September 19, 2022

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letter, and thank you especially for confiding in me the details of your recent arduous detours in the empire of physicians and surgeons. As you noted, it's a realm where I myself have spent much of my life, albeit not as a patient, but as his opposite, dare I say it, as anti-patient.  Perhaps it reflects on my "technical" incompetence when I admit that I felt my real task was not to "cure" my patient but to mediate between him and the exigencies of existence. Early on, I thought I discovered that language could not serve my purpose, because unavoidably the meaning of words is largely contingent on the individual experiences of each of us. For that reason, all I will write now, is that I think of you very often with much concern and affection.
 
As for myself, I am startled by the awareness of how inexorably my life is changing, while the days, indistinguishable one from the next, go by ever more rapidly. I don't remember whether I wrote you, my walking has become so precarious that for almost nine months, I haven't ventured on the stairs. I'm now confined in this spacious house to the second floor, half of which is devoted to storage. Here I sleep fitfully for ten or eleven hours each night. The remaining time I spend reading, trying to learn about topics far beyond me, such as quantum mechanics, trying to write, or toying with my collection of old computers, which now consists of five laptops and four desktops, each in various states of software or hardware disrepair. I'm reminded, how in my childhood in the backwoods of Virginia, I occupied myself with repairing radios which then still consisted of vacuum tubes, transformers, condensers and resistors linked with wire and solder.  I fell behind and never learned how to use semi-conductors.

The older I get, the more childishly inadequate I feel; and with this provocative confession, I send you and Jan my very best wishes. Jochen