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PL

Letter to Władysław Tatarkiewicz written 23.11.1959

Rkp 1529
65

Cambridge 23 November 59

 

Dear Władysław,

                       My stay at Cambridge has reached its end; I still have a lecture at Harvard University tomorrow (on the subject of Aristotle’s Poetics) then around the 27th‒28th I’ll go to Chicago, where I’ll probably be until around 10 December and maybe longer, making trips to nearby universities.

            I haven’t written until now, because I’m very busy here. I was in Buffalo (8/11) with a lecture at the local university (on aesthetic experience), then had the opening of a discussion here at the American Academy of Sciences[O1] , which I had to write in English and which took me a great deal of time, because I wrote first in German, hoping that someone would translate it for me, and only then in English, because I found someone who could correct me. In general the language creates great difficulties for me, above all in the comprehension of live speech; they speak very differently here from what I had encountered previously. But too bad. While I’ve met many fine scholars here, in an overall sense the philosophical atmosphere for me is extremely alien.

            We are both healthy, what [O2] is happening with the Aesthetics Yearbook? Is it already being printed, and in that case when can it be expected to appear, or is this all ‘music of the future’? And how about your History of aesthetics? Has it already gone to press?

            I’m sending this to Cracow because I don’t know if you’ll be in Cracow more often than in Warsaw. What are you lecturing on this year? Still aesthetics or maybe something else? How long are you staying in Cracow? Don’t you get tired of making the trip to Warsaw?

            My address until around mid-December will be University of Chicago, Department of Philosophy, Chicago 37, or through the Institute of International Education, 1 East 67 Street, New York 21, N.Y. – they’ll forward it to wherever I’m going to be. What I’m going to do following my stay in Chicago is something I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll still go to San Francisco (Berkeley), but maybe I’ll return to New York, in order to spend more time there. I’ll write again.

I send cordial greetings for you and for your wife from both of us

                                                                                         /signature/ Your Roman

 

 

[O1]Właśnie American Academy of Arts & Sciences
[O2]Czy czegoś tu brakuje? Wydaje mi się, że to jest non sequitur