia has in years past, only permitted out-of-state voting by persons away on vacation or on business. I do not change the voting registration because there is a possibility, admittedly remote at this time, that I might move there. If I died as a resident of Virginia my estate would avoid the very substantial estate taxes imposed by Massachusetts.

One one or two occasions in years past, my wife and I made it a point to be in Green Cove early in November to vote. This year I would consider such an effort prohibitive in risk, if not in time, energy and money. In any event, the obligation to vote, depending on perspective, is one of citizenship or herd membership, an important topic, which I will defer to another letter.

Please be well, and give my regards to your parents.

EJM