September 26, 2022

Dear Benjamin,

Thank you for your letter. I think of you and Carrie often and with affection.  I regret being so crippled that I was unable to to attend your wedding, which I celebrated in my own particular way. A few weeks ago when Nathaniel asked me what I would say, if like him, I were asked to contribute a few words to that ceremony, I referred him to Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

It occured to me that under the circumstances, I would want to be able to recite the poem from memory, and at 92 years and 3 months of age, I embarked on a thought-experiment to test both my memory and my understanding.  For some months, I have noted the slippage of most recent, of immediate, memory. For example, I find myself searching on the table or under the chair for a sock which is already on my foot, having just now pulled it over my heel with the aid of two short ropes attached to a semi-cylinder over which the sock had been stretched. 

When I tried to test my memory concomitantly with memorizing the sonnet by reading and re-reading it not from a piece of paper, but from the memory on which I was trying to imprint it, I was startled to note that my silent recital was interrupted by the absence of certain words, the blockage of which I could circumvent with the aid of mental notes which then, curiously, appeared indelible. Specifically, my memory refused to repeat the word "impediments" in line 2, until I learned to remind it about shackled feet. I was surprised also that where my memory refused the word "alters" in line 3, it was consistent in uttering "alters" in line 11. My memory in turn, when it stumbled in line 3, was quite amenable to skipping to line 11 for the missing term. As I reread the poem now, I my memory is sufficient to identify in almost every line the word(s) at which it once balked and which it has finally assimilated.  Now, when I try to fall asleep at perhaps 2 a.m., I repeat Sonnet 116 over and over to myself, without so much as a single instant of hesitation.

As I tell it to myself over and over, my understanding evolves. I imagine the comments of my English A instructor at Harvard in 1946, - I remember him as G.B.A. because he subscribed only his initials to his criticisms of my writing. Had he not known the name of the author, G.B.A. would have been so critical of the style, that he would have refused even to grade the sonnet.  He would have excoriated a "marriage of true minds" susceptible to admission of "impediments", he would have objected to the intransitive use of "alters" in lines 3 and 11, he would have found fault with the ambiguity of "bears it out even to the edge of doom" in line 12.  (a line which Stefan George, in his elegant German version of the sonnets, translates ..."sie hält aus bis an des grabes rand." [holds out to the edge of the grave] My senile euphoria, however, rejects the equation of doom and death. For a marriage of true minds, I argue, doom is something other than death.) G.B.A. would have rejected the purely orthographical rhymes of lines 2 - 4, 10 - 12, and 13 - 14. However, had G.B.A. known the author's name, he would have recognized this as one of the "greatest sonnets" in the language.

I'm embarrassed to admit that it's taken me many weeks, indeed until just now, to interpret Sonnet 116, rather than as a encomium of marriage, as an account of the tragedy of life in general, and the tragedy of marriage in particular. I now construe the opening sentence: "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments", literally. Shakespeare pleads with the reader for permission to proceed as he did in "The Tempest", to indulge in fantasy and to deny reality. In the process of attempting to deny reality, Shakespeare describes and reiterates over and over again, the reality which he purportedly wishes to deny. The closing couplet is the admission that the permission to deny reality has been denied.

These considerations raise in my mind the more general issue of the relationship of language to reality, of the degree to which saying a matter is true or good, in fact makes it true or good, or the converse. I ask, to what extent is the reality of the world in which we live a reflection of our language and to what extent is our language a reflection of that reality? To my mind this is not an empty question. I reflect on the alchemy and astrology that has governed our past attempts to understand and to assimilate ourselves to our world. I ask how confident we should be that contemporary truths, such as quantum mechanics or set theory, or other mathematical hypotheses, or for that matter, the teachings of "neuroscience" are fundamentally more rational.  I ask more generally what "rationality" means. What are the characteristics of insanity and dementia? How certain can I be that I have been spared them both?

I thank you again for your letter. I apologize for the questions on my mind, and I send to both Carrie and yourself, my very best wishes. Love Jochen