Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your e-mail. Thank you for accepting Nathaniel and Sabine's invitation to the dinner party. It sees to have been a very satisfactory event for all of us, although I must admit that my stubborn resistance to acquiring a hearing aid prevented me from participating in the conversation.  I am much aware that my attempting to inject myself into conversations is frequently counterproductive, - because my failure to understand may be more than a merely auditory failure. I suspect that my thoughts have driven me into a emotional wildernesses, where it is is not the ears, but the spirit which will not hear and which cannot be heard. 

From my perspective Nathaniel and Sabine's visit was eminently satisfactory.  Not even a hint of dissatisfaction or disagreement on the part of any of us.  The two of them, - actually their dog makes three - have my standing invitation to return without prior notice on any date and for any length of time, and to stay indefinitely, even beyond the term of my own statistically limited prospective residence here.  Having said as much, I should add that neither Nathaniel nor Sabine told me, and I did not ask, why they came, or when, or whether they intend to return. Nathaniel did confide to me: a) that he had signed up to play trumpet at 2 rehearsals and three concerts in Hingham about a month from now - December 18, is a date which sticks in my mind, b) that they were considering a Christmas visit to Sabine's relatives in Nova Scotia, and a second visit to other relatives of Sabine in Florida. The salty air of Madaket has caused rust to break through the metal bulkhead door, which I had tried to protect against just this failure with rustproofing paint about a decade ago. Nathaniel has closed the defect with plastic sheeting and duct tape, while the three of them continue to live in a house minimally warmed only by electrical space heaters.  

Meanwhile, pleased as I was to be visited by Nathaniel, Sabine and their dog, I am even more pleased to be abandoned to myself, spending the remaining days of my life under the benevolent aegis of my patron Saint Felix Krull to whom I entrust myself in prayer each night as I fall asleep, and whom I thank anew each morning when I awaken for yet another day's challenge to pretend to be more than I am. I don't think that, - as a matter of fact, I'm sure that - Thomas Mann had no inkling of the grandeur of the monument to truth which he was creating when he breathed life into the nostrils of my Saint. I think that Thomas, who considered himself the reincarnation of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and extolled himself with the claim: "Wo ich bin, da ist deutsche Kultur" (Where I exist, there German culture exists likewise) was somewhat of a prig, who looked down his nose at the upstart he had created.

But Felix and I address each other by our first names. Only Felix can explain how I, not being a violinist, could have picked up a violin and presumed to play the violin part of BWV 1019, only Felix can justify my presuming to pontificate about quantum mechanics without remembering Schrödinger's equation, only Felix can fathom my secret satisfaction with https://www.researchgate.net/publication/41554442_Hilbert%27s_foundation_of_physics_From_a_theory_of_everything_to_a_constituent_of_general_relativity, only Felix would tolerate my comparison of the Glasgow Climate Change Conference https://unfccc.int/conference/glasgow-climate-change-conference-october-november-2021 with the First Council of Nicaea 325, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea 

Consistent with my discipleship of Felix Krull, I have been revising my interpretation of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play "Nathan der Weise".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_the_Wise. Nathan the wise was modelled on Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the religious renegade Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn, who added Bartholdy to his last name in an effort to camouflage his native Judaism. I first read Nathan der Weise in one of the volumes of German "classical" literature on the bookshelves in Konnarock originally given as Bar Mitzwah presents to my namesake uncle Ernst Joachim Meyer who volunteered for the German Imperial Army in the First World War and was killed soon after its outset, on November 6, 1914, on the slopes of a hill known as "Loretto Heights" near Souchez in Normandy. When I was a child I much admired Lessing's play and I now remember how, as a fifteen year old student in the senior class of Germantown Friends School, I regaled my classmates and my teacher with recitations of the Parable of the three Rings which Wikipedia summarizes as follows:

"The centerpiece of the work (Nathan the Wise) is the "Ring Parable", narrated by Nathan when asked by Saladin which religion is true: an heirloom ring with the magical ability to render its owner pleasing in the eyes of God and mankind had been passed from father to the son he loved most. When it came to a father with three sons whom he loved equally, he promised it (in "pious weakness") to each of them. Looking for a way to keep his promise, he had two replicas made, which were indistinguishable from the original, and gave on his deathbed a ring to each of them."

"The brothers quarreled over who owned the real ring. A wise judge admonished them that it was impossible to tell at that time – that it even could not be discounted that all three rings were replicas, the original one having been lost at some point in the past; that to find out whether one of them had the real ring it was up to them to live in such a way that their ring's powers could be proven true, to live a life that is pleasant in the eyes of God and mankind rather than expecting the ring's miraculous powers to do so. Nathan compares this to religion, saying that each of us lives by the religion we have learned from those we respect."

I admit that my contemporary re-interpretation may be invidious, but I now assess "Nathan der Weise" as successor to the liturgical "mystery plays" of the Middle Ages and of the "morality plays" of the Renaissance, albeit admittedly perhaps the greatest of these.  Nonetheless the circumstance that the characters are constrained by the virtues and vices they are designed to exhibit, makes the play an epitomy of political correctness. In consideration of the ubiquity of religiously inspired art, it would be fatuous to try to argue that art and morality are mutually exclusive. Perhaps it's only because I am so fed up, I feel so suffocated by the political correctness required of us, that I have become sensitized, allergic, beyond reason.  By the same token, my admiration of Felix Krull is nourished by my conviction that the society in which we live and on which we depend, is the consequence and expression of language, and that the representations of language which society demands are inherently at odds with the subjective individual experiences of each of us.  By making a mockery of society, Felix Krull challenges the social half-truths, the falsehoods, with which we must deceive each other and ourselves, and sets us free.

The URL of my website about which you ask is: 73.253.254.185 This is a dynamic address, subject to change, but my internet service provider (Comcast) leaves it unaltered unless and until there occurs one of the occasional general, wide-spread service outages, at which time I would provide the changed URL by e-mail. 

Please be well, and give my best wishes to your parents.

EJM