June 10, 2023

Dear Donald,

Thank you for your prompt reply. Permit me to quote the English poet, critic, and dramatist John Dryden 1631–1700 who wrote:
    Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
    And thin partitions do their bounds divide.
With respect to the genius role you offer me, I'll take a rain check, but with respect to madness, I see no escape from the labyrinth: and since sanity is defined by the mentality of the herd, it must be I who is insane.

You ask about my novels. The first two volumes I called "Döhring" which was the maiden name of my greatgrandmother and is a derivative of "Thüringen" where my ancestors were peasants so poor that they could afford no horse and hitched each other to the plough. Döhring is a middle-aged academic whose wife had died because he had persuaded her to neglect a treatable disease (endocarditis), who ventures to the Canadian Rockies in an attempt to reconstitute his life. In the airplane en route he is seated next to a zealous feminist whom he permits to attach herself to him. Chapter Seven (English version attached) relates Döhring's encounter with a hermit who has fled into the wilderness because he cannot believe that the Holocaust has ended. The rest of the book describes the muted tragedy of a second marriage.

Volumes 3 to 9 of my series of novels, I called "Vier Freunde" (four friends).  It is a fictitious autobiographical fantasy which leaves to the reader the determination of who was friends with whom. Attached is an English version of chapter 1.

Some of my writing of the first 52 years of my life and all of my subsequent writing is accessible to you on my website http://ernstjmeyer.ddns.net Should you access it, don't be put off by your browser's warning that the website is "insecure". The website is homemade and I haven't bothered to convert the http format to the https format which is now fashionable.  There are 98 divisions, mostly in German, but much in English. Many typographical errors. Life is too short to try to correct them.

The two volumes of Döhring and the first four volumes of Vier Freunde are published in German as "print on demand" hard copy at exorbitant prices by amazon.com on the Internet. I see no reason why you should want any of them, but if you did, let me get them for you. amazon.com gives me a big disount.

Again best wishes to Jan and to yourself. Jochen