Bonnie Webber's Commonplace Book

These are quotes that have touched a chord in me, that I find worth recalling from time to time. Others can be found by fingering me at bonnie@central.cis.upenn.edu

When I say that a thing is true, I mean that I cannot help believing it... But...I do not venture to assume that my inabilities in the way of thought are inabilities of the universe. I therefore define truth as the system of my limitations, and leave absolute truth for those who are better equipped.

Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.

[Literary-minded] men choose Hamlet because every man sees himself as a disinherited monarch. Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs.

As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.

Luckily, I remembered something Malcolm Cowley had taught us at Stanford -- perhaps the most important lesson a writing class (not a writer, understand, but a class) can ever learn. 'Be gentle with one another's efforts,' he often admonished us. 'Be kind and considerate with your criticism. Always remember that it's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

When Louis Agassiz (with some assistance certainly) "discovered" the ice age, that astounding revelation propelled him into the first rank of science's heroes. But then he lingered on ... If science really were the bloodless pursuit of truth, achieved by piling one discovery atop the next, then it would be immune to tragedy. But ideas have life spans of their own, and they can, when the time comes, leave the scene grudgingly, carrying with them into irrelevance all those people who cannot bear to give them up. Agassiz's utlimate fall into a peculiarly precise brand of creationism overlaid with a nasty streak of racism has the air of tragedy to me ... He does leave behind, though, an object lesson about the stakes for which science and scientists play. The stories scientists tell are not simply bedtime tales. They place us in the world, and they can force us to alter the way we think and what we do.

From this simple but arresting finding Gould moves on to some remarkable illustrations of other ways in which statistical analysis of a distribution -- a ``full house'' of numbers -- can change our view of life (in his case, quite literally so). In 1982, at the age of forty, Gould was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, a disease with a median survival of eight months. Fifteen years later, he is still very much around. Statistics helped him stay optimistic. The median is the halfway point: half the patients will be dead in thirty-two short weeks. In other words, half of the variation in mortality must be squeezed into that brief period: anyone who lasts longer has a ``tail'' of time -- up to threescore years and ten -- into which he might survive. Once the terrifying figure of eight months is seen as just a fragment of the whole story there is hope. The median is not the message. Every patient is part of a distribution, and to understand his plight must use all the information available and not see himself as uniquely damned.

Gardening and scholarship were not so different; both took long hours and single-mindedness, resiliency in the face of major setbacks, a gift for tedium and a flair for the marriage of the unusual. Both strained the eyes and lower back and depended to some degree on fate, prejudice, perspective and the intuitive flash. In scholarship intellectual prejudice became theory, in the yard a personal design: if you hated hydrangeas you left them out. And while research was not prey to the night routs of the armadillo, back-stabbing was no more prevalent in the natural world than in the halls of learning. Armadillos were just odder looking, if more predictable.

Once I was looking through the kitchen window at dusk and I saw an old woman looking in. Suddenly the light changed and I realized that the old woman was myself. You see, it all happens on the outside, inside one doesn't change.

This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff. Bereft of life, it rests in pease. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.

Hap ``thought perhaps we ought to go over to Kmart, see if they had something in sheen green. Something we got tired of wearing, we could use to upholster a chair.''

Gillian Parkin sighed. She was an intelligent, enthusiastic 24-year old, and it always depressed her when people hadn't heard of her thesis topic.