I found this letter in Dropbox last night, something I tried for a short time before buying more space on iCloud. The letter was to Larry or Lawrence Kurfiss, a high school friend who left in his junior year but came back to marry my former girlfriend. He went off to college with her, then to graduate school, having two children on the way, before getting divorced as we all seemed to do, and ending up in Seattle for almost the remainder of his life. Suddenly he turned up in Thailand dying from a painful variety of bone cancer. His spirits were high, but his correspondence became less and less frequent. He was heavily sedated. I never did quite understand how he ended up in Thailand, and I’m not sure when he died exactly. He simply stopped responding. The letter was never meant to be public. But in reading it again after after all this time I find that it touches on many things that still interest me and, of course, steers clear of many other things that I seldom reveal. I’ve deleted a name, added a note or two and otherwise made it ready for the internet, but except for that, the letter is as I found it. It’s long, so I invite you not to read it. But if you do, I hope your time will not be entirely wasted. I had completely forgotten it, and Larry, as things turned out, never answered.

I went downtown yesterday. It was Sunday. [The day before Memorial Day.] I can’t really remember being in town on a Sunday since Amie and I used to drive there. We sometimes took the bus, but we had to be sure we weren’t going anywhere outside the bus radius. Our favorite bookstore, though Amie worked at Barnes & Noble, was Borders. We knew the manager, many of the clerks and one or two of the café people. They had a big store with a huge selection of books that were different from those at Barnes & Noble. We almost always came home with books under our arms. At B&N you could order those and wait, but in that era you had to pay for anything ordered in advance. I think book orders sank to such a level that B&N decided to drop that policy. The café sold Seattle’s Best, which has predictably become a division of Starbucks. They sold things like espresso coffee with a small scoop of ice cream in the cup, a version of which my mother served in the 50s after bridge. I remember that because I scooped the ice cream and poured the coffee, while tucked away in the kitchen. And they gave frequent discounts. Who doesn’t love discounts? Then they announced a huge number of stores were closing. They returned what they could and transferred everything else to stores that were open mainly to sell off inventory, and then they were gone. It was the fault of massive mismanagement according to numerous business magazines sold at Barnes & Noble. After that, it was a lot easier to take the bus downtown.

My support group now consists of myself. So I had to be very careful Sunday to be at each of the bus stops in advance. There are only four buses down and four buses back on Sunday, the first is at the crack of dawn (actually later) to service those who work that day. So for non-workers there are only three. I left on the 12:42 from the Atascadero Downtown Transportation Center and came back on the 5:33 from the San Luis Obispo Transportation Center. That was my window. Miss the 12:42 and the next bus was in three hours. No point in going down only to turn around and come back. Miss the 5:33 and I’d have to walk around all night and the following day until the first bus home on Tuesday. I set multiple alarms on my phone and spent the last hour reading at the bus stop. I think I was nervous the whole time and found that I was actually sick halfway through. The American spelling of diarrhea ends in rhea, the British spelling is rhoea. According to Wikipedia it comes from from διά dia "through" and ῥέω rheo “flow". Diarrhea. Look at it. The next time you need to use this word, you still won’t remember how to spell it. I was sixty, I think, before I first included it in correspondence and have never once trusted my spelling.

At breakfast, or rather at lunch when I had breakfast, I finished the first chapter of Deer Hunting with Jesus [a Kindle Book that Larry had just sent me], propping the iPad behind my plate. Leaving Barnes & Noble I caught sight of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few by Robert B. Reich. I grabbed it and walked toward the Transportation Center. There I read the introduction and first chapter. To check the spelling of the name Bageant today, one I’m still not comfortable with — I hope it won’t be a lifetime problem (or an end of life problem) like diarrhea — I opened Deer Hunting, and since it was open, skimmed through the introduction again. The author he recommended was Michael Zweig from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. I have always loved the name Stony Brook. Reich is from Berkeley. In fact, his exact position there takes up half a paragraph. I imagine Reich eats Zweig for breakfast. But you know, aside from style, which Bageant owns, the first chapter of Reich sounds a lot like Bageant’s introduction. So, I’ll keep you posted.

The summer after graduation we were between houses. The one two blocks up that we were moving to was almost but not quite finished. We lived in an apartment in Torrance for a few miserable weeks before a friend of the family gave us his house while he and his family left on extended vacation. As a very young boy I remember being a landscape helper for my father at that house, planting ivy and digging holes for larger plants. Everything was exactly as it had been, except bigger and older. It had a beautiful view of the ocean and, if you were energetic enough, you could grit your teeth and walk down to the beach and back. The house sat on a small plateau well above the street. On the front steps I read the article “Was Velikovsky right?” by Eric Larrabee. (Harper’s Magazine, August 1963 — There’s a lot to be said for Google.) Emmanuel Velikovsky was a name I learned from that article. Another thing was the word “catastrophism”, the opposite of minute change over the course of millions of years which is sometimes called gradualism, or just the way things are according to the majority. I looked out over the ocean as I read, reading about the ocean hurling itself over Europe, the land splitting apart, Venus sending giant bolts of lightening toward the Earth. I saw the ocean below rise and crush everything around me, rip the houses from the ground and… And then I got up, went inside and got something to drink. When my heart slowed down, I went back outside and read some more.

When I enrolled at Harbor College later that year I found a copy of Worlds in Collision (1950), the book that cause the initial uproar. I told you in a former email that it was dangerous to express a belief in continental drift. Well, believing anything Velikovsky said was even more dangerous. I didn’t know enough to know that as I soaked him up, nor was I on track to become an academic. I read the books available at the time. There was a huge chunk of history in them that I was not prepared to process. Old Testament history. Even now I would find it difficult. I found a hardback copy of Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960) in a used book store, a book I still refer to, or would, were it not buried in a box somewhere. It’s about the overlaying of myths and history, how information from one time and culture moves to another. The peculiar life of Akhnaton explains the life of Oedipus, and also various city names in Greece. A book that proved very useful to me. In other words, it shaped the way I think. Worlds in Collision, however, was published twice in 1950, once by Macmillan and then by Doubleday. Macmillan was the major textbook company of the era. A young astronomer, an atheist, otherwise called a scientist, named Carl Sagan lead a group that said they would withhold all their books from Macmillan and insist everyone else do the same unless Macmillan withdrew Velikovsky’s book from its list. In America, with its Constitution and Bill of Rights, they wanted Velikovsky’s book banned. It did not match the scientific consensus, and should not, therefore, be published. The Communist Revolution did similar, though harsher things. Sagan saw himself as the great arbiter of belief. He perhaps saw himself as a Kafkaesque Inquisitor or Secretary of Censorship. He did not want books written against Velikovsky, because that would involve reading his books. He wanted him and all his ideas banished. Macmillan folded the moment Doubleday stepped forward and said it would take over publishing him. I, therefore, banished Carl Sagan.

The big issue was Venus being produced out of Jupiter about fifteen centuries ago. In other words, within the memory of man. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that Jupiter was effulgent, that it produced light. It was a very small sun revolving around a much larger one, which in turn was very small. Ray Bradbury wrote a story called “Death-by-Rain” in 1950. It was included in the movie The Illustrated Man, which I saw while in the Army. It was no secret that he was writing about a Venusian planet where it rained without end. We were taught that Venus was cool and wet when we were in elementary school. By we I mean you and I. Bradbury just made it rain all the time, since the planet was perpetually covered in clouds. In other words, Bradbury based his story on “fact”. Velikovsky said that the elimination of Venus from Jupiter reduced its mass below the effulgent stage, but also hurled a forming Venus through the inner solar system as it looked for its proper orbit. In the process, it nearly ran into earth more than once. It also did odd things that suggest that gravitation works hand in had with electromagnet forces. When frozen bison were dug up in Siberia with green plants and flowers in their teeth and stomachs, it suggested that the earth had come to a staggering halt. Bison grazing in Europe had been hurled as far east as eastern Russia and then frozen in an absolute flash. They did not get there gradually over millions of years. Velikovsky, of course, was not a scientist. He was a doctor of medicine, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst who devoted most of his life to doing research, unlike Richard Dawkins who had his degree in Biology and was Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science — in other words, a narrowly educated scientific hitman. Velikovsky believed Venus had caused among other things this sudden stoppage and used myth among other anathema to “prove” his case. He said that Venus, being a new planet, having been ejected from the bowels of a larger one, less than two millennia ago, would be hot. It has not had anywhere near enough time to become cool and stable. Venus being hot was the ravings of a non-scientific idiot. You could read almost anywhere that it was cool and wet. But when we got there via the space program and found the surface temperature to be well over 864° Fahrenheit, Carl Sagan actually claimed that 864° Fahrenheit isn’t all that hot. We can easily imagine places with higher temperatures. The fact that lead melts on the surface didn’t bother him in the least. In other words, he lied for the cause of science and made lots of money.

J—, whom you may remember from high school, raised his voice in my living room to drown out any discussion of Velikovsky when he visited as a doctoral candidate in Physics. There wasn’t anything wrong with Velikovsky, everything was wrong, so wrong that he refused to allow any discussion of him. He did something similar when I tried to discuss Louis Charpentier a few years later, concerning the building and placement of cathedrals in France. I was reading him in an original French edition. He hadn’t yet been translated. Basically, they just put them wherever they wanted to, and there is nothing special about how they were built. And that was the end of that conversation. I was pleased to see that [the late] Norma Lorre Goodrich [“a prolific author and former professor at the University of Southern California and Claremont Colleges” — see her website] quotes freely from Charpentier in The Holy Grail. Scientists attend a sort of Catechism before they are granted holy robes. They are taught to fine tune the catechetical points, but not to question them, and to make sure no one else does either. The fact that Newton wrote more about Alchemy than he did about gravitation or calculus was absolute nonsense. If such works exist, then someone was pretending to be Newton. Now, most of a lifetime has passed and Gary Lachman in The Secret Teachers of the Western World devotes considerable space to Newton and Alchemy, explaining that science has become so powerful as to convince people that Newton despised such nonsense. But there it is, just don’t expect a doctorate in science, though I suppose you could still get one in Medicine, if you believe it.

Books and ideas. Books, ideas and memories. The fact that they are still alive and well inside me speaks, I think, against the triviality of reminiscence. Sitting on a borrowed porch reading, and imagining… I remember the back door of the laundry room on Elm Street, the secret entrance to the attic in a the guest closet, and the peach tree behind the decorative fence in the back yard. But these and a million other things are isolated and disconnected. They lack the structure of books and ideas, though like Alchemy I have much more of them than I do of calculus and gravitation. The active life is one of selection and emphasis. We do the best we can with what we have, and I think that when we reach the end, there will be much left to do. We will wonder why we did so little. Or maybe we will wonder why there was so much to do in the first place. And we will try to narrow down the questions to something manageable. And then, perhaps, we will remember.