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Exceptional self-defining ALS signed “Lenny,” one page both sides, 6.75 x 9.75, April 7, 1987. Handwritten letter to his manager, Harry Kraut, in full: “Having just finished Martin Gardner's brilliant/hateful wipe-out of occultism (in the N.Y. Review of Books, apropos of recollected oeuvre of Shirley MacLaine) I find myself beset by feelings of paradox and thinking of you. I guess your paradoxical duality is one of the things I most like in you (and, for that matter, in any thinking feeling person (including myself, in those ever-decreasing moments when I like myself)).
Which of us worth his salt is not a paradoxnick? There's something in The Bible we all believe, even if not literally; and there's also something in Darwin and Freud that grabs us equally. Wm. Blake vs. Martin Gardner, X vs. Y, and on down the list of all the antitheses that engender free inquiry and democracy.
I like to think of myself, and of you, as primarily rational humanists; but then, there I go inhaling cosmic energies via Aaron Stern. And then, there you go, so movingly, pursuing your profound and loving experiment with Patrick Porter. I can't tell you how touching I find it. This is not a sketch for some future lecture, but a spontaneous love-letter on your birthday. Have a happy one, and many more…” In very fine condition. Accompanied by the original envelope addressed by Bernstein, who adds his initials to the reverse flap, “LB.”
The referenced Aaron Stern founded the Academy for the Love of Learning, which he conceived with Leonard Bernstein, as a ‘think-and-do tank’ to develop, practice, and foster research on its transformative learning methods, which are designed to activate the natural love of learning in people of all ages.
In 1971 Bernstein appointed ‘Harry Kraut, a music-loving Harvard Man…with a shrewd business-trained eye who had worked at the Boston Symphony for thirteen years, most recently as manager of Tanglewood,’ to head Amberson Inc., the company Bernstein created to manage his professional affairs. Kraut produced such television programs as Bernstein at Tanglewood, Bernstein at 70, and Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic.
A rare and important letter that also finds Bernstein referencing a handful of notable names, including actress Shirley MacLaine, with whom Bernstein shared an interest in reincarnation and Eastern mysticism, the “occultism” alluded to in an article by writer Martin Gardner, as well as historical figures like artist William Blake, naturalist Charles Darwin, and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
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