Dear Donald,

Thank you for your e-mail.  I admire the equanimity with which you write about the medical problems that Jan and you have had in the course of the summer.  Sixty years of practicing medicine have taught me how important it is to bear the burdens of illness with patience.  I try to practice what I preach. My physical condition is little different from when you visited me earlier this year.

Your letter reached me during the six days when my son Klemens and I were visiting my parents' home in Konnarock, Virginia, a house with the maintenance of which I have been involved since 1952 when it was built. After my mother's death in January 1990, the house was occupied only occasionally during the summer by my sister, and in her absence, occasionally by my wife and myself.  The oil burner has not been used for 30 years. If I turned it on now, I can't say what would happen.  In one of the three bathrooms, the drain from the toilet and from the wash basin are badly occluded.  We were unable to open them with a metal "snake".  Sodium hydroxide drain opener helped only slightly, if at all.  On page 81 of the draft of my translation of the Rosenthal family history which I sent you, I described my efforts fifty-three years ago to prevent this home, the use of which had been promised my parents for the rest of their lives, from being sold out from them.

My increasing affection for this particular house, and for all the houses in which I have ever lived, - and for all the trails which I have ever hiked, - must have something to do with my aging memory.  The older I get the more irretrievably unreal the past seems to me, and the attempt to recapture the past in history seems nothing more than story telling, the invention and recitation of myths.  In German, as you may know, the word Geschichte has a double meaning.  Geschichte refers to what happened in times past, but it also refers to the stories that one tells to ones children, or to oneself. To revisit a house which stores so many memories, is in its own curious way, a recapitulation if not a rediscovery not of the past, but of the present, of life itself.

I had planned, while in Konnarock, to read in some of the books we brought over from Germany, many of them damaged from the water which drenched the container with our household belongings, (at the time referred to as a "lift-van") when the Nazis, as a farewell salute to the departing Jews, dipped it into New York harbor at its unloading. I thought I would take another look at the children's books which molded my childhood imagination, specifically one by a Danish writer, Karin Michaelis about the stationmaster's motherless daughter Bibi, which told of Bibi's reconciliation with her aristocratic grandparents, who had originally disowned their grandchild because of her mother's mesalliance with a commoner. All this from memory, because the three or four remaining Bibi volumes were stored on the lowest shelf of the glass-fronted bookcase which I understood my mother to have had custom made in Germany.  That bookcase was one of the few pieces of furniture which survived the immersion into New York Harbor. But now, with my hips almost immovable, I could not bend sufficiently to open the sliding glass door. To retrieve the books, I should have had to get down on hands and knees, and then to struggle back onto my feet. It didn't seem worth the effort.

Instead, I found food for my thoughts on the Internet, specifically in Wikipedia's accounts of the very smallest, the physics of subatomic particles, and of the very largest, the astrophysics of "the Universe" and its reported expansion from the time of its original explosion in "the big Bang" 13.8 billion years ago, enlarging with the speed of light to its present dimensions.  The approximate diameter (in meters) of the visible universe is 93 billion light years.  https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/numbers.html Trying by a thought experiment to understand the meaning of such "astronomically" large numbers, I calculated how many millimeters were comprised in our recent trip of 790 miles to Virginia. 790 x 5280 x 12 x 2.54 x 10 equals 1,271,381,760.  or 1.27 billion. Presented with this number of millimeters,  I would have no intuitive idea about what it meant.  Then I contrast the unimaginable length of a light year with the the clearly visible extent of one millimeter, and find myself befuddled. I suppose that's to be expected when one gets to be 91 years and 4 months old.

My very best wishes to yourself and Jan.

Jochen