October 13, 2022

Dear Nikola,

Thank you for your prompt reply. I'm sorry I missed your telephone call.  I keep my cellphone, the only phone I now have, next to the laptop on my all-purpose table where, almost unable even to stand, I spend virtually all 14 or 15 waking hours of my day, reading and writing, and intermittently falling asleep. I leave the phone on the table even while I am hobbling to and from the bathroom or to and from the large room on the School Street side of the house. There I have, in addition to four non-functioning machines, two other laptops which I keep running. I communicate with them via my local area network. One of them is programmed with my website server "ernstjmeyer.ddns.net". Onto both of them I copy as back-up the texts that I write. When you telephoned, I must have failed to hear the ringing because I was away from my table. Please feel free to try to call again.  However,  I'm embarrassed to ask you to do so, because my deafness has gotten worse, and I don't know how much of what you would say I could understand. 

I'm spending my days not only unavoidably by also deliberately getting old. Aging seems to me a natural process. Often, if not always, one goes about it awkwardly and thoughtlessly. I try to do better. I assimilate myself to my increasing physical limitations, and try not to let them impair my thinking. As one day after another inexorably displaces its predecessor, I keep asking myself whether there might not be some virtue in the gradual weakening of memory. When I was younger the facts which cluttered my mind stifled my imagination and my understanding. Now that the facts are less obtrusive, my world seems to have changed. I experience the natural numbers as quanta, and counting, as a precarious leap from one entity to the next. I interpret the riddles posed by Zeno as exhibitions of the unsolved and possibly insoluble paradoxes of continuity which are then so effectively denied and suppressed by the discipline imposed by Euclidean geometry. - As I write this, I remind myself that it may be nonsense. - I interpret Leibniz's Monadology as a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to disentangle the impossibilities inherent in atomism. I understand Kant's indigestible terminology as a veil over the circumstance that the only reality to which I have access is the contemporary functioning, the present consciousness of my own mind. "Es lebe die Unverfrorenheit!" Long live impertinence! is the motto which Einstein superscribed to his scientific efforts. I mimic his insolence and ask, what does it mean to "understand" and who, if anyone, has succeeded in "understanding" quantum mechanics, relativity, and particle physics? Not I! I find myself relegated to the pathetic effort of trying to understand my failures to understand.

Thank you for the reference to Croesus and Solon. Since I couldn't remember what if anything I ever knew about them, I gave myself a Wikipedia crash course on the topic and now consider myself an expert. In my attempt to "understand" Einstein's thought by tracing its development, I surfed the Internet and found at https://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu/ a remarkable collection of documents of what seems to me, speaking of Croesus, inspite of all the fame and glory, if not because of them, to have been a sad and difficult existence. The texts are accessible to you. They are provided both in the original German and in an English translation.
 
With respect to your access to a piano keyboard in Belmont about which you inquire, my harpsichord and my old "upright grand" piano with its cracked soundboard and numerous keys whose ivory has peeled off, are always there for you. The availability to you of the grand piano in Klemens' house would be contingent on musical cooperation between yourself and Laura. Laura is an avid French horn player, and is likely to welcome a pianist to accompany her. If you wished to try to establish such cooperation, I would suggest that you find on the Internet https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:For_horn,_piano one or more scores which you could play with Laura, then practice on my piano to confirm your proficiency, then invite her to my house to let you accompany her here. If she considered accepting such an invitation, she would almost surely invite you next door to use her piano.  That may sound far-fetched, but as Einstein said: Es lebe die Unverfrorenheit. It occurs to me also that Schubert songs, such as Die Winterreise, though written for soprano, have been transposed for bass and are commonly performed by barytones, and would sound wonderful as french horn - piano duets.

Stay well, be content, and don't forget to come home.

EJM