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Hochroterd
8. v. 32
Dear Meister Arnold, Where am I writing from? From a small farmhouse on a hillside, forty-five minutes by car from the Berggasse, which my daughter and her American friend1 (who owns the car) have bought and furnished as a weekend cottage. We had expected that your journey home from Palestine would take you through Vienna and then we would have insisted on your seeing it.
You have been very generous in sending me your picture, though it is true it does not show me much of you except your forehead, and also the photograph of your author's cage1 which I shall never manage to see, together with the news that your eyes have improved and those few drops from the cauldron where so many new stories are now brewing-all of which I would like to read though my days are beginning to be numbered.
You were right; I have just had my birthday and now I am laboriously defending myself against the obligations arising from it. But to come back to you-how strange this tragically mad land you have visited must have seemed to you. Just think, this strip of our mother earth is connected with no other progress, no discovery or invention-the Phoenicians are said to have invented glass and the alphabet (both doubtful!), the island of Crete gave us Minoan art, Pergamon reminds us of parchment, Magnesia of the magnet and so on ad infinitum-but Palestine has never produced anything but religions, sacred frenzies, presumptuous attempts to overcome the outer world of appearance by means of the inner world of wishful thinking. And we hail from there (though one of us considers himself a German as well; the other does not); our forebears lived there for perhaps half or perhaps a whole millennium (but this too is just a perhaps) and it is impossible to say what heritage from this land we have taken over into our blood and nerves (as is mistakenly said). Oh, life could be very interesting if we only knew and understood more about it. But we are sure only of our feelings of the mome