Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1805

Penned letter to Spencer MacCallum

June 11, 1958

 

 

Dear Spencer

 

     Mighty glad to have yours of the 5^th but was hoping to see you before the 23^rd.

 

     About physics: I think I’ve made more than a dozen starts — some of them quite long — but never seem to hit just the right stride. I know quite well what I want to say, but it’s difficult to set up a suitable background for it out of what is already accepted. It comes out of that background, to be sure, but just how must be shown sharply and by making old language serve new meaning — showing the old ideas in a new light. And the new conceptions, too, must be set out in the existing linguistic forms, giving them a new twist or slant. I could send you quite a bit but not much of it has been typed and so far I’m none too well satisfied with any of it.

 

     About linguistics. I think that makes a very fine third string to your bow. I don’t wonder it fascinates you. I know it would me.

 

     So you’ve set your sights on the Master’s degree. That is fine, but I wish that could be used towards a Doctor’s — and I was hoping you’d not be so far away next year. I enclose a check for the $115 plus $85 more – to add a bit to your budgetary confidence, margin for emergency.

 

     It’s surely fine to hear the good things about Beatrice and Irvan. I wish I could see more of them. It is one thing to understand the proprietary principle of Society and another thing to have an urge to communicate it. It is great to know that Irvan has both. I hope he is going to work at it a lot.

 

     Mr. Thayer Lindsley sent me John Gunther’s recent big book about Russia from the inside. Somehow I just had to read the most of it, even though I pretty much had to “come out the door wherein I went.” More important probably, I’ve been reading and re-reading Schroedinger and De Broglie over and over again. They give me much material, but only in disjointed fragments, side lights, as it were. And that Ayn Rand book, Atlas Shrugged, I read about a third of its 1100 pages before it stalled me, but now I’ve done the most of it and it is really a work of great power, a mighty work of genius, even though it doesn’t break any new ground and glorifies free enterprise more in terms of contrast with its opposite more than the wonder and beauty of its own.

 

     I leave tomorrow or Friday for New York again. Will be there two weeks or more. Must get a lot of put-off things done before I leave, so   —   so long till about the 25^th.

 

                                      P.D.