20050613.01

                             Preface

     Nine years have passed, since I first uploaded the text of
my novel "Die Andere" onto this web-site.  Two years ago, I
started similarly to make accessible to the hypothetical reader
my notes on the various issues that pre-occupy me from day to
day.  I have made no attempts to publicize the availability of
these texts.  As a matter of fact, I am loath to argue that
anyone should take the time or the trouble to read them.
Nonetheless, the publication on the Internet, such as it is, of
the various admittedly fragmentary essays that I have written
over the years is an effort from which I derive some
satisfaction, and I intend to continue with it.

     The chief impediment to my writing, which it has taken me
many years to identify, and which even now, I have only
partially overcome, is the assumption that the meaning of what
I write is contingent on its being approved by others; that
what is of value is necessarily recognized as such, and that
the thoughts which remain unnoticed are by virtue of that fact
without merit.  To the extent that this is true, my writing is
worthless.

     There is no denying that the discovery, the public
identification of the artist as the creator of a meaningful
opus, and of the writer as the author of significant prose or
poetry is a political process.  One seeks approval for ones
art or for ones ideas as one seeks approval for ones political
programs.  And while there is no formal election that crowns
the author with his laurel wreath, there might as well be. 
The differences between running for political and running for
cultural office are much less significant than the
similarities. In either case the aspirant announces his
candidacy, mounts a campaign to persuade his constituents and
awaits the outcome, which depends in part on the
characteristics and qualities of the candidate and his
message, and in part on the vagaries of chance.  It would be
untruthful for me to claim that I had never so campaigned. 
My manuscripts were rejected by publishers on two occasions. 
I understand that these decisions were determined by
financial considerations: the manuscripts that I had
submitted were rejected, because the publisher could not
make a profit from the printed work.  For better or for
worse, I made no conscious attempt to adapt my writing to
the anticipations, my own or anyone elses, of the mood or
taste of the public.

     Nothing is more emblematic of my attitude than the
circumstance that I chose to write in German.  After I had
come to this country at the age of nine, the ensuing
period of my adolescent intellectual development was
characterized by nostalgia, ambition, and disappointment. 
The expatriation assumed for me a symbolic significance
which even now I cannot explain.  I attributed my
dissatisfaction with myself to the loss of a treasure,
which even though I could not define, it was incumbent
on me to try to recover.

     I became aware of the extent to which intellectual
perception, to which thought itself is shaped and limited
by the language in which it must be expressed, and by
which, in fact, it is formed. I believed, rightly or
otherwise, that the expression of ideas and experiences
is limited by language; and that language which largely
determines them is therefore the key to intellect and to
spirit.

     Language is always only incompletely translatable. 
Some ideas can be expressed with equal felicity in more
than a single tongue.  Many cannot.  The belief that one
can always express an idea in any one of a number of
languages is an (idealistic) simplification concerning
communicability which is contradicted by experience.

     Only in retrospect does my choice of language
appear to have been a conscious one. When I now sit
down to write, the sentences appear in one language or
the other, but not randomly.  My English is addressed
to identifiable individuals, to my wife, to my son, to
my grandchildren, to my patients.  English, of course
is the language of the professional and business prose
that I have occasion to elaborate.  Aber die deutschen
Saetze wenden sich an die Erinnerung meiner Kindheit,
an meine verstorbenen Eltern, an jene unsichtbare Welt
des Geistes welche mir in meiner Kindheit und Jugend
vorschwebte und welche bis auf den heutigen Tag noch
nicht voellig verblichen ist.  The sentences which I
write in German address themselves to the memory of my
parents, to a childhood that remains luminous
notwithstanding the passage of many years, and to the
vivid awareness of a realm of intellect and spirit
which, to this day, has not entirely faded. To the
extent I have time, I hope to rewrite the German and
the English texts in the reciprocal language.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer