Letter to Lydia (continued)
…”I hope you don’t think that this kind of pre-occupation indicates I am ‘making my bed’ or anything like that. No, I realize I wouldn’t be here in the first place if I hadn’t failed somehow to acquire a perfect connoiserurship for being dead: one has to starve oneself in order to [...]

In the envelope that contained the prior two letters, one to Leon, the other to Leon’s wife, Lydia, there’s one other letter that appears to be from this time period that I will transcribe today:
“Dear Lydia,
Thanks very much for your letter. And for the little buffet of the pig’s-bladder it administered (?): this time I [...]

Here is the third and final installment from the letter I’ve been transcriping from Bob to Lydia, Kathleen’s mother, from that period in the 1970s when Bob was a shut-in.
I could be more plain. But I observe the alchemist’s cautious motto: obscurum per obscurius. Well, not really, I don’t mean to swathe my head in [...]

On closer phenomenological investigation of myself, the truth of the old adage gets clearer and clearer: ‘The made are merely the outvoted.’ Parmenides, the ancient pre-Socratic philosopher knew this when he asserted that the world was constructed by Nomos, or Convention, and not out of Physis, or what we now call physical Reality. (This was [...]

This is an excerpt from a letter to Lydia, Kathleen’s mother, from the same period (1970s). It begins:
“You are wrong to feel abashed about your earlier letter or apologize for it as silly. I should be the one abashed for having assumed that pseudo-schoolmasterly tone in my reply. But you understand, I’m sure, that [...]

I have vague memories of some of the histrionic sentences I was guilty of in those letters and I hope you will excuse me — sometimes I remind myself of my mother! (I don’t mean to slight my mother, but it is always bad for a man to remind himself of his mother, you know.)