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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