Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your letter.  I interpret Matthew 7:6, like everything spoken, as poetry, and as such subject to diverse interpretation. How _you_ interpret it, will be a reflection of yourself. I read this text which appears within the Sermon on the Mount, primarily as Jesus' ironic anticipation of his own fate. He is doing what he tells his hearers not to do.  I assert its applicability to myself as incident to the imitatio Christi to which each of us is authorized and condemned.

As I review my own life, I begin to understand all my communicative presumptions, the expectation that I might be "understood" - by any one, by my parents, by my existing family, by such "friends" as I have ... as illusions. Correspondingly, the expectation that I might learn to understand looks now like an empty dream. The alternatives with which I find myself confronted are to reject or to accept, to hate or to love. I "understand" that to survive, I have no choice.

This morning I see a vision of the - no not Goetterdaemmerung - but Menschendaemmerung (human decline) in which my series of novels will end, a dissolution of the society I have invented, where nothing will remain "for posterity" except a collection of stories and poems, on sheets of paper - or should it be DVDs - so damaged by rain - or by tears? -  as to be illegible.  

Please give my regards to your parents. Be confident and well.
EJM