November 27, 2022

Dear Donald,

Thank you very much for your letter. I have been thinking about you often.  Now I am relieved and pleased by your reassurances that you are comfortable and confident. The Holidays are upon us. I think of them as existential markers, buoys, illusory or otherwise, in the implacable stream of time. 

The unavoidable task for me, in the present and in the future that remains, is to accommodate myself to the proliferating and increasing limits, physical, mental and perhaps also spiritual, of my daily activities.  The threshold argument is that I should not even mention my handicaps, because to mention them is to describe them, to describe them is to create them; because undescribed they would be inapparent, and inapparent, they would cease to exist just as the fears of the day and of the dark disappear when I fall asleep, - unless I have nightmares.

As I may have told you, for the past 12 months I have shared this large house with my grandson Nathaniel, who is still trying to establish himself as a musical conductor, his fiancee Sabine who is preparing herself for law school with a position as legal assistant in the Middlesex County District Attorneys office, and their large, friendly dog with black fur, and white patches on his nose, on his breast, on his feet and on his tail.  I avoid using the name "Joe" which they have given him, because that happened to be the name of my paternal grandfather. The dog, however doesn't care what he is called, so long as he can lounge undisturbed on my bed, which he has discovered to be the most comfortable spot in the house, and as long as I share with him my meals, which he finds much more appealing to his tongue than the regular dog food. Periodically he jumps off the bed and heads to the door, which I keep closed to conserve heat. Then, grasping my walker with both hands, I shuffle across the room to let him out into the hallway. A few minutes later, when he wants back in, I repeat the trip.
 
When I am not commuting across the room, I sit at the table bent over the computer keyboard, often, especially in the early afternoon, asleep. When I'm awake, I type into it whatever is on my mind, uncritically, knowing that what I write will be reread, if ever, only by myself. When there's nothing on my mind, I try to compensate for the emptiness with a last minute effort to educate myself, to learn and to understand. Recently I looked into a treatise De Docta Ignorantia, by Nicolaus Cusanus (1401-1464), (Of Learned Ignorance) to which I was drawn not only by the consolation which its title promises, but my memories of the little town Kues in the Moselle Valley which my wife and I visited thirty years ago, and by my fondness for the wines with are grown there. I was startled that the German translation of De Docta Ignorantia with which I trotted after the original Latin, omitted large sections of the text without apology or explanation. I wondered whether the translator considered them repetitious or unintelligible, and found my prejudice against the reliability of translations to be confirmed.

So that's a fragment of what is on my mind tonight. Trying to tell you more would get me in trouble. I close by sending to you and Jan, my very best wishes for the Holidays and for the future beyond. With love from Jochen