Last entry for an eventful month

10:15pm in Madison, Wisconsin where it was amazingly warm (over 60 degrees) when I arrived shortly after 6:30pm...one weird sight I won't forget soon: in spite of the warm temperatures and clear skies, all the lakes we flew over on the approach to the airport were still frozen!

Getting to the hotel was a trip since I really didn't know where I was going and the directions given over the phone made some sense but I was so tired I forgot the last half of them and so I called again when I made it to the mall that the hotel is named after, figuring it had to be close...and it was, but I was so glad I was able to drive around before it got dark; THAT would have substantially increased the degree of difficulty.

Going to dinner was made charming by two events:  a huge family leaving the restaurant and marveling at the fact that it was still so warm out (I had packed my coat in my suitcase and decided to leave it there for now; it was that warm!)...everybody had taken no chances and brought along their heavy coats, and the infants were decked out in multiple layers, so much so that they didn't move much, or couldn't.

And then my waitress was a charming young lady named Amy who prefaced every question with 'sir' this or 'sir' that, and when I told her she didn't need to be that formal, she explained it as simply a habit, and not really a bad one these days.  Anyhow, we had a natural banter going that was enhanced by a busboy joining in the fun...we fist bumped (all three of us) and it made the dinner a little happier and a little less lonely than it otherwise would have been.

I am SO ready to have my sinuses behave...I've gone through more kleenex than I've ever used on the road before!

Thank goodness for familiar things: music playing in the background, books on this and the iTouch, my little bronze horse from The Black Stallion, a crystal prism from a long-closed store in Savannah when I helped Nathan settle in that freshman year, already 9 years ago...amazing.

Small steps...my personal Kaizen

It was no surprise to me that I fell asleep around midnight and woke up at 4:45am...that was the way it always used to be whenever I'd travel somewhere far enough away that I wouldn't be able to sleep in my bed that night.  Beginning a journey is in many ways a separate and distinctly different experience than planning one; the reality of what you're about to embark on is something that can only truly be felt once that process begins in actuality. 

There are many who feel their life's steps are preordained, predetermined...it's at such moments that I appreciate the true magnitude of faith; to think that anyone/anything can be so omniscient as to know what is to happen to each and every one of us, at each and every moment, is to find sense within the inherent chaos that permeate our existences and provide us not only with an awareness of past/present/future, but also the ability to believe in the possibility of a continued existence beyond our immediate reckoning...not perhaps in life eternal but in life later today, tomorrow, next month.  To me, the true power of faith is believing in that gossamer link each of us have with God and how that thread remains connected no matter what direction we choose, what path we walk, no matter if we choose to affirm or deny that...in the best spirit of a zen koan, it simply is, and nothing said or done can change its essential quality...denying or affirming it is unimportant really; living up to its potential is what we should strive for.

Little things done to advance the day help tremendously, not perhaps in distance spanned with each effort, but when looking back at the collective result.  For me, relief and joy in remembering to cut a long toenail before it reminded me every day that I hadn't clipped it!  Taking my supplements, drinking some coffee, having some oatmeal, packing phone chargers, remembering my checkbook..taking the time (I actually made the time by waking up early) to stop, think, write and truly begin the day by consciously being in it and being actively involved in shaping it as opposed to feeling that I am a passenger only, unable to do anything to affect the day's flow or anything within it...perhaps I ultimately can not, but at least by being aware of what I can do to make the day ahead a time worth being engaged and involved in, I become less a passenger and more of a partner in the process. 

One of my pet peeves is the phrase "no big deal, it doesn't matter"...unless you are engaged or involved in the process of life, how can you tell whether something is or is not a big deal?  Isn't it better to evaluate and determine the worth of a moment before casting it off as unessential?

In any case, spending a half hour with one's thoughts helps ground oneself, especially before any journey, whether involving thousands of miles or a few short steps.

Preparing for a long journey away

In some ways the day before a long trip is more nerve-wracking than actually starting the trip, in terms of packing, trying to mentally prepare for as many contingencies as humanly possible...and here my background with the space program is not as helpful as one might think because preparing for every contingency usually means overthinking and then forgetting something simple and essential...like an emery board...check! paying rent...check!  paying utilities...check!  packing extra toothpaste and underwear...check!

I've been living with this trip to Wisconsin for several weeks so getting it underway finally tomorrow means closure and a restoring of perspective (friends who are musicians are sometimes on the road for months or at least multiple weeks instead of the mere 11 days here, which amuses me but doesn't drive the point home as much as it will when I am safely back) that will help me view things with at least something of the requisite clarity and balance I like to think I have from time to time but haven't felt for a couple of days now.

After all, I remind myself it is a state I haven't been to for forty (!!!) years and I doubt I'll return to again (unless I get assigned to it again...one never knows, like the inventory report I was switched to at the last minute that called for visits to Albany, Redmond, Klamath Falls and White City...and which turned out better than expected)...but any adventure is worth pursuing once the correct attitude is in place.

I think I'd feel less anxious if I wasn't still battling this nagging minor head cold...it's been around since Tuesday/Wednesday, and it's been serious enough to make me feel somewhat punk and unambitious...this morning, I felt bad enough on waking to take a hot shower, and when that didn't help as much as I hoped it might, I took a sudafed clone and when that didn't help, I took a real sudafed...and that finally helped relieve my symptoms enough to make me move around and start doing useful tasks around the house.

It's funny how when one's day isn't progressing smoothly, it seems like all sorts of things proceed to 'gang' up on you...today is the first time I can remember my printer not working as well as it normally does, and a small software app that allows an iPad to charge off a USB port on my home PC quit working after about an hour, and I have no idea why.  We aren't so technologically advanced not to believe in gremlins when such disparate events happen one after another.

A good day...including new music and a new architect

Whenever I can finish one of my assignments and feel good about the end result, it makes all the effort seem worthwhile.  Today was one of those rare days when everything seemed to work the way I intended them to...the writing of the report was smooth, procedural and careful in terms of attention to detail (something I am not always good at) and making sure numbers and facts were consistently presented throughout the report.  I hoped I would be finished by noon, and when I looked up from the keyboard and saw it was 11:45am, I was pleased but not really surprised.

Then after going to Five Guys again (because CK made me hungry talking about where she and her boys went for lunch after visiting the Knoxville Aquarium) and being relieved that this order took far less time to complete than Saturday's did, I came back and found some letters asking for advice that I could relate to better than some of my other recent attempts...it had been awhile since my writing came out effortlessly in a coherent structure and all I had to do was get it all down and see if everything made sense where I had initially placed them.

This clear seeing was with me the entire day.  I read about the just announced winner (Shigeru Ban) of the Pritzker Prize for Architecture and recalled how his cardboard church in New Zealand seemed not only boldly creative in its use of readily available materials, but that the resulting space felt as spirit-filled as you would want a place of worship to feel.  It truly says something about an artistic vision when the result transcends the materials used to create a meaningful space that anyone that can sense and feel intuitively...and in that intuitiveness there is no limit to what can be felt.

Even picking up my daughter at the Amtrak station in the afternoon was a task made memorable by the clearness of everything happening around me: trains pulling in, each heading for different destinations (Portland and Chicago), young children scampering along the tracks followed closely by parents making sure they didn't wander too far away, planes approaching the distant airport flying low enough overhead to see landing gear deploy and flaps lowered.  Everything was normal and unassumingly 'usual'; most of the time we are barely aware of the life occurring around us...today though, I saw it all, almost as if heeding the lesson in Wilder's Our Town where if only for a moment we may be aware of the specialness of each and every moment of life, not just here or there.

This clarity extended itself to the latest music I downloaded today (seasons 1 and 2 of Person of Interest by Rawin Djawadi).  At this point in my life I find myself drawn to music that is simple in structure but still touched by an element of 'space' that allows the listener's imagination to see not only what was intended but also opening up the mind to allow anything and everything to possibly connect with that setting. 

The older I get, the more I find that I relate to music that depicts solitude, awareness...but also loneliness; colored by loss, perhaps regret, certainly acceptance of fate and with it the approach of death...one's own or that of someone else.  For me, to live long enough to grow out of an understandable fear of death and have it replaced with the peace that comes from quietly accepting it as a natural part of life itself is to better understand the benevolence of God in granting us a finite time here before we continue our journey elsewhere.

It is expected to begin raining sometime overnight, and will continue for most of the week.  I'm not sure if Tuesday or Wednesday will have anything close to the same clarity or easy tapping of resources that I experienced today, but realizing that awareness again is to be linked anew with so many special moments in my life, and that connective thread will not be easily lost in the days to come.

Discovering Thin Places

In the course of today's readings, I came across the following writings from the website for the NPR program "On Being" and found them worth rereading and thinking about...and of course I find the reference to Madison, Wisconsin very intriguing indeed as I will be spending the first ten days of next month there for business.

Thin Places and The Transforming Presence of Beauty

Sarah Blanton 

I have spent the last 20 years trying to portray the sense of place I experience at the lake of my childhood. Located in Upper East Tennessee, South Holston Lake is cradled in the Appalachian Mountains.

Being in the presence of a deep, quiet body of water gently surrounded by this wise mountain range pulls me out of the shallow fray of my frantic life to rest in a centered awareness. It is a threshold — a true “thin place.”

The concept of thin places comes from Celtic mythology. Peter Gomes, a Harvard theologian, writes:

“There is in Celtic mythology the notion of 'thin places' in the universe where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity. To seek such places is the vocation of the wise and the good — and for those that find them, the clearest communication between the temporal and eternal. Mountains and rivers are particularly favored as thin places marking invariably as they do, the horizontal and perpendicular frontiers. But perhaps the ultimate of these thin places in the human condition are the experiences people are likely to have as they encounter suffering, joy, and mystery."

South Holston is where I bump up against the truth of my spirituality at its most sincere and humble levels. At this frontier, I see most clearly. Resting by these waters creates an awareness of the moment where I can finally stop the racing thoughts of our world. At this still point of mindfulness, I finally come into remembrance of the transforming presence of beauty.

Spirituality, described as the art of homecoming, is that universal experience of suffering, joy, and mystery. The driving desire behind this ongoing body of work tries to convey feelings of belonging, of homecoming as the soul lies against the threshold of such thin places.

Illustrating the spirit of South Holston through moods of seasons and weather, perspectives and light, I find a growing sense of intimacy and purpose.

My personal journey seemed to mirror my artistic choices, and the images progressively have become more personal. The importance of self-reflection emerges through simple attraction to the reflective properties of the water. Expanding, my attraction moved to objects and structure that underscored this growing introspection.

The role of courage to embrace a sense of separateness surfaces as a strong undercurrent serving to highlight the difficult journey of self-acceptance. Through critical self-reflection, I have become aware of the powerful force of solitude in both my spirituality and my art. Enveloped in that solitude are suffering, joy, and mystery that carry me to that thin place.

 

An Encouragement For Spring And The Writing Life 

Parker J. Palmer
 

For me, writing is a miraculous process. It's as miraculous as Spring itself, when buds arise from frozen ground and greenery leafs out from wood that's hard and unyielding.

For 50 years I've been writing almost daily. I'm driven not by expertise but by my own bafflement about many things — some of them "in here" and some of them "out there." Every time I write, I'm surprised by what I discover about myself and/or the world.

So I no longer wait until I have a clear idea to start putting words on the page. If I did, I'd never write a word! I simply start writing, trusting that the writing itself will help me dig into my bafflement, uncover what I already know, and point me toward what I need to learn next.

And if tomorrow I find out that I got it wrong, I know that none of my words will go to waste. Instead, they become compost for the next round of new growth.

Here's a poem that reflects my experience of the writing life. I offer it partly as an encouragement to those who write for any reason, personal or professional. Trust the process!

I offer it also as an encouragement for Spring to arrive ASAP! As they say, we are so, like,done with winter in Madison, Wisconsin! Totally...

The World Once Green Again

That tree from its dense wooden trunk
surprises into leaf
as my tight-fibered heart leafs out
in unexpected speech.

I know that trunk, so thick, so slow,
its heartwood core so like my own.
Yet here I celebrate that we
can take leave of our density
to dance the wind and sing the sun.

Our words, like leaves, in season spring
and then in season fall,
but at their rise they prove a power
that gentle conquers all.

As shriveled leaves return to earth
to nourish roots of leaves unstrung,
so dry words fall back to the heart
to decompose into their parts
and feed the roots of worlds unsung.

And when speech fails, the dark trunk stands
'til most surprising spring
wells up the voice that ever speaks
the world once green again.

Money well spent...now and for the future

The following was taken from today's Spaceflight Now:

Mission managers are finishing proposals to be submitted to NASA in April for consideration in a senior review, a process every two years in which an independent panel of respected scientists rank the value of continuing funding for each project.

The senior review board's recommendations will be announced in June, according to NASA. All of NASA's science divisions use a similar review to decide which missions most deserve continued funding.

Scarce funding, always a concern for NASA, is aggravated in this year's senior review cycle by the inclusion of the Curiosity Mars rover, which will complete its primary two-year mission this summer and must ask for approval for extended operations.

Seven missions are on the planetary science division's senior review docket this year:

• The Curiosity rover, initially approved for a prime mission lasting one Martian year, is participating in the senior review for the first time this year after arriving on Mars in August 2012. Curiosity is driving toward Mount Sharp, a three-mile-high peak believed to harbor layered clay minerals containing clues about the red planet's ancient past.
  
• The Cassini mission is proposing an extension until late 2017, when the spacecraft will fly inside of Saturn's outermost rings before plunging into the gas giant's atmosphere. Cassini's mission has been extended twice since entering orbit in July 2004. Unlike other projects in the senior review, which are on the hook for two-year extensions, Cassini is seeking a three-year commitment from NASA to operate the spacecraft until the planned conclusion of its mission, supporting flybys of Saturn's moons Titan, Enceladus, Dione and Tethys.
  
• NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, flying in orbit several hundred miles above the red planet, is seeking money for a fourth extended mission phase since it arrived at Mars in March 2006. MRO hosts a sharp-eyed high-resolution camera, a mineral mapping spectrometer and ground-penetrating radar. The orbiter also serves as a communications relay platform for the Curiosity and Opportunity rovers on the Martian surface.
  
• After a remarkable 24-mile journey across Mars, the Opportunity rover is exploring the rim of Endeavour crater, where scientists say they have found evidence of an ancient environmental that was capable of supporting microbial life. Opportunity landed in January 2004 at the start of a planned three-month mission, but the rover is still going and producing science results.
  
• Mars Odyssey is the longest-serving mission to ever visit Mars. The spacecraft entered orbit in late 2001 and still has fuel for nine or 10 years of operations, according to NASA. Odyssey is the primary communications link with NASA's rovers on Mars, and the probe is currently adjusting its orbit to fly over Mars during morning daylight, which scientists say could yield insight into ground composition, warm-season water flows found on steep slopes, and geysers spawned by dry ice during the spring thaw at the Martian poles.
  
• NASA is a junior partner on the European-led Mars Express mission, which has orbited Mars since December 2003. NASA supported development of the Mars Express subsurface radar and an instrument to monitor the interaction between the solar wind and Martian atmosphere to study what happened to the water that was once plentiful on Mars. NASA's limited involvement in Mars Express makes it the least costly mission in the agency's catalog of extended missions.
  
• The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is up for a two-year extension. LRO would be NASA's only spacecraft exploring the moon over the next two years, with instruments to gather high-resolution images, search for ice deposits, map the moon's jagged terrain, and measure radiation in the lunar environment.

NASA's other planetary missions, such as New Horizons, Juno and Dawn, are still in their primary mission phases. And the MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury was already granted an extension to March 2015, when engineers expect it to run out of propellant and impact Mercury.

As a longtime space follower, the first five are of highest significance (particularly Cassini and Opportunity since those (along with Odyssey) are multi-decade missions and the chances for those occurring again are slight with the possible exception of Curiosity), with LRO and Mars Express important but not as essential. 

Of course, when one considers the cost of boondoggle projects like the advanced technical fighter (my contention is that keeping a proven design like the F-15 and improving ordinance/technology is a heckuva cheaper way to go, and the aircraft get built, flown, and maintained operational), it's amazing that anything close to real, meaningful science ever gets accomplished at the governmental level.

Welcome back, Nate

After a busy day, I'm spending the night in Albany, Oregon getting ready to drive over Santiam Pass tomorrow afternoon, returning to Redmond in order to count inventory on Wednesday morning at a location just down the street from where my hotel will be tomorrow evening, I was delighted to learn in my perusal of my usual RSS connections the following snippet:

We hope you’ll gain insight and pleasure from our approach to the news and that you’ll visit us from time to time. We hope to demonstrate the value of data journalism as a practical and sustainable proposition.
 
It’s time for us to start making the news a little nerdier.

It's quite appropriate to have March Madness kick off with the dean of prognosticators once again amongst us: Nate Silver and his colleagues at the newly reintroduced FiveThirtyEight.com.  I've missed his rare combination of attention to detail and witticisms reminiscent of Pogo, The Daily Show, and Colbert Report, only subtler.

It's unfortunate that his honest, objective analysis will be displayed again this election season, this time though chronicling the probable losses of the Democratic Party in November in the same way that the GOP found it self being analyzed two years ago.  If there is any moral to this clarity, it's that objective review without having subjective crap heaped on top of it is the best way to learn and to move on, and in no other field is this kind of clearsighted vision more necessary (and less likely to be found) than in politics.

I was tempted to choose my selections for the field of 67 exclusively based on his site's recommendations...but will probably opt not to just because having reached the lofty position of 170th several years ago in the New York Times and not breaking the top 8,000 since, I find kibitzing and trash talking from the sidelines to be just as satisfying, if not more so because my limitations are not so apparent when they aren't finalized in an entry somewhere.

More bits and pieces

It's always a relief when you finally get to the point where you've collected all the necessary information to work on your taxes and have them turn out the way you thought they might without unnecessary gyration or number crunching.  As it now stands, I will get some money back from Federal while the amount I owe Oregon is around the estimate I gave myself about 6 months ago.  After taking care to save my work, I took a deep breath and then a nice hot shower...and while I probably won't actually file them until next week, just having them done to that point took an enormous load off my mind.

Among the other things I've meant to talk about but haven't yet because of work, travel, or just getting my head around them...

I'm sorry to see Anne Kaneko's Fukushima blog come to an end.  Having discovered it about 6 months about the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, I always liked its candid first-person observance of life in a part of Japan that is still trying to come to grips with the ramifications of what happened there three years ago.  Then too, it also helped to hear a western perspective on events and news that often seemed at odds with what logic or common sense dictated...even though Japan's culture is worlds apart from that of the United States, the political backroom dealing and bureaucracy are, sad to say, not all that different, and the candor with which she viewed things was all the more discouraging for the legacy that part of Japan has not only for the rest of its country, but for the effects it is having on the rest of its Pacific neighbors.

I wish her the very best in her new life closer to Tokyo, and will miss her clean, spare reporting of news and events, accompanied as they often were by wondrously beautiful photography, most of the time focusing on something simple, basic and part of everyday life.

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As I write this, the voting in Crimea has ended with over 95% voting for secession and incorporation with Russia.  I continue to wonder if the clandestine methods Russia employed to take over that part of Crimea will continue bit by bit throughout areas of Ukraine, or if Putin will see in the posturing and weakness displayed by the EU and United States an opportunity to move boldly and defy the world to do anything definitive in terms of sanctions after the deed has been done.  While Germany's statements at week's end were sterner than I had expected, I just don't see the kind of coordinated countermove anywhere that would not only give the Russians pause or surprise them.

About the biggest surprise I had over the last several days was downloading Season 21 of Top Gear and realizing with a start that their second episode race involving small high-mileage cars took place in the exact place where all the tension and standoffs are now occurring! (they began at Yalta and ended up north of Kiev in the middle of Chernobyl where Jeremy supposedly succumbed to the radiation, he but still made it to the episode's end)

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I wonder how many others have experienced the sheer ecstasy that comes with hearing (or playing?) certain seminal compositions...for me, there will always be a sense of magical wonder whenever I hear the following works and performances:

Bach Brandenburg Concerto no. 3, first movement (Collegium Aureum)
Bach Clavier Concerto no. 5, second movement (my 'Slaughterhouse Five' moment played by Glenn Gould)
Chopin: Piano Concerto no. 2, second movement (Martha Argerich, Charles Dutoit/Montreal Symphony Orchestra)
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe, introduction (Pierre Boulez/New York Philharmonic)
Tchaikovsky: Serenade for Strings (Robert Irving/New York City Ballet Orchestra)
Tchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty Ballet, introduction (Gennadi Rozhdestvensky/BBC Symphony Orchestra)
Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis (Sir Adrian Boult/London Philharmonic with inspired solo violin playing by Rodney Friend)

In the days to come, I will try to describe why these particular pieces have such special significance to me...in some cases, it's because of the music's connection to other special memories (Tchaikovsky Serenade)...in others, it's because the music reminds me of other special irreplaceable moments (Argerich's temperament and poise reminds me of virtuosi I saw in person; Rubinstein, Horowitz, Serkin, Pollini)...but regardless of the reason, they never fail to remind me of all the positive reasons why I fell under the spell of music so long ago and never wanted to leave.

Bits and Pieces

I have been trying to work on my taxes this weekend, and made steady progress until Saturday afternoon brought with it news of all sorts of events, some to share here and others to keep quiet about for awhile longer.

The saddest news was that of my brother-in-law's passing in Hawaii because of a heart attack.  When I spoke with my sister, she was coping as best she could...and in that instant I completely understood where she was coming from.  Memories came flooding back of that day when my Mother died: how time either sped by without my being aware of it, or slowed down to the point where almost every second lasted seemingly forever...how emotions were numbed or exposed, suddenly and without any warning or control.  I can only hope that she has people around her to get her through this difficult time...I suspect she does...one of the things she always liked about Sid's family is that they welcomed her without the kind of difficulty or drama that seemed to accompany ours.

The above title will make more sense once I post the following entry.

Perspective setting and empathy

I will discuss this topic further when I return home on Thursday, but for now, beginning with the wise words of James Fallows (Atlantic Wire):

As the years go by, I am more and more convinced that the immediate, fast-twitch talk-show responses on what we "have" to do about some development are almost always wrong, and the calm, day- or week-after reflections about proportion, response, and national interest are almost always wiser. If I could, I would put all cable-TV discussion of breaking-news crises on a 24-hour delay. Maybe there has been a case in which immediate reflex-response to big news has seemed wise in the long run. Right now I can't think of any.

Listening to a recent podcast this morning of Lynne Rosetto Casper's excellent Splendid Table, one of her guests was a Stanford professor working on a study involving empathy.  As I listened to the intriguing discussion (where among other things, a student suggested using a cow as an avatar), I wondered how much of business is based on the notion that empathy is dangerous because it would provide each employee with potential significance/relevance, and how this could cut into profits because being truly empathetic would call for a reasonable compensation instead of maximizing the return on an investment. 

I wonder if anyone has ever done a study showing the effect on sales and output when profits and employee compensation are reasonably balanced, instead of the former being emphasized to the detriment of the latter.

It's worth pondering: is empathy a human trait that is so instinctive that everyone can do it but many choose not to...is it something that gets in the way of efficient "business" because it's easier to view an employee as a replaceable part?  Certainly the notion of a minimum wage implies that people are entitled to a basic level of compensation...I wonder, would those who argue most strenuously against such a requirement be willing to voluntarily pay people more, or is the notion that most people "out there" are too lazy, unmotivated or don't deserve to be paid more just easier to accept?

When it comes to the nonstop coverage of the missing 777 with more than 230 souls onboard, one wonders if any of the news channels engaged in feverish speculation about their collective fate would be doing that if they knew anyone on that flight...of course they would, because the notion of "stuff" is more important than that of content.  It's sad when restraint and consideration are considered weaknesses.  But then too, empathy has very little place in the modern world, and it's sad that an argument has to be made in order to even justify its place in more of today's interactions.

How reviewing can suck the very life out of an event

As I was reading the review in The New York Times of the recent piano recital by Murray Perahia at Carnegie Hall, I was reminded of the last time I had attended a live piano recital locally.  I do not recall the year, but the featured pianist was Richard Goode, and I believe the program consisted of Beethoven and Schubert.

While I don't have any overtly negative memories of the pianist, I remember very well the person who invited me to the performance, and she remains the lasting memory to this day of why music reviews should be done sparingly or not at all.  Her name escapes me, but she wrote the program notes for the piano series and had posted a Craigslist notice asking anyone who was interested in attending the recital to write her back and explain why they should accompany her, and the winner would be her guest.  Now I would like to think that at least a few people entered the little contest and mine was judged the best of the group, but as time has gone by, I've occasionally wondered if the reason why I was chosen was that I might have been the only applicant.

Regardless of the circumstances, I was delighted to attend, especially since the performance would take place in what used to be called the Intermediate Theater of the Performing Arts Center (now Newmark Theater).  I attended the opening program in 1987 and immediately loved the warm acoustic provided by the cherry veneer paneling that served as a perfect compliment to the brighter reflective sound from the overhead shell.  To my thinking it was (and still is) the best of the auditoriums in Portland, along with the Keller (the Winningstad sounds too strident to me while the Schnitzer requires artificial amplification to such an extent that the aural experience between the main stage and balconies is exhaustingly unpleasant).

But back to the hostess for the evening.  She was not a formally trained musician but had studied in her spare time and considered herself a resource for enlightened, thoughtful reflection when it came to music performance.  She considered her program notes to be well researched, and useful to both the amateur and professional reader.  Needless to say, modesty was not one of her traits that she chose to promote.

After reading the first several paragraphs, I knew it was going to take a major effort on my part not to embarrass one of us (probably me) by pointing out that while the gist of her writing was accurate and informative, it had one major shortcoming, and that was it considered minutia to be a substitute for the love or magic of that composition.  It is one thing to explain sonata form; it something quite different (and much more difficult I might add) to make it resonate with the music being described.  In the hands of someone who is both a skilled musician and writer (Charles Rosen comes to mind; Alfred Brendel and Stephen Hough as well), program notes can be informative and an invitation to enter the world of the music being recreated.  With this person I felt the program notes were her attempt at justifying her presence within this special realm. 

That recital remains the first and only time I ever wished I could sit away from a specific person.  Her desire to analyze the music, the performance, the piano, the tuning/temperament, served only to drain everything of whatever potential magic there was, leaving for me at least the sense that nothing mattered but how the music related to her...without her, nothing in the performance mattered. 

Now there is nothing wrong with her basic point:  music, especially live music, should connect, has to connect with the listener in some visceral, emotional way...but there is something fundamentally wrong or sad when one component of the circle of composer, musician and listener is distorted so much that the other parts do not matter; that the balance is lost, sometimes forever.  I was reminded of how our society's relentless quest to do or have everything done faster and better can so often result in quantity but at the expense of quality...and in the arts, there will always be devotees and performers, but artists...people with talent and the ability to share that with love and grace...will continue to be rare and defy the kind of analytical description she was doing and enjoying.

What kind of listener should be nurtured?  First and foremost of all, someone who can listen and be willing to see beyond the notes and structure of a piece and be touched by the underlying inspiration.  The kind of effortless, simple joy that a child brings to life is something we all had at one time or another and can, if we are able to grasp it again, make everything seem special again.  For sure, having sufficient background in a subject to understand history, context, etc., is always useful but it is not always necessary...as a matter of fact I suggest that in many cases, that can inhibit true enjoyment because of all sorts of peripheral reasons (like elitism, feelings of superiority) can end up stripping art of its spirit.  I suppose at its essential core, the best listener is someone who believes in the magic inherent in hearing something performed live and actively listens because one never knows when that special sense will happen, and the anticipation of that moment possibly happening makes the experience special for both the performer and listener.

I thanked her for letting me attend the performance, left quickly and after coming home played some Debussy performed by Paul Jacobs.  I had purchased these recordings some 25 years earlier and still listened to them rapturously because of the simple, graceful performance; nothing pulled or stretched about, the music being allowed to breathe, ebb and flow.  If the piano or acoustic isn't completely perfect...so what?  What matters most is what the music contains, and here away from the harsh spotlight of that person's mindset, one could sense again some of the subtlety and nuance, much like the delicacy of a butterfly's wings illuminated by the sunlight instead of caught and pinned on a specimen page. 

That is why I don't do many reviews these days.  Analyzing and critiquing is not as much fun as encouraging others to listen in, to attend in person, to participate...all with the joy inherent in witnessing something live, ephemeral and perhaps enduring in the mind afterwards.

HIMYM and the Foundation

As How I Met Your Mother enters the homestretch of its final season, wrapping March 31 on CBS, speculation has been rampant that Ted's titular bride-to-be has been dead the entire time his adult self has been narrating the series. (The most recent, overtly cryptic, episode only fueled the morbid argument.)

Cristin Milioti very politely disagrees. The actress…seemed genuinely put off by the suggestion the series would end on such a dark note.  "That's insane," says Milioti. "There are some crazy conspiracy theories, which really makes me love the fans more... That is so crazy."

Calling the finale "beautiful," she also notes that there weren't any alternate endings written or filmed in an attempt to maintain secrecy. "They've had this vision for nine years, and it's in great hands…They know exactly what they want to do."

Could she be bluffing? Of course. She's had a few convincing performances of late. Milioti also chatted with THR about her turn as Leonardo DiCaprio's on-screen first wife in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street -- and how none of her co-workers noticed she was in it. 

“… It merely required the use of that much-neglected commodity—common sense. You see, there is a branch of human knowledge known as symbolic logic, which can be used to prune away all sorts of clogging deadwood that clutters up human language.”

“What about it?” said Fulham. 

“I applied it. Among other things, I applied it to this document here. I didn’t really need to for myself because I knew what it was all about, but I think I can explain it more easily to five physical scientists by symbols rather than by words.” 

Hardin removed a few sheets of paper from the pad under his arm and spread them out. “I didn’t do this myself, by the way,” he said. “Muller Holk of the Division of Logic has his name signed to the analyses, as you can see.” 

Pirenne leaned over the table to get a better view and Hardin continued: “The message from Anacreon was a simple problem, naturally, for the men who wrote it were men of action rather than men of words. It boils down easily and straightforwardly to the unqualified statement, which in symbols is what you see, and which in words, roughly translated, is, ‘You give us what we want in a week, or we beat the hell out of you and take it anyway.’ ” 

There was silence as the five members of the Board ran down the line of symbols, and then Pirenne sat down and coughed uneasily. Hardin said, “No loophole, is there, Dr. Pirenne?” “Doesn’t seem to be.”

---

 “But then,” interposed Sutt, “how would Mayor Hardin account for Lord Dorwin’s assurances of Empire support? They seemed—” He shrugged. “Well, they seemed satisfactory.” 

Hardin threw himself back in the chair. “You know, that’s the most interesting part of the whole business. I’ll admit I had thought his Lordship a most consummate donkey when I first met him—but it turned out that he was actually an accomplished diplomat and a most clever man. I took the liberty of recording all his statements.” 

There was a flurry, and Pirenne opened his mouth in horror. 

“What of it?” demanded Hardin. “I realize it was a gross breach of hospitality and a thing no so-called gentleman would do. Also, that if his lordship had caught on, things might have been unpleasant; but he didn’t, and I have the record, and that’s that. I took that record, had it copied out and sent that to Holk for analysis, also.” 

Lundin Crast said, “And where is the analysis?” 

“That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications—in short, all the goo and dribble—he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out. “Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one damned thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.”

Asimov, Isaac. Foundation (p. 69-71). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Being careful what you wish for

Like most of us, I subscribe to a number of online newsletters that advance a number of topics, whether subtly/not-so-subtly or overtly/covertly provocative, and I came across this transcribed interview this morning, where the following exchange took place:

http://singularityhub.com/2014/03/06/in-depth-with-jason-silva-brain-games-trance-states-and-the-abomination-of-death/

Will our parents be the last humans to die without having any say in the matter? Or maybe it’s us?
 
That to me is an abomination. I can’t fathom it. The dream would be to save our parents, wouldn’t it? I mean my whole interest in this stuff came from being unable to contemplate the mortality of my parents. Just being unwilling to accept ever having to come to terms with something so horrific. How do we address this horrific imposition by a supposedly meaningless universe? Well, if the universe works through us, and we are it and it is us—then we can change the rules.

Now, I have never been someone who's been able to walk away from a provocative act or statement, though as I've gotten older, I've gotten better at doing so; if for no other reason than the simple fact that reacting impulsively to something has never worked out well for me.

However, something about this exchange rankled me, and I wasn't sure why...I suppose part of it had to do with the audacity, the sheer arrogance implied in the phrase "then we can change the rules".  I've read my share of TED talks, of well-intentioned prose where the utopia of existence can occur if only this or that occurs or is changed, and after the euphoria of that heady pronouncement fades, what is left afterwards is a kind of basic response...namely, 'ok, how?' 

In a way, 'how?' is the easiest one of the core questions to reply...this is where the logician, scientist or enthusiast have equal footing, and whether or not a solution proves plausible or not, realistic or not, this question can always be answered, in many ways.

After this, though, the questions get more complicated...who? what? where? when?  All these can narrow the focus but can also (whether intentionally or not) raise some true moral questions of their own.  As inconvenient as the latter may prove, they are essential because whether or not we like it or not, life...life on this planet; life as we know it...is not based on pure science or pure logic, and that applies to every facet of life, which includes death.

But as challenging as 'how?' is, the most compelling, the most difficult of all, may be: 'why?'

Mortality is a fact of life.  Period.  Everything is born or created; it follows that everything will either die or disappear.  To me, that simple fact can be funny (thank goodness there's a limit to puberty!, thank God there's a finite time to my teens/twenties!), profound (we must recognize every moment we have with appreciation for its uniqueness and evanescence and that applies to our interactions with others), sad (I miss my grandparents and mother and friends who have died), or basic (I will die some day), but whatever the situation, to suggest that death can somehow be dealt with like a minor inconvenience seems to misunderstand the illogic of that claim.  How can one live indefinitely?  And what would be the quality of that life lived in perpetuity?

Judging from the situation of most of the world's current population, ALL countries, governments, municipalities are doing a poor job of caring for their populations, let alone natural resources.  There are people everywhere who are hungry, unwanted, exploited, illiterate...and yet if you looked inside at basic anatomy, there would be no overt difference between a beggar off the streets of Mumbai and a notable literati or tycoon from New York or London.  Every difference, every distinction or prejudice occurs on the surface of our culture/society, and this is what we consider worth continuing forever?

It is entirely possible that the person being interviewed was speaking from an earnest desire to do something altruistic; that the way most people die in the western world is not from old age but from disease...but wouldn't it be more effective to spend the time and energy not only to cure ailments but ease the suffering involved?  Wouldn't it be better to spend the time and resources on preventing certain things from happening in the first place, things that left untreated could lead to disease and pain?  Wouldn't it be better to take the time and effort to have more people care about what life means instead of taking it for granted, being oblivious to everything around us except ourselves and maximizing one's 'share'?

All these things contribute to the quality of a life, not a measurable quantity but something indefinable...intangible.  It seems to me that viewing the universe as supposedly meaningless is inherently sad because it suggests that because we don't understand the why of that, it's completely irrelevant and something to fear or rail against. 

To me, the fact that the universe isn't completely explainable to me is a source of endless relief!  Realizing that I don't need to know every thing in order to understand or appreciate some things lends perspective and depth to my present existence....the fact that every day begins and ends the same way provides a sense of continuity and balance, a zen koan that defies any answer other it simply is.

And I might just simply be wrong, but knowing I have a finite time here makes it possible for me to care more about what I leave behind; in the same way that if I'm going to be somewhere special for only a certain number of days, I will cherish that time much more than if I was there indefinitely.

I think what people in general need to realize is that it's not the quantity of something that counts the most; it's the quality that matters, and it is as true for one's life as it is for everything within life itself...how else can one explain the contradiction between the opulence of the developed world and the number of genuinely unhappy people in it, feeling the way they do while using all manner of drugs, meth, alcohol, tobacco and other stimulants/distractions?  How many of these poor souls could relate to the story of Citizen Kane where true happiness lay in a simple child's sled named "Rosebud?"

Coming home gorgeously

If you had to drive home from a business assignment, you could certainly do much worse than to go north from Bend via Oregon 97 up to timberline and then take 35 north to Hood River, heading west on I-84, crossing the Columbia at Cascade Locks and then west on Washington 14 through Washougal and Camas.  The fact that it had been pouring the last several days made the air seem fresher than remembered, the afternoon light purer and sharper, and the Cascades to the west that much more distinctive with snow cover matching memory, not the minimal dusting of the past few winters.  It took all my concentration not to keep looking off at the Three Sisters and Mt. Jefferson and wanting to head off in that direction just to see the hills and peaks blanketed in white and blessed again with that special muffling of sound that comes with a world blanketed by abundant snowfall.

I know that the drive north from Madras until reaching timberline can be hot, dusty and neverending in the middle of summer, but today that part of the drive also seemed touched by the clear light and gentle wind, with views in every direction unbelievably sharp and dimensional in a way that made repeated glances necessary just to convince the mind's eye that you can see that far away that clearly without even trying.

I was fortunate in that I made it to the timberline junction just around sunset, and could travel on 35 with the twilight helping me navigate the twists and turns of that path out of the forest.  Once I got used to the notion that all the reflections in the road really were water-caused, not ice (at least for the moment), and that the "dust" being kicked up by the vehicles ahead of me was loose snow, I could tackle the drive with bravado and caution, making sure that my speed was just enough to make it out of the forest into the orchards south of Hood River before the last of the day's light disappeared, replaced as it was by the darkest blue night sky I had seen for some time.  I stopped for a Diet Coke and spent some moments looking at the stars twinkling overhead and their light reflecting off the river's smooth, barely rustling surface...and then marveled at the realization that I wasn't the only person in that parking lot taking a moment or two to let the wonder of the place took hold of our souls.

All around, the fields and hills were quiet, with only an occasional bird call breaking the silence.  Even the number of cars on the road wasn't as many as I would have thought for a Friday evening, though admittedly neither Hood River nor Cascade Locks are social magnets; what restaurants I did encounter were filled reasonably so, and the people seemed like me delighted by the clear weather but a bit wary as well, wondering when the rains will return...the true hallmark of a Pacific Northwestener.

On Explaining the Obvious

As any parent of school-age children knows these days, public education has become more of an attempt to quantify "education" according to standards set by some National organization instead of determining what they might be capable of doing.  I don't necessarily object to the first approach so long as a good-faith effort is made to give children the necessary basic tools to do well in these evaluations, but one of the problems I do have with this approach is evident in the following article:  Music-prodigies-math-prodigies.

While the premise has some intrigue to it, there is really and truly nothing that can be done with this information, and that's precisely my objection to it.  We sometimes spend so much time disassembling something that at the end of it, we are left with a handful of parts and no better sense of how it worked (other than it did work, but now it doesn't) and definitely no better clue as to why it worked the way it did...the why of something may be more important than anything else...not to figure out or quantify, but to appreciate for what it is and its uniqueness.

As someone schooled in both the arts and sciences, I had no problem keeping separate in my thought processes things that could be answered quantitatively and those that did not have to be or could be answered that way.  I also had no problem knowing which answer "group" to assign for a particular problem.  Perhaps it was because I took enough classes in music theory, composition, harmonic/structural analysis, counterpoint, and orchestration to understand the mechanics of music and know that regardless of a work's technical merit, it lacked any sense of life or spirit unless it transcended its limitations through artistic expression and context.  There may be an enormous difference between a scale played awkwardly and tentatively by a newcomer to an instrument and what Yo-Yo Ma can toss off in tuning onstage with his Silk Road Ensemble, but to a child and his/her parents, the former could be miraculous and blissful moment as well.

My point is this: we spend way too much time wanting comprehensive proof these days.  When it comes to the arts, some things are best appreciated instead of analyzed. When trying to figure out if a prodigy has a brain structure and thought process different from a different discipline, it may be better to just accept it to be true, that it is a blessing or mystery, and move on.  If we insist on disassembling everything in our lives, we may be left at the end with just a bunch of parts and no better idea of how it worked or why it worked that way.

There is something to be said about believing in the magic of everyday life and the way ordinary things can become special if we just took the time to appreciate them in whatever way is necessary to allow their uniqueness to become evident.

Wondering

It was about a year ago that I came to Bend on business and spent most of an entire week here.  It was  cold and drizzly for the first several days, and I looked out at the Deschutes River and marvel at the changing vistas brought about the rain, clouds, fog, wind and sunshine.  While I fed all manner of waterfowl with the pita and bread I smuggled back from the restaurant, I got used to seeing one particular "couple" who came every day and knew to wait for me in particular.  I called them George and Gracie.

Today I made it into Bend around mid-afternoon, and after taking a little time to catch my breath and unwind from the drive from Vancouver, I went to a restaurant in downtown specializing in middle eastern food.  I ordered a couple extra pitas, and then decided on the way back to stop at Safeway and pick up a bag of them under the rationale that they'd be cheaper that way (and they were).

Once back in my room, it took a little fiddling to remember how to do this disbursement:  first of all, the pieces had to be small enough for the ducks to eat...too big and they could choke or just give up.  Then once a group appeared it made more sense to rip up many pieces at once instead of by ones or twos.  Well it worked, and for a little while I had four pairs of ducks to feed, and it was as enjoyable as I remembered it to be...but then after I went back in to eat my dinner and then came back outside afterwards, I noticed that one pair remained...and I wondered if it was the same couple from last year.  With ducks it is virtually impossible to tell one male from another, let alone females with their less vibrant plumage, but something made me think that just perhaps this could be the same pair that I shared so much wondrous quiet time with, and the thought pleased me very much.

On W. H. Auden and the true nature of kindness

Over breakfast this morning, I came across the following from The New Work Review of Books:

The Secret Auden
Edward Mendelson

W.H. Auden had a secret life that his closest friends knew little or nothing about. Everything about it was generous and honorable. He kept it secret because he would have been ashamed to have been praised for it.
 
I learned about it mostly by chance, so it may have been far more extensive than I or anyone ever knew. Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York. She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.
 
Someone else recalled that Auden had once been told that a friend needed a medical operation that he couldn’t afford. Auden invited the friend to dinner, never mentioned the operation, but as the friend was leaving said, “I want you to have this,” and handed him a large notebook containing the manuscript of The Age of Anxiety. The University of Texas bought the notebook and the friend had the operation.
 
From some letters I found in Auden’s papers, I learned that a few years after World War II he had arranged through a European relief agency to pay the college costs for two war orphans chosen by the agency, an arrangement that continued, with a new set of orphans every few years, until his death at sixty-six in 1973.
 
At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.
 
At literary gatherings he made a practice of slipping away from “the gaunt and great, the famed for conversation” (as he called them in a poem) to find the least important person in the room. A letter-writer in the Times of London last year recalled one such incident:
 
Sixty years ago my English teacher brought me to London from my provincial grammar school for a literary conference. Understandably, she abandoned me for her friends when we arrived, and I was left to flounder. I was gauche and inept and had no idea what to do with myself. Auden must have sensed this because he approached me and said, “Everyone here is just as nervous as you are, but they are bluffing, and you must learn to bluff too.”
 
Late in life Auden wrote self- revealing poems and essays that portrayed him as insular and nostalgic, still living imaginatively in the Edwardian world of his childhood. His “Doggerel by a Senior Citizen” began, “Our earth in 1969/Is not the planet I call mine,” and continued with disgruntled complaints against the modern age: “I cannot settle which is worse,/The Anti-Novel or Free Verse.” 

A year after he wrote this, I chanced on a first book by a young poet, N.J. Loftis, Exiles and Voyages. Some of the book was in free verse; much of it alluded to Harlem and Africa; the author’s ethnic loyalties were signaled by the name of the publisher, the Black Market Press. The book was dedicated “To my first friend, W.H. Auden.”

To me it always seemed very easy to be generous and be able to reap credit from that...the more difficult task was to do acts of kindness or generosity and have no one other than oneself know about them.  It is at the heart of all religions, the core of belief in the innate goodness of people, where doing the act of kindness is all that is needed to better understand oneself, one's personal motivations and one's own spiritual or emotional place.

As Mendelson's essay continues, there is much more shared about the other forces in Auden's life that might well explain his reticence to divulge such personal details in contrast to the public perception of him as a writer and poet...perhaps that explains to some extent why after all these years of familiarity, there are still aspects to his life that continue to intrigue me.  I do not need to know things past a certain level of intimacy; I suspect all of us would feel the same way if we had to be subjected to the scrutiny of the general public the way he was.  But as I get older, the easier it becomes for me to disregard the unessential and focus in on what is enduring; whether it involves the basic tenet of someone's core philosophy, or serves as a candle briefly lit, dispelling the darkness for a moment and revealing some of the mystery that makes us who and what we truly are.

From the Land of "Borgen"

Although I don't watch much in the way of television these days, I did see all three seasons of "Borgen", the Danish political drama with a similar appeal and character depth akin to "The West Wing", and last night after the Academy Awards, I found the Danish short film "Helium" (winner of this year's Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film) on iTunes available for a very reasonable price ($2 for SD, $3 for HD).

It is a 22 minute film dealing with death, hope, imagination and love.  How it dealt with such a compelling subject was through a gently subtle understatement in much the same way the political drama covered the evolution of its principal protagonist without being overly dramatic or obvious the way TV often is presented here.

I am very pleased to have a copy for my library.  Heartily recommended.

The Plot Thickens in Ukraine

This posting on CNN this evening fills in some intriguing background information regarding the situation in the Crimea (my caps and emphasis):

(CNN) -- Tensions smoldered in Ukraine, and in capitals around the world on Monday, as Russian troops consolidated their hold on the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea, global stocks slipped on fears things could get worse and diplomats grasped for a way to stop the situation from escalating.

At an emergency U.N. Security Council meeting to discuss the unfolding crisis, diplomats asked Russia to withdraw its troops and called for mediation.

Russia's envoy said his country's aim in Ukraine is to stop radical extremists who are destabilizing the country -- adding that ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had asked Russia to send troops.

The United States' ambassador accused Russia of breaking international law and responding to an "imaginary threat."

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin read a letter from Yanukovych at the meeting, describing Ukraine as a country "on the brink of civil war," plagued by "chaos and anarchy."

"I would call on the President of Russia, Mr. Putin, asking him to use the armed forces of the Russian Federation to establish legitimacy, peace, law and order, stability, and defending the people of Ukraine," the letter said.

Introducing The Foundation Trilogy in an Unusual Way

As my children and girl friend warily know from countless repetitions, among the handful of books I hold near and dear are Isaac Asimov's collection of three books written in the 1950s and published individually as "Foundation", "Foundation and Empire", and "Second Foundation"; and collectively know as "The Foundation Trilogy". [NOTE: for entirely selfish reasons I am limiting my discourse to these three novels, not the others subsequently written by Asimov directly or his authorized substitutes...I've read several and while there's merit to be found, there was nothing essential that...for me...requires their being included along with the original trio.]

For a reasonable introduction, I'm including a column written several years ago by another enthusiast whose name is better known these days for comments relating to slightly less esoteric topics as economics instead of psychohistory:


Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation novels grounded my economics  
theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 December 2012

There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book – the one that has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades – is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.

OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.

So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. By the way, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you want to encounter the whole thing fresh.

Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it's not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it's set in the future, there's interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details, playing a fairly minor part in the story. The Foundation novels are about society, not gadgets – and unlike, say, William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, which are excellent in a very different way, they're about societies that don't seem much affected by technological progress. Asimov's Galactic Empire sounds an awful lot like the Roman Empire. Trantor, the empire's capital, comes across as a sort of hyper-version of Manhattan in the 1940s. The Foundation itself seems to recapitulate a fair bit of American history, passing through Boss Tweed politics and Robber Baron-style plutocracy; by the end of the trilogy it has evolved into something resembling mid 20th-century America – although Asimov makes it clear that this is by no means its final state.

Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I'm not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov's invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science that understands society, can predict how it changes, and can be used to shape those changes.

That conceit underlies the whole story arc. In Foundation, we learn that a small group of mathematicians have developed "psychohistory", the aforementioned rigorous science of society. Applying that science to the all-powerful Galactic Empire in which they live, they discover that it is in fact in terminal decline, and that a 30,000-year era of barbarism will follow its fall. But they also discover that a carefully designed nudge can change that path. The empire can't be saved, but the length of the coming dark age can be reduced to a mere millennium.

The novels follow the unfolding of that plan. For the first book and a half – Foundation and the first half of Foundation and Empire – all goes well. Then the plot takes a swerve, as the plan goes off course, only to be put back on track by the mysterious Second Foundation in the eponymous third novel.

Described that way, the story can sound arid and didactic. And the truth is that if you're looking for richly nuanced character development, you should go read Anna Karenina. Asimov was actually better than many science-fiction authors at creating interesting individuals – as a teenager I had a crush on Arkady Darell, the firecracker teenaged sort-of heroine of the trilogy's conclusion – but that's not saying much.

For that matter, you'll also be disappointed if you're looking for shoot-em-up action scenes, in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker destroy the Death Star in the nick of time. There's only one brief description of a space battle – and the true purpose of the battle, we learn, is not the defeat of an ultimately trivial enemy but the creation of a state of mind that serves the Plan. There is, to be fair, one scene in which the fate of the galaxy hinges on the quick action of a hero (or actually heroine – Bayta Darell, at the end of Foundation and Empire). But even then it's not conventional action writing: Bayta saves the day at the very last minute by shooting one of the good guys.

Yet despite their lack of conventional cliffhangers and, for the most part, either heroes or villains, the Foundation novels are deeply thrilling – suspenseful, engrossing, and, if I may say, bracingly cynical. For the absence of conventional cliffhangers doesn't mean an absence of unconventional cliffhangers.

In the first book-and-a-half there are a series of moments in which the fate of the galaxy seems to hang in the balance, as the Foundation faces the apparent threat of extinction at the hands of barbarian kings, regional warlords, and eventually the decaying but still powerful empire itself. Each of these crises is met by the men of the hour, whose bravery and cunning seem to offer the only hope. Each time, the Foundation triumphs. But here's the trick: after the fact, it becomes clear that bravery and cunning had nothing to do with it, because the Foundation was fated to win thanks to the laws of psychohistory. Each time, just to drive the point home, the image of Hari Seldon, recorded centuries before, appears in the Time Vault to explain to everyone what just happened. The barbarians were never going to prevail, because the Foundation's superior technology, packaged as religion, gave it the ability to play them off against each other. The warlord's weapons were no match for the Foundation's economic clout. And so on.

This unique plot structure creates an ironic resonance between the Foundation novels and a seemingly unrelated genre, what I'd call prophetic fantasy. These are novels – Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time cycle comes to mind – in which the protagonists have a mystical destiny, foreshadowed in visions and ancient writings, and the unfolding of the plot tells of their march toward that destiny. Actually, I'm a sucker for that kind of fiction, which makes for great escapism precisely because real life is nothing like that. The first half of the Foundation series manages, however, to have the structure of prophecy and destiny without the mysticism; it's all about the laws of psychohistory, you see, and Hari Seldon's prescience comes from his mathematics.

Yet if the Foundation books are a tale of prophecy fulfilled, it's a very bourgeois version of prophecy. This is no tale of the secret heir coming into his heritage, of the invincible swordsman winning the day with his prowess. Asimov clearly despises both aristocracy and militarism; his heroes, such as they are, are unpretentious and a bit uncouth, with nothing martial about them. "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent," declares Mayor Salvor Hardin.

But wait: Foundation isn't about the triumph of the middle class, either. We never get to see the promised Second Empire, which may be just as well, because it probably wouldn't be very likeable. Clearly, it's not going to be a democracy – it's going to be a mathematicized version of Plato's Republic, in which the Guardians derive their virtue from the axioms of psychohistory. What this means for the books is that while a relatively bourgeois society may be the winner in each of the duels, Asimov is neither endorsing that society nor giving it a special long-run destiny. What this means for the storytelling is that the struggles don't have to be and aren't structured as a conventional tale of good guys versus villains, and the novels have that unexpected cynicism. The Foundation may start out a lot nicer than its barbarous neighbours, but it evolves over time into a corrupt oligarchy – and that's all part of the plan. And because the story arc is about the fulfilment of the Seldon Plan, not the triumph of the men in white hats, Asimov is also free to make some of his villains not especially villainous. Bel Riose, the imperial general who menaces the Foundation, is more appealing than the plutocrats running the place at the time. Even the Mule, who endangers the whole plan, is a surprisingly sympathetic character.

Which brings us to the Mule, the deus ex mutagen who drives the swerve in the plot halfway through the series. When I first read Foundation all those years ago, I resented the Mule's appearance, which interrupts the smooth tale of psychohistorical inevitability. On a reread, however, I see that Asimov knew what he was doing – and not just because another book and a half of Seldon Crises would have gotten very stale.

The Mule is a mutant whose ability to control others' emotions lets him conquer the Foundation and threaten the whole Seldon Plan. To contain the menace, the Second Foundation – a hidden group of psychohistorians, the secret keepers of the Plan – must emerge from hiding. So far, this sounds like any of a hundred tales of the struggle between good and evil. But Foundation isn't that kind of series. The problem, you see, isn't how to defeat the Mule and ensure the triumph of truth, justice, and the Foundation way. It is, instead, to get the Plan back on track – and that requires making sure that nobody understands the Plan!

So the Mule (who, as I said, isn't an entirely unsympathetic character) must be defeated, but the defeat must be subtle – no dramatic space battles, no victory parade, in fact no obvious defeat at all. Characteristically for the whole series, the accomplishment of the Mule's quiet defeat itself depends crucially on his not understanding the need for subtlety: he must believe that the Second Foundation is planning the very kind of shoot-em-up denouement that it must in fact avoid.

Even so, the Second Foundation has shown a bit of its hand – so the final episode concerns the confrontation between the First and Second Foundations, a confrontation that the Second Foundation must win by appearing to lose. For the restoration of the Seldon Plan requires the cultivation of a proper state of ignorance; the First Foundation must unlearn its dangerous knowledge of the Second Foundation's influence, and this can only be achieved through the Second Foundation's apparent destruction.

Oh, and the surprise in the very last line of the whole series still brings a smile to my face.

Are there flaws in the Foundation novels? Of course there are. The characters are, by and large, two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. There's also a notable lack of physical description of the characters or, well, anything. As I said, Tolstoy this isn't. A nerdier gripe – indeed, a very, very nerdy gripe – is that, in imposing his historical templates on the galactic civilisation, Asimov clearly had a problem with scale. Tazenda, in Second Foundation, is supposed to be a more or less barbarian kingdom, a flyspeck polity that only rules 20 planets. Um, 20 planets? Then there's Trantor, the world completely covered in metal because its 75m square miles of land surface area must bear 40 billion people. Do the math, and you realize that Trantor as described has only half the population density of New Jersey, which wasn't covered in metal the last time I looked out my window.

But these are, as I said, nerdy concerns. After all, the Foundation novels aren't really about the galaxy, or even about space travel. They're about the true final frontier – understanding ourselves, and the societies we make.

A non-nerdy concern – or anyway, a less nerdy concern – would be this: Now that I'm a social scientist myself, or at least as close to being one as we manage to get in these early days of human civilisation, what do I think of Asimov's belief that we can, indeed, conquer that final frontier – that we can develop a social science that gives its acolytes a unique ability to understand and perhaps shape human destiny?

Well, on good days I do feel as if we're making progress in that direction. And as an economist I've been having a fair number of such good days lately.

I know that sounds like a strange claim to make when the actual management of the economy has been a total disaster. But hey, Hari Seldon didn't do his work by convincing the emperor to change his policies – he had to conceal his project under a false front and wait a thousand years for results. Now, there isn't, to my knowledge, a secret cabal of economists with a thousand-year plan to save our current civilisation (but then I wouldn't tell you if there was, would I?). But I've been struck these past several years by just how much power good economics has to make correct predictions that are very much at odds with popular prejudices and "common sense".

To take a not at all arbitrary example, a standard macroeconomic approach, the IS-LM model (don't ask) told us that under depression-type conditions like those we're experiencing, some of the usual rules would cease to apply: trillion-dollar budget deficits wouldn't drive up interest rates, huge increases in the money supply wouldn't cause runaway inflation. Economists who took that model seriously back in, say, early 2009 were ridiculed and lambasted for making such counterintuitive assertions. But their predictions came true. So yes, it's possible to have social science with the power to predict events and, maybe, to lead to a better future.

That said, it's a long way from getting the medium-term path of interest rates and inflation more or less right to predicting the overall course of civilisation centuries in advance. Asimov's psychohistory evidently integrates economics with political science and sociology, which are much harder subjects than economics – economics is, after all, largely about greed, while other social sciences have to deal with more complex emotions. There are wonderful, insightful political scientists and sociologists working today, but their fields have yet to develop even the (very limited) degree of intellectual integration that makes doing economics sometimes feel like we're living in at least the very early dawn of Hari Seldon's psychohistory.

But maybe those fields will come along too. Will we then be ready to start making recordings for the Time Vault? Actually, no – and I think never. If there eventually is a true, integrated social science, it will still be a science of complex, nonlinear systems – systems that are chaotic in the technical sense, and hence not susceptible to detailed long-run forecasts. Think of weather forecasting: no matter how good the models get, we're never going to be able to predict that a particular storm will hit Philadelphia in a particular week 20 years from now. I'm willing to believe in faster-than-light travel; I'm not willing to believe that Hari Seldon can time his recorded appearance to coincide precisely with the latest crisis between Terminus and its neighbours.

But like the cardboard characters, this little implausibility in the Foundation novels matters not at all. They remain, uniquely, a thrilling tale about how self-knowledge – an understanding of how our own society works – can change history for the better. And they're every bit as inspirational now as they were when I first read them, three-quarters of my life ago.