Oaktree Villa at the Weser Riverside

Finally, Here we Are. In the most beautiful working room I could ever have wished to sit in. She too is doing her Blip homework here. In the old lounge chair. We even cannot remember when we sat down together in this library. Must be years ago...Never mind. This too is why we live here. This is a room for reading, reflexion and writing. And here They Stand in Silence: Edmund, Lou, Helmuth & All Those Other Friends in High Places. Many of them are really too High Brow as to make reading a genuine pleasure. No problem, for here you can also listen music - Herman Prey is singing Schubert now - And at my left you can sit at an old table to draw or sketch, write poetry, or do Nothing At All.


Years ago, during our living in a small Dutch village, sometimes I had the opportunity to pass considerable time in my workingroom, a warehouse loft. Willemien did not really like to be there, though there were seats and place enough to share. Was it the atmosphere? A tacit conflict of interests? Who will tell? Anyhow, time has brought change. While She had to liquidate her Antiquariat, I went out again for work. Until nearly a decade later heartsurgery and my Seventieth birthday brought that work to an end. And gave me back the room to take up again what I had put aside for lack of time.


But then something else happened. That old academic reading and writing ambition appeared to have lost its relevance, meaning. I am not going to tell here how and why and under what circumstances. Clearly, since a year in writing this journal, I am underway in an ongoing process of discovering “my own voice”. The voice I had been suppressing since the language of scientific and philosophical rationality had caught my mind and soul in its “deadening” grip.


Finding back my own voice has made it futile and meaningless to waist my time in reproducing the academic works and thoughts of Old&Venerable Friends like Edmund and Helmuth (& Others). I have learned to read in a different way. And I am learning to rediscover and develop  my original voice in telling you about the remains of our day. That is one of the lessons the true master of real life is teaching me. And guess what? Who are the ones that helped me in understanding why learning this lesson is so vital? Indeed, Mischa and Willemien. And thats why we are working now - not in the Old Library - but in the New.
Can you hear That, Edmund and Helmuth? No, well ask Lou Salome over there. She knows what I am talking about. Thanks, Lou, Hope to See You later.