For Me, Consciousness Is The Most Interesting

When The First Mechanical Clocks Were Invented, Marking Off Time In Crisp, Regular Intervals, It Must Have Surprised People To Discover That Time Flowed Outside Their Own Mental And Physiological Processes. Body Time Flows At Its Own Variable Rate, Oblivious To The Most Precise Hydrogen Master Clocks In The Laboratory. In Fact, The Human Body Contains Its Own Exquisite Time-pieces, All With Their Separate Rhythms. There Are The Alpha Waves In The Brain; Another Clock Is The Heart. And All The While Tick The Mysterious, Ruthless Clocks That Regulate Aging.

I Picked Such Seemingly Disparate Essays, I Thought It Was Important To Say What Was The Guiding Principle In The Selection Rather Than Focus On Any One Essay. I Reached For Some Principle That Had Been Subconscious In Me And Lifted It Into Consciousness. Authenticity And Sincerity Were The Most Important Unifying Principles Of All These Apparently Different Essays.

It's The Platonic Philosophy In The Republic That Philosophers Should Lead The Country.

I Am Spellbound By The Plays Of Shakespeare. And I Am Spellbound By The Second Law Of Thermodynamics. The Great Ideas In Science, Like The Cro-magnon Paintings And The Plays Of Shakespeare, Are Part Of Our Cultural Heritage.

I Consider Myself An Essayist And A Fiction Writer. In The Essays, I Certainly Have Been Influenced By Some Of The Leading Science Essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.