December 27, 2023

Dear Donald and Jan,

Thank you very much for your annotated December newsletters, and please pardon the delay of my response which is attributable to the circumstance that the newsletter had been inadvertently buried in a pile of mail waiting to be answered. My son Klemens discovered your letter two days ago in the process of neatening up my desk preliminary to a medical home visit by one Dr. Tamara Vesel, https://www.tuftsmedicine.org/doctor/tamara-vesel who had kindly agreed to assume administrative responsibility for my "medical care" so as to be able to relieve Klemens of the necessity of signing my death certificate "when the time comes."

On what day and at what hour that time will come, is still very much "up in the air", quite literally if you look up to one enthroned in the clouds, who, according to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, has designed a pre-established harmony, according to which the world has evolved from Day One, from the Beginning to an End nowhere in sight.  Even tonight some of the few leaves remaining on the trees will fall from their twigs to the ground, precisely according to those calculations. My own demise will be no exception.

I quote Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 to summarize my present condition:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Please consider the last two lines to be optional, and accept my very best wishes for a healthy and prosperous New Year.

Jochen