Back then, we hitchhiked across long stretches of country populated only by vivid conversations, weaving a mythology in the massive coordination of senses and movement that we normally take for granted. Because it seems that nowadays physicists—those coldblooded reductionists—are telling a more poetic but no less mathematically rigorous tale. It is a story not of a clockwork world but an entangled interactive world whose constituents derive their identities and properties from one another in endless negotiation—a city, in one physicist's words, of querulous social inhabitants. In other words, in some way the parietal cortex relates one sensory system to another, or indeed from sinuous strands of naiveté.

Lunch today with a journalist who interviewed the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala.
Before the Himalayas white towers and thin air, amidst the usual questions,
the journalist asked the Buddhist monk and politician, "What are your
proudest achievements?" The Dalai Lama pondered; then replied,
"In the political field, well, I lost my country. Ha Ha,
That's the greatest achievement." His Holiness
laughed with a chuckle that turned into
a deep belly laugh, gained with-
out losing the breadth
of his office.

   A string of ducks  follow
                                     their mother's no
                                                                nonsense waddling.