Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your letter.

With respect to the deaths of those who are dear to you, take Shakespeares
advice:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell; 
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so, 
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, 
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if (I say) you look upon this verse, 
When I (perhaps) compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay,
Lest the wise world should look into your moan, 
And mock you with me after I am gone.

                                Sonnet 71

Physically, my health seems at present to be stable.
It's obviously subject to unpredictable but inevitable deterioration.
So far as my state of mind is concerned, I identify an unreasonable
state of euphoria which I ascribe to senility and which induces me to
be disproportionately productive of products which have no value
except for the solace they provide me.

After reading three volumes of Ernst Cassirers Philosophy of symbolic Forms,
and devoting, as I mentioned to you, some time to Feynman's Lectures on
Physics, I have regressed to reading and editing volume 7 of my series of
novels with a view to publishing itat an early date - as well as volume 8,
and a concluding volume 9, yet to be written - on Amazon's CreateSpace, -
or whatever they call it.

I'm aware that my euphoria also determined how I feel about my writing.
As I reread Volume 7, I'm impressed how much freedom of thought and feeling
I derive from my indifference to literary "success", and how this freedom
expresses itself both in the style and content of what I write. Some sections of
What I have been reading remind me in their tenor of the texts of Franz Kafka,
who, as you may know, was so aliented from his potential readership, that he
directed his writing to be destroyed at his death; a directive with was
ignored by his friend and executor Max Brod, to who we owe the preservation
of Kafkas unique literary creations.

"Max Brod, although he was a prolific writer in his own right, is best remembered as the friend and biographer of writer Franz Kafka. Kafka named Brod as his literary executor, instructing Brod to burn his unpublished work upon his death. Brod refused and had Kafka's works published instead." (Wikipedia)

Please feel free to telephone at any time. Please feel free to come at any time
on an hours' notice. If you do, I suggest we were masks and stay 6 feet apart.

EJM