Thursday 2 February 2023

I approach the doors to 501 Groveland and ring the bell and wait. It is a public entrance, but it is secured, and I wait for the buzz that will signify that the door has automatically unlocked. Does someone inspect me from a distance, weighing my dress and visage to see if I am suitable for entry? Or does the person on duty hit a button as reflexively as Pavlov’s dog salivates in response to it bell. I suspect I would only be subject to scrutiny if it were late at night, where I am nothing more than an unknown body emerging from a grey mist of fog.

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Tuesday, 6 December 2022

“Tom, you’re on a roll with your career!” Thus reads the subject line of the latest email of the day.

This is fantastic news! Not “fantastic” in its most common sense, but rather in its alternative sense of “fanciful; remote from reality.” After all, I am well into my fourth year of retirement, and it is at least two years since my last paper was published, my last patents granted, and my last appearance at a professional conference. While it would be fun to believe that the cumulative mass of my accomplishments has somehow reached a critical point, tipped, and is now barreling along on its own like an ever-growing cartoon snowball, it is not so.

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This note is under construction…

Haecity has to do with the distinct and specific identity of a particular time-place. I encountered the term in Stan Robinson’s Mars triology, and was intrigued by the way it was used to fuse a sort of mystical view of the world as a deeply interconnected whole with the quest for rigorous and systematic understanding that drives scientific inquiry.

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Monday, 28 November 2022

I awoke early, called not only by the glacier, which had been on my mind all night, but by a grand flood-storm. The wind was blowing a gale from the north and the rain was flying with the clouds in a wide passionate horizontal flood, as if it were all passing over the country instead of falling on it. The main perennial streams were booming high above their banks, and hundreds of new ones, roaring like the sea, almost covered the lofty gray walls of the inlet with white cascades and falls. I had intended making a cup of coffee and getting something like a breakfast before starting, but when I heard the storm and looked out I made haste to join it; for many of Nature’s finest lessons are to be found in her storms….

—John Muir, Stickeen,1909

I am not tough. Nor I do not aspire to be. That’s not to say I’m weak. Rather, I’d characterize myself as cautious, intelligently so. I am open to challenge, but I wish to be prepared, and would like to see myself as resilient.

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