328. Coast Starlight

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AMTRAK should fire that bitch Julie. 

What with a train recently getting blocked by snow and a fallen tree, and news of even more storms, I did everything I could do online to learn the status of the train I was supposed to be taking to SLO last week. According to all AMTRAKs online information, the train wasn’t running. There’s a map where you can see the location of all AMTRAK trains, there were no 11 or 14 trains on that map. When I asked specifically, I was told the same thing. When I called the only number AMTRAK offers, I got to chat with Julie, their retarded AI. She confirmed that there was a disruption and promised to connect me with an agent... before disconnecting me. I then tried to call the local stations but was unable to find an operating local phone number. I sent an email and got a reply that someone would get back to me after they opened at 8am -- I needed to be on my bus at 7:50.

I had gotten up at 6am to reconfirm all this and then went back to bed. But then I thought, would even AMTRAK be stupid enough to just leave everyone up in the air like this? I mean they had my email and cell, they should have contacted me if I was going to be left stranded. So I got up, packed up quickly, and headed for the Temporary Transbay Terminal. I didn’t even have time to trim my beard.

I assumed there would be a replacement bus, but here I am on the nonexistent 11 train, getting an interesting tour of the lower part of the East Bay. We followed the inland route through Niles, which feels rather like SoCal in it’s endless suburban squalor. Just went by Levi stadium, to my surprise. I didn’t know the train could take this route. We’re on Caltrain tracks now -- and when did Caltrain get this facility in Santa Clara? Now we are passing where I thought we would join this line, but I guess that’s just a minor siding of some kind. 

There’s a Whole Foods down here? Just to the west of Deridon Station. Even more residential development than last time I was here. There’s really only one little lot of the old industrial section and it seems abandoned and no doubt about to be redeveloped. 

And speaking of changes. The parking lot at Jack London Square, that was filled with food trucks for the Eat Real Festival, is now the site of a new building, residential I think and still under construction, that fills the entire block. We don’t work that event anymore, but this is still a bit of a shock. I wonder if they’re developing the space behind where we put the dumpsters?

2019

I thought this would be the year I reflected back thirty years on one of the best years of my life. But thanks in part to having just read Calypso, where David Sedaris keeps thinking ahead to when he will be “old,” I’m finding myself also thinking back twenty years to when my dad died and then twenty years ahead to when I will be the age my mother was when she died. So twenty years back I was helping my frail, dying parents and in another twenty years I will be that same age, and potentially in that same condition. Given that my sixties so far have not been a walk in the park, I can’t help sharing David Sedaris’s gloom when contemplating the future.

Of course twenty years is a long time. This will be my twelfth year of Greening, which is itself a long time, especially for me in one job. I can imagine doing this for another five years, maybe nine. I can’t really imagine Greening when I’m past 75. There’s a point where the years ahead seem not too few, but possibly too many.

Spring?

I think our cold and rainy weather is coming to an end. I think this not for any meteorological reason, or because of the behavior of large rodents, but because I remembered I had a long, warm raincoat at the back of my little closet. I wore it yesterday and realized I should have been wearing if for weeks now. So, my assumption is the weather will change now. And nothing Descartes wrote can make me think otherwise. (Solipsism reference.)

Last night I learned that the person I worked for at the Apple Multimedia Lab had died in his sleep. I hadn't seen him in a few months less than thirty years. I don't know what health problems he may have had. Since March is the month my dad died in the hospital -- and a Lab friend has a brother currently doing the "dance of death" with his hospital -- my first reaction was to think that this was an unusually good death.

I'm also reading The Dark Flood Rises, by Margaret Drabble (more on this later), which seems to be shaping up as a fairly dark book about death and aging, so everything is going counter to the spring season -- though I am noticing the green, new growth on the maple tree out my kitchen window. I even walked past a funeral at Notre Dame des Victoires on the way here to the Bank Cafe.

132. George Eliot

Previous - 131. Walt Whitman

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Spring

With all the rain and cold, I had missed the stealthy approach of spring. In recent days, though, I've noticed that the Japanese maple out my kitchen window is mostly green, and the poor tree in the pot in our alley -- the one that was shifted about all last year and suffered an abusive, radical pruning of its few branches, now has sprouted a few new leaves from what few branches remain. (Curiously, I'd advocated pruning the tree in the past only to be ignored by the woman who "takes care" of the garden. Fate has given the tree a more severe pruning than I would have.) 

The dark obverse of spring's sticky young leaves (I think that was Ivan K's phrase) is pollen. My allergies, surprisingly in abeyance so far this year, have finally kicked in.

George Eliot - From Proust Was a Neuroscientist

p27 ... Inspired by Isaac Newton's theory of gravity, which divined the cause  of the elliptical motions found in the heavens, the positivists struggled to uncover a parallel order behind the motions of humans. [Footnote: Newton himself wasn't so naive: "I can calculate the motions of heavenly bodies," he wrote, "but not the madness of people."] According to their depressing philosophy, we were nothing but life-size puppets pulled by invisible strings.

The founder of this "science of humanity" was Pierre-Simon Laplace... Laplace didn't need God [for his cosmic laws] because he believed that probability theory, his peculiar invention, would solve every question worth asking, including the ancient mystery of human freedom.
...

p28 ...Since everything was merely matter, and matter obeyed a short list of cosmic laws (like gravity and inertia), knowing the laws meant knowing everything about everything. All you had to do was crank the equations and decipher the results. Man would finally see himself for "the automaton that he is." Free will, like God, would become an illusion, and we would see that our lives are really as predictable as the planetary orbits. As Laplace wrote, "We must . . . imagine the present state of the universe as the effect of its prior state and as the cause of he state that will follow it. Freedom has no place here."

I'm doing something I rarely do, write notes on a first reading, so I don't know where this is heading. But if this doesn't end up with quantum uncertainty I will be shocked and disappointed.
...

p29 James Clerk Maxwell... realized that Laplace's omniscient demon [from a thought experiment] actually violated the laws of physics. Since disorder [entropy] was real (it was even increasing), science had fundamental limits. After all, pure entropy couldn't be solved. No demon could know everything.

...While Laplace believed that you could easily apply statistical laws to specific problems, Maxwell's work with gasses had taught him otherwise. While the temperature of a gas was wholly determined by the velocity of its atoms [this is anachronistic I think unless you substitute "molecule" for "atom"] -- the faster they fly, the hotter the gas -- Maxwell realized that velocity was nothing but a statistical average. At any given instant, the individual atoms were actually moving at different speeds. In other words, all physical laws are only approximations. They cannot be applied with any real precision to particulars. This, of course, directly contradicted Laplace's social physics... 
...

p32 In many ways, [George Henry] Lewes was [Herbert] Spencer's opposite [Spencer has just rejected Eliot]. Spencer began his career as an ardent positivist, futilely searching for a theory of everything. After positivism faded away, Spencer became a committed social Darwinist, and he enjoyed explaining all of existence -- from worms to civilization -- in terms of natural selection. Lewes, on the other hand, was an intellectual renowned for his versatility; he wrote essays on poetry and physics, psychology and philosophy... 
...

p32 ...He wanted to be a "poet in science." She wanted to be "a scientific poet."

p33 ...A stubborn skeptic, Lewes first became famous in 1855 with his Life of Goethe, a sympathetic biography that interwove Goethe's criticisms of the scientific method with his romantic poetry. In Goethe, Lewes found a figure who resisted the mechanistic theories of positivism, trusting instead in the "concrete phenomena of experience." And while Lewes eagerly admitted that a properly experimental psychology could offer an "objective insight into our thinking organ," he believed that "art and Literature" were no less truthful, for they described the "psychological world." In an age of ambitious experiments, Lewes remained a pluralist.

Candide

"English Visitors to Ferney: A Sampling"

Edward Gibbon, August 1763
p113 ...After a life passed in courts and Capitals, the Great Voltaire is not a meer country Gentleman, and even (for the honor of the profession) sometimes a farmer. He says he never enjoyed so much true happiness... 

The play they acted was my favorite Orphan of China. Voltaire himself acted Gengis and Madame Denys Idame... Perhaps... I was too much struck with the ridiculous figure of Voltaire at seventy acting a Tarter Conqueror with a hollow broken voice, and making love to a very ugly niece of about fifty... [Did he not understand her position in the household?] The whole Company was asked to stay and set Down about twelve to a very elegant supper of a hundred Covers... The supper ended about two, the company danced til four, when we broke up, got into our Coaches and came back to Geneva, just as the Gates were opened. Shew me in history or fable, a famous poet of Seventy who has acted his own plays, and has closed the scene with a supper and ball for a hundred people. I think the last is the more extraordinary of the two.

Next - 133. Necessitarianism