The World Is Moving Faster And Faster,

Children Grow Rapidly, Forget The Centuries-long Embrace From Their Parents, Which To Them Lasted But Seconds. Children Become Adults, Live Far From Their Parents, Live Their Own Houses, Learn Ways Of Their Own, Suffer Pain, Grow Old. Children Curse Their Parents For Their Wrinkled Skin And Hoarse Voices. Those Now Old Children Also Want To Stop Time, But At Another Time. They Want To Freeze Their Own Children At The Center Of Time.

Music Is, Of Course, A Universal Emotional Experience, Cutting Across Cultures And Languages. I Studied Piano For Ten Years As A Child And Consider That Experience One Of The Most Valuable In My Life.

I Consider Myself A Spiritual Atheist. I Certainly Believe There Are Forces Bigger Than Ourselves, And That We Should Be Searching, Individually, For Meaning In Our Lives. But I Don't Believe There's A Supreme Being, An Intelligence That Created Everything.

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 Think What Gets You Through A Small Writing Project, Is Just One Burst Of Inspiration. A Book, Especially A Longer Book, It's A Different Kind Of Force That Pushes You Through It. It's A Vision Of The Whole Thing.