December 18, 2022  

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your letters. It is always a pleasure to have a message from you.  I wish for you and Jan, Holidays that fulfill their promises and your expectations. When I was young and my parents were alive, we regularly drove to Virginia for Christmas. It seemed very important that the family should periodically be reunited. All of us made much effort to express our affections for each other, but all of us, I think, ultimately experienced a paradoxical need for separateness and were relieved when the congeniality of the celebrations ended, and we rediscovered ourselves on the highway back to Massachusetts and to our accustomed semi-solitary existences.

As I may have told you, I spend the fourteen or fifteen hours each day when I am not lying in bed, on a chair on whose arms I must depend to sit down and to I get up, positioned in front of a small table, reading from or typing into my laptop computer. This exchange with a machine determines what is on - and in - my mind, and that, obviously, if I am to answer your letters, is the only matter of substance for me to write to you about.

Look at me from Einstein's perspective. He famously defined insanity, as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Precisely that applies to my efforts to learn. As I read, I can't stop trying over and over to understand what is incomprehensible to me, until I discover not only that I don't understand, but that I have forgotten what it was that I was trying vainly to understand.  I can't even learn to stop trying to learn. Obviously, I am in difficult straits. The salient difference is that while paresis of the limbs makes me awkward and uncomfortable, paresis of thought blunts the emotions as well and engenders a moronic satisfaction and contentment reminiscent of the watchman at the conclusion of Goethe's Faust II, who sings

Zum Sehen geboren,
Zum Schauen bestellt,
Dem Turme geschworen
Gefällt mir die Welt.
Ich blick' in die Ferne,
Ich seh' in der Näh'
Den Mond und die Sterne,
Den Wald und das Reh.

So seh' ich in allen
Die ewige Zier,
Und wie mir's gefallen,
Gefall' ich auch mir.
Ihr glücklichen Augen,
Was je ihr gesehn,
Es sei, was es wolle,
Es war doch so schön!

In English from the Internet:

Born to watch,
appointed to observe,
sworn to this tower,
I enjoy the world.
I gaze into the distance;
I see, as if they were near,
the moon and the stars,
the wood and the roebuck.

I see in everything
eternal beauty,
and just as I enjoy it,
I also enjoy my life.
You happy eyes,
whatever you see,
no matter what it is,
it is always fair to me!

I can't take credit for the original German text, but I plead in self-defense that the translation isn't mine.  Best wishes and Holiday Greetings to Jan and to yourself.  Jochen