On Wed, Jan 12, 2022 at 11:15 AM Ernst Meyer wrote: Dear Nikola, I haven't heard from you for a while. I hope that you are well. EJM Dear Dr. Meyer: I have been intensely focused on learning Web development. Here is a letter I wrote you on January 3 but never finished, or sent. I hope you are well. I shall call this week, I think.... Dear Dr. Meyer: Thank you, as for so many times, for a stimulating conversation today. I find myself awake with thinking on my mind --- through no fault of our conversation, I must hasten to add. I went up a half hour ago 'for to go to bed, and I was ready to take something to sleep (as my mother, frankly, would prefer: but does obeying this desire of hers fall under your recommendation to be good to my parents?), when it occurred to me it might be better to let my thoughts settle a little, and so I took a walk. And on my walk, as I traced out on the evolutions of my path across the ground something perhaps homomorphic to the evolutions of my mind, it occurred to me my thoughts might settle even better were I to write them down. What you say of yourself --- if I remember correctly and without presumption: that I am the only person remaining you can talk to --- is just as true for me with respect to you. Unlike you, I have the additional handicap of being unable to record my thoughts for an unknown and possibly absent readership. Without trying to evade the crippledness of this condition, and without implicating myself in some kind of grandiosity, I might say I am in good company: neither Socrates, Jesus, nor Confucius wrote anything; Paul wrote nothing but letters; and Leibniz, if I understand correctly, worked out most of his philosophy in letters. (I give you permission to publish this letter on your website along with your reply, and I also give you retroactive permission for any past letters of mine that you may find of interest --- though it would certainly be helpful to scrub them of any embarrassing details: e.g. health and finance.) I have a hard-won hypothesis as to why this might be so for me (and perhaps I can extend it to the abovementioned historical and literary figures). I must take care to think it and word it in such a way as to neither feel nor conveigh resentment. In one of my formative years I had a teacher of writing whom I was deeply afraid of --- so deeply that I didn't really realize it at the time. I was quite sure that my thoughts were not only unwelcome to him, but wholly anathema. It is necessary for me to have the image of your self, and of your mind, in order to blot out that now-invisible image of a man who was seemingly prepared, metaphorically speaking, to spit in my face. I wonder if Socrates, Confucius, Jesus, and Paul (Leibniz seems not to fit the hypothesis) were forced to only speak and write to known persons or people because they had something to say that was deeply unwelcome to the society they inhabited. (I love these kinds of hypotheses: they are unsupportable and undisprovable. That means there is no hard work to be done about them, and I am, unfortunately, lazy --- so far incurably so.) If that is so, then, as I say, I am in good company. It is a great sorrow to me that I have found a conversant who does not constrain my mind towards the end of his life. Would it be too forward of me to ask you to live longer, if you can, for my sake? Is it not ineluctably tragic that as the mind remains and grows, the body fails? I look back also on these two barren years with great sorrow. I hesitate to call them 'wasted', as I am not sure they were avoidable. At any rate, the past is an inheritance that we cannot disclaim. The majority of those days, I had nothing I could say to you, though there was much on my mind that I was unable to extrude. And my ability to listen was quite limited as well. How many conversations, then, did not happen ---- how many letters were not written, and were not read! Would that I could have another ten years in the company of your mind to make up for all that was lost. To miss two years of someone my own age; this, percentage-wise, and actuarially speaking, is not a great loss; but in your case it unavoidably is. I suppose we are tangenting here on another reason I write you before sleeping: I have no idea what kind of mind of mine I will wake up to. It may be that the veil will fall again and I shall find myself once again in a stupor. It all depends on my dreams. The night before last I dreamt that I was in a cinema that was showing a movie that was itself set in a cinema. Instead of dark walls and red seats, the walls and seats were khaki, and the characters moved freely between screen and theater. Then the theater attendants came to clean up, and I told them it was a wonderful movie, and I hoped it would be more widely publicized, and that they would have another showing. And they invited me to dine with them backstage, but I was obliged to go to the latrine at the edge of the woods. And there I found that the latrines were filled with the clothes and possessions of a troupe of men of no fixed abode, and as I tried to use it they came and scolded me for intruding on their wardrobe. I have no idea what kind of dream I will have tonight, if any; and therefore I cannot know what tomorrow will be like. My heart, unlike yours, beats steady, but the pendulum of my mind swings with an unknowable swingth. So it goes. Before I went out on my walk I had read some old writing of mine from junior high. I find it impolite to inflict juvenilia on anyone without request, but I thought to myself: quite something for a sixth or seventh-grader to have written. I wrote stories then, either humorous or horrifying. After my first year of boarding school, I never wrote another story, and for nearly a decade (as I believe I told you once), I never got through another book. Reading those old stories gave me a pang of loss, but loss is an inheritance that cannot be disclaimed. What stops my mouth? It is a stuttering of the mind, a need and desire to say something that cannot be said. As I went out to walk, I found myself turning over in my head what I wished to say to the administrators of my boarding school. At the end of November they had sent out a circular letter over email inviting students with experiences of abuse to come forward. I wanted to say something then, but my mind was dull, and I was not quite sure how to identify or describe the abuse I experienced; and I was even less sure that the recipients of my letter had any chance of accepting or even entertaining the notion that what I experienced was abuse. The most I can say is that I had a teacher who was later identified by the Catholic Church as a pedophile. That, by itself, is probably not enough. They have taken a courageous stand against child rape (if I may, with admitted resentment, indulge in sardonicism), but beyond that one suspects an administrative apparatus evolved and even designed, in part, to evade moral responsibility, can go no further. Wishing to speak unwelcome thoughts twists the extrusion of them. In my dullest times I can only conceive of saying things that are sugarcoated and conventional; in my moments of intensivierung I can only conceive of saything things of great length, breadth, and precision, so that my unwelcome case may be fully prosecuted; in the middle times, I find myself wanting to sneak behind the prejudice of my presumed hearer, and say, first, the things that will be welcome, while coyly and surreptitiously and with great cunning implying the unwelcome things, perchance to say them later. I was taught in school to put my thesis first, and supporting evidence later; but the one who taught this was someone who did not wish to hear my thesis (to the best of my ability to know). If I were able to write my letter to the administration in such a manner, I would say that I was obliged to spend much of my mind's energy in those classrooms wondering whether I was being propositioned. * I do not know if there will be any utility in composing, and still less sending, even still less publishing anonymously; even still more less publishing under my own name,, such a letter --- all of these being temptations of the imagination. But to turn it over in my mind had a salutary effect: it allowed me to move on to other things I wished to think of. ============ I do think it would be good practice to work on your website, but I'm not quite ready to do so. It would be easier to do so if it were hosted and had a domain name, of course....