In A World Without Future, Each Moment

I Go To Live In Maine For The Summer. Without Computer, And Without The Telephone Service We Are Mercifully Without The Faxes And E-mails. So It's Really About Two And A Half Months That I'll Feel Like I Can Recover Some Silence In My Life...which Is So Hard To Find.

I Think People All Over The Institution Recognize That Different Ways Of Understanding Are Valuable. Artists May Think In A Different Way Than Biologists Or Chemists, But You Can Learn Something From That. It Is True That The Arts At Mit Don't Have The Same Amount Of Funding Or Same Status As The Sciences Or Engineering.

The Relationship Between Science And The Humanities Is Two-way. Science Changes Our View Of The World And Our Place In It. In The Other Direction, The Humanities Provide The Store Of Ideas And Images And Language Available To Us In Understanding The World. The Exploding Star Of A.d. 1054, The Crab Nebula, Was Sighted And Documented By The Chinese, But Nowhere Mentioned In The West, Where The Aristotelian Notion Of The Immortality Of Stars Still Held Sway. We Often Do Not See What We Do Not Expect To See.

I Spend A Lot Of Time Just Listening To The Ospreys. I Watch Them Go Through Their Life Cycle. They Spend The Winter In South America. The Mother And Father Osprey Stay Together. It's A Monogamous Relationship. And Every Summer They Raise A New Brood Of Children. They Came Back To The Nest In The Middle Of April. They Take Separate Vacations In The Winter - The Mother And Father.

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