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Science fiction is never about the future, in the same way history is rarely about the past: they're both parable formats for examining or commenting on the present.
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So with truth - there is a certain moment when one can say, this is the truth and here I put a dot, a stop, and I go to another thing. A judge has to put an end to a deliberation. But for a historian, theres never an end to the past. It can go on and on and on.
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Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.
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The present enables us to understand the past, not the other way round.
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What we have done in the past is not sufficient now to prepare our youth.
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It is time, therefore, to abandon the superstition that natural science cannot be regarded as logically respectable until philosophers have solved the problem of induction. The problem of induction is, roughly speaking, the problem of finding a way to prove that certain empirical generalizations which are derived from past experience will hold good also in the future.
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Salvation, the prophets tell us, is preconditioned by repentance. The redeeming act of God waits upon man's initiative.
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Some people wait constructively; they read or knit. I have watched some truly appalling pieces of needlework take form. Others - I am one of them - abandon all thought and purpose to an uneasy vegetative states.
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Waiting is a large part of living. Great, passive, negative chunks of our time are consumed by waiting, from birth to death. Waiting is a special kind of activity - if activity is the right word for it - because we are held in enforced suspension between people and places, removed from the normal rhythms of our days and lives.
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I listen to all kinds of music, but I've always been a really big fan of Top 40 radio. If I'm in my car, that's what I listen to.
