Dear my Unknown, I was wanting to write to you. I was wanting to write to you about all the things that I was thinking about. I was wanting to write to you about the patterns in music and how they're abstract, how they mean nothing. That listening is a supreme act of faith, since there's nothing to those patterns but patterns, and that a young man our age in Russia in 1985 made an index card for each person he found in the national archives who had disappeared, and he made a card file of 200,000 people. Did you know there were 300,000 people at Woodstock in 1969? Can you picture them in the field there, as shown in the film, as caught by the cameras, recorded by the apparatus, 300,000 skating on mud naked? Can you imagine them all assasinated in a single shot? If you imagine this happened every summer, 300,000 people killed in one go, every summer for twenty years, this is something like what the Holocaust was: The biggest Woodstock every summer, all wiped out in a stroke, that many times. And if you imagine this happened every summer: 300,000 people killed in a moment, if you imagine this happened every summer for one hundred years, our entire lives and longer, then you know: this is what Stalin did to the Soviet people, united in Socialist union, devoted to perpetual revolution.

Mathematics is the study of patterns such as they exist in the mind; it is a collection of truths which need no validation in concrete experience. The ordinal numbers are innumerable because you can imagine them and because the things you're imagining can't be brought in correspondence to the natural numbers. If the things you're imagining can be given such a correspondence, you're not imagining the ordinal numbers.

I wanted to write to you about how I feel these days which is loaded with privilege and unchallenged, just like you. I want to spend my time as I used to, working and living, rather than as I do now, commuting and waiting. If I could find my place to work I would work; this way of life doesn't bring challenges but it doesn't bring the executioner in a leather smock, either, holding his pistol to the back of your cousin's head.

Listening is a supreme act of faith; you don't know that it will lead you to feel things. But if you don't listen you won't feel things. I was wanting to write you this but instead I went to Yoga and cleaned the house and boiled couscous for dinner.