November 16, 2021

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letter, and thank you for your generous estimate of my writing. I'm not sure it is deserved. As long as I can remember I've felt a desire, perhaps even a compulsion, to write. That need to write is at least partly a compensation for an often disappointed, and sometimes frustrated wish to talk. I interpret language as a social phenomenon. No child learns to speak in isolation, and what every child learns to speak is the language of its family. I hear in language an echo of the universal phenomenon of humans, living, working and dying together. And I see society not only among human beings. When I remember Aristotle's famous declaration that humans are in need of society, and only gods or animals can live in isolation, I see the array of geese flying overhead, the flock of sheep grazing on the hillside, the swarm of bees in the hive or the bevy of ants scurring through their ant hills, then I wonder whether I should ask for a refund of my tuition.

For me, expressing myself in words addressed, if necessary to an imaginary listener, has always seemed concomitant, if not prerequisite to all creative thinking. I remember, how as a student in college, I would practice my thoughts imagining I was addressing one of my fellow students or one of my teachers.  Later, when I was practicing medicine next door to Harvard Law School and only a few blocks from Harvard Yard, my conversations with patients seemed to me a reward much more valuable than the checks from the insurance companies.  I remember specifically visits from a professor of German literature, who came regularly and announced at the outset of one visit: "Doctor, I don't have time to talk to you today." I am appalled by the fact that most of my colleagues consider their time too valuable to listen and hire secretaries or assistants to obtain the histories of their patients' lives.

At the same time I was aware of the forcefulness with which language impinges on the emotional and intellectual ambience. In my medical practice, I listened without critical comment to everything that my patients had on their minds, and many of them entertained political notions and religious experiences very different from my own. I restrained myself from expressing any ideas which might make my patients uncomfortable. I wanted my consultation room to be a place of neutrality where all patients felt at home. Arguably I was (and am) a coward, or worse, I place a higher value on business than on Truth. Perhaps my belief that Truth cannot be adequately expressed in dogmatic formulas is evidence that I am a premeditating liar.

I raise these questions, because since on many issues to which you allude in your letters my responses would be unconventional and politically incorrect, I ask for your help in identifying the topics about which you wish, and the topics about which you do NOT wish to correspond, such as for example, my home-brewed Judaism, my analysis of anti-semitism, my interpretations of history as myth and of science as poetry, the cultures of perpetual economic growth and of advertising, my understanding or misunderstanding of the compelling social and political issues of the day, such as climate change, Roe v. Wade, up to - or down to, Donald Trump. 

Meanwhile my warmest winter wishes to you and your family.

Jochen