Dear Nikola,

Thank you for both your e-mails. I wish for you that you are even now comfortably "at home" in Portsmouth with your parents. Please give them my regards.

The 6 days of family togetherness on Nantucket which I peacefully absolved, made poignant the solitude with to I have become so accustomed, and in which I have learned to feel satisfied and secure. I wonder if I am making a virtue of necessity.

The senile euphoria which had inspired me and driven my writing, has subsided at least to the extent that I am no longer satisfied with the style of my compositions. I am astonished by the thought that style might prove to be the key that unlocks the secret meanings of ones words.

My continuing involvement with the texts of Ernst Cassirer strengthens my surmise that I can "understand" them only to the extent that I am able to interpret them as "poems" to which the author resorts in an attempt to express his own intuitive and (otherwise) virtually incommunicable experience (Erleben).  Noteworthy, I think, that in the case of Cassirer - as of Heidegger and to some extent of Kant, this philosophical poetry entails the invention of a new and foreign language, which the aspiring reader must acquire by arduous study, reminiscent of a pilgrimage to the Holy Grail - or of the fatal curiosity by which one is drawn to the Veiled Image of Sais.

Please keep in touch, and feel free to telephone when so inclined.

EJM