November 12, 2020
Dear Nikola,
Thank you for the reference to Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. I accepted Amazon's offer of their Kindle edition for 30 days and read the first 65 pages.  Then I downloaded the entire text from archive.org. I had never read "science fiction" before. For me it was the first time ever. Thank you for broading my horizons. I found much to think about.

My immediate reaction, I must confess,  was to remember my father's rejection of all contemporary music, of all contemporary drawing and painting, of much contemporary writing. He said "Das hat mit mir nichts zu tun." That has nothing to do with me. I try to be more open-minded. Although I cannot coerce my feelings, I  can, and I believe I should, direct my thoughts to unfamiliar territory.

Solaris reminded me of the notion of expressionism. I quote from Wikipedia:

"Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas.[1][2] Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning[3] of emotional experience rather than physical reality.[3][4]

"Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic,[1] particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theatre, dance, film and music.[5]

"The term is sometimes suggestive of angst. In a historical sense, much older painters such as Matthias Grünewald and El Greco are sometimes termed expressionist, though the term is applied mainly to 20th-century works. The Expressionist emphasis on individual and subjective perspective has been characterized as a reaction to positivism and other artistic styles such as Naturalism and Impressionism.[6] 

Solaris, as the account of a parallel world that purports to be real and true, also challenges the notions of epistemology with which I have been pre-occupied.  Beyond its historical literary "success", the index of Solaris' truth and reality is the time and energy which I am devoting to the effort to "understand" and interpret its meaning.  

EJM


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Dear Nikola,

Thank you for coming. Please feel free to come back as frequently as seems best to you and for you. When you are here, it isn't necessary that we should continually converse. You should feel free, as well as helping me put my house in order, to read, to practice violin, piano or harpsichord, to use your computer, perhaps to write. Thank you for coming.

EJM

On 11/11/2020 05:24 PM, Nikola Chubrich wrote:
> Dear Dr. Meyer:
>
> Thank you for having me over. I hope it will continue to be acceptable to Klemens: other than my parents I am not seeing anyone else.
>
> Here is a link to Stanislaw Lem's /Solaris/:
>
> https://www.amazon.com/Solaris-Stanislaw-Lem-ebook/dp/B00Q21MVAI/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1605133261&sr=8-1
>
> It occurs to me that I can lend you my Kindle, which has a copy of it; I do not use the Kindle all that often.
>
> Note that there is an older translation into English, by Kilmartin and Cox; though it reads well it is a double translation (from the French edition), and omits certain passages, including a wonderful passage in the last chapter that echoes Aeschylus in the /Oresteia/.
>
> I am sure there is a German translation as well.
>
> Nikola.