Saturday, November 23, 2002

Pie

Carl Sagan in Contact:

"According to the Bible, the ancient Hebrews had apparently thought that pi was exactly equal to three."

Don McLean, song lyric: 

"The three men I admire the most,
The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.*"

Those days are not entirely forgotten in Texas.

*November 22 is the feast day of Saint Cecelia, celebrated by Chaucer in the Second Nun's Tale.

Trivia quiz: What is the world's most popular piece of music?

Friday, November 22, 2002

This space is reserved for a glass slipper.

Trinity

On this date in 1963...

1. Father:  C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man), 
2. Son:  John F. Kennedy ("Grace under Pressure" -- displayed, not written), and 
3. Holy Spirit:  Aldous Huxley (The Perennial Philosophy)

all died.

On the bright side:

On this date, Tarzan (John Clayton III, the future Lord Greystoke) was born and Ravel's "Bolero" was first performed.

MAYA

Jack London died on this date.  On the other hand, Hoagy Carmichael, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Mariel Hemingway were born.

In memory of Arthur T. Winfree:
Time, Eternity, and Grace

Professor Arthur T. Winfree died on November 5, 2002. 
He was the author of "The Geometry of Biological Time."

• Charles Small (see the earlier entry "Hope of Heaven," November 21):

"I've always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true...."

• Kylie Minogue in my November 5 entry:

"Time disappears with Tequila.
It goes elastic, then vanishes."

• Octavio Paz on his childhood in Mexico

(Nobel Prize lecture):

"All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence."

• A colleague on Professor Winfree:

"He just wanted to get to the truth."

• Octavio Paz, condensed and translated 
  
  Nobel Prize lecture:

"Gracias."

Thursday, November 21, 2002

Pray

This brief heading echoes the title of the latest novel by Michael Crichton, perhaps the best-known member of the Harvard College class of 1964. In honor of that class and of Q (see the preceding entry), here is a condensed excerpt from a passage of Plato quoted by Q:  

Socrates. 'Should we not, before going, offer up a prayer to these local deities?’

'By all means,’ Phaedrus agrees.

Socrates (praying): ‘Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, grant me beauty in the inward soul, and that the outward and inward may be at one!....

That prayer, I think, is enough for me.’

Phaedrus. ‘Ask the same for me, Socrates. Friends, methinks, should have all things in common.’

Socrates. ‘So be it…. Let us go.’

In accordance with this prayer, and with the coming of summer to Australia, that land beloved of Pan, this site's music now returns to the theme introduced in my note of September 10, 2002, "The Sound of Hanging Rock."

Hope of Heaven

This title is taken from a John O'Hara novel I like very much. It seems appropriate because today is the birthday of three admirable public figures:

• Eleanor Powell, dancer,
• Coleman Hawkins, saxophonist, and
• Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (Q), teacher.

"No one can top Eleanor Powell - not even Fred Astaire." -- A fellow professional.  Reportedly, "Astaire himself said she was better than him." 

That's as good as it gets.

Let us hope that Powell, Hawkins, and Q are enjoying a place that Q, quoting Plato's Phaedrus, described as follows:

"a fair resting-place, full of summer sounds and scents!"

This is a rather different, and more pleasant, approach to the Phaedrus than the one most familiar to later generations -- that of Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance.  Both approaches, however, display what Pirsig calls "Quality."

One of my own generation's closest approaches to Quality is found in the 25th Anniversary Report of the Harvard Class of 1964.  Charles Small remarks,

"A lot of other stuff has gone down the drain since 1964, of course, besides my giving up being a mathematician and settling into my first retirement.  My love-hate relationship with the language has intensified, and my despair with words as instruments of communion is often near total.  I read a little, but not systematically. I've always been enthralled by the notion that Time is an illusion, a trick our minds play in an attempt to keep things separate, without any reality of its own. My experience suggests that this is literally true, but not the kind of truth that can be acted upon....

I'm always sad and always happy. As someone says in Diane Keaton's film 'Heaven,' 'It's kind of a lost cause, but it's a great experience.'"

I agree.  Here are two links to some work of what is apparently this same Charles Small:

• Arithmetic of Finite Fields and
• Manontroppo Music -- Arrangements, especially for string quartet