Your friends and admirers throughout the world are glad to be able to celebrate your 70th birthday. During your long, delicate and difficult life you have created an oeuvre that will survive the challenges of time.

I have often wondered where you get the strength from. Is it perhaps from the understanding—which came to you very early—that ultimately we humans, as individuals, live in a state of mortal detachment from the course of the universe? Your equanimity in personal affairs has astounded me just as often as your courage in public ones; and your inexhaustible good humor seems to me like a gift from the heavens.