Author Archives: laurn larson

Tenuta Rapitala Hugonis DOC 2019

9 July 2025 By in Red Wine, Wine Tags: , , Leave a comment

Red Blend Other from Sicily

Cabernet Sauvignon 50% and Nero d’Avola 50%

Purchase Price: $75 (Restaurant)

ElsBob 91

ABV 14.0%

A dense deep red, full-bodied, with aromas of red fruit and spice, well balanced with tannins that add a fine even structure, and a very long, pleasant finish. It was an excellent pairing with our entrées of Osso Buco and Braised Italian Ribs.

An excellent fine wine that retails from $38-60. $38 is a fair price to pay but $60 is a bit much. Drink now or hold for another 4-5 years. Cheers.

Trivia: Nero d’Avola grapes produce a full-bodied wine high in tannins with medium acidity and tastes of red fruits. Almost all Nero d’Avola wines come from the dry farms of Sicily and are a natural for blending with Cabs and Shirazes. The name originates from the southern Sicilian town of Avola which began growing the grape several centuries ago.

Shadows of Reality — Existence Beyond Nothingness

8 July 2025 By in Philosophy, Religion Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

From the dawn of sentient thought, humanity has wrestled with a single, haunting, and ultimately unanswerable question: Is this all there is? Across the march of time, culture, and science, this question has echoed in the minds of prophets, philosophers, mystics, and skeptics alike. It arises not from curiosity alone, but from something deeper, an inner awareness, a presence within all of us that resists the idea of the inevitable, permanent end. In every age, whether zealot or atheist, this consciousness, a soul, if you will, refuses to accept mortality. Not out of fear, but from an intuition that there must be more. This inner consciousness will not be denied, even to non-believers.

One needs to believe that death is not an end, a descent into nothingness, but a threshold: a rebirth into a new journey, shaped by the echoes of a life already lived. Not logic, but longing. Not reason, but resonance. A consciousness, a soul, that seeks not only to understand, but to fulfill, to carry forward the goodness of a life into something greater still. Faith in immortality beyond sight. A purpose beyond meaning. Telos over logos.

While modern thinkers reduce existence to probability and simulation, the enduring human experience, expressed through ancient wisdom, points to a consciousness, a soul, that transcends death and defies reduction. Moderns confuse intellect or brain with consciousness.

Contemporary thinkers and writers like Philip K. Dick, Elon Musk, and Nick Bostrom have reimagined this ancient question through the lens of technology, probability, and a distinctly modern myopia. Their visions, whether paranoid, mathematical, or speculative, suggest that reality may be a simulation, a construct, or a deception. In each case, there is a higher intelligence behind the curtain, but one that is cold, indifferent, impersonal. They offer not a divine comedy of despair transcending into salvation, but a knowable unknown: a system of ones and zeros marching to the beat of an intelligence beyond our comprehension. Not a presence that draws us like a child to its mother, a moth to a flame, but a mechanism that simply runs, unfeeling, unyielding, and uninviting. Incapable of malice or altruism. Yielding nothing beyond a synthetic life.

Dick feared that reality was a layered illusion, a cosmic deception. His fiction is filled with characters who suspect they’re being lied to by the universe itself, yet they keep searching, keep hoping, keep loving. Beneath the paranoia lies a desperate longing for a divine rupture, a breakthrough of truth, a light in the darkness. His work is less a rejection of the soul than a plea for its revelation in a world that keeps glitching. If life is suffering, are we to blame?

Musk posits that we’re likely living in a simulation but offers no moral or spiritual grounding. His vision is alluring but sterile, an infinite loop of code without communion. Even his fascination with Mars, AI, and the future of consciousness hints at something deeper: not just a will to survive, but a yearning to transcend. Yet transcendence, in his world, is technological, not spiritual. To twist the spirit of Camus: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?”, without transcendence, life is barren of meaning.

Bostrom presents a trilemma in his simulation hypothesis: either humanity goes extinct before reaching a posthuman stage, posthumans choose not to simulate their ancestors, perhaps out of ethical restraint or philosophical humility, or we are almost certainly living in a simulation. At first glance, the argument appears logically airtight. But on closer inspection, it rests on a speculative foundation of quivering philosophical sand: that consciousness is computational and organic, that future civilizations will have both the means and the will to simulate entire worlds, and that such simulations would be indistinguishable from reality. These assumptions bypass profound questions about the nature of consciousness, the ethics of creation, and the limits of simulated knowledge. Bostrom’s trilemma appears rigorous only because it avoids the deeper question of what it means to live and die.

These views, while intellectually stimulating, shed little light on a worthwhile future. We are consigned to existence as automatons, soulless, simulated, and suspended in probability curves of resignation. They offer models, not meaning. Equations, not essence. A presence in the shadows of greater reality.

Even the guardians of spiritual tradition have begun to echo this hollow refrain. When asked about hell, a recently deceased Pope dismissed it not as fire and brimstone, but as “nothingness,” a state of absence, not punishment. Many were stunned. A civilizational lifetime of moral instruction undone in a breath. And yet, this vision is not far from where Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis lands: a world without soul, without consequence, without continuity. Whether cloaked in theology or technology, the message is the same, there is nothing beyond. The Seven Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins have lost their traction, reduced to relics in a world without effect.

But the soul knows better. It was not made for fire, nor for oblivion. It was made to transcend, to rise beyond suffering and angst toward a higher plane of being. What it fears is not judgment, but erasure. Not torment, but the silence of meaning undone. Immortality insists on prudent upkeep.

What they overlook, or perhaps refuse to embrace, is a consciousness that exists beyond intellect, a soul that surrounds our entire being and resists a reduction to circuitry or biology. A soul that transcends blood and breath. Meaning beyond death.

This is not a new idea. Socrates understood something that modern thinkers like Musk and Bostrom have bypassed: that consciousness is not a byproduct of the body, but something prior to it, something eternal. For Socrates, the care of the soul was the highest human calling. He faced death not with fear, but with calm, believing it to be a transition, not an end or a nothingness, but a new beginning. His final words were not a lament, but a gesture of reverence: a sacrifice to Asclepius, the god of healing, as if death itself were a cure.

Plato, his student, tried to give this insight form. In his allegory of the cave, he imagined humanity as prisoners mistaking shadows for reality. The journey of the soul, for Plato, was the ascent from illusion to truth, from darkness to light. But the metaphor, while powerful, is also clumsy. It implies a linear escape, a single ladder out of ignorance. In truth, the cave is not just a place, it is a condition. We carry it with us. The shadows are not only cast by walls, but by our own minds, our fears. And the light we seek is not outside us, but within.

Still, Plato’s intuition remains vital: we are not meant to stay in the cave. The soul does not long merely for survival, it is immortal, but it needs growth, nourished by goodness and beauty, to transcend to heights unknown. A transcendence as proof, the glow of the real beyond the shadow and the veil.

In the end, the soul reverberates from within: we are not boxed inside a simulation, nor trapped in a reality that leads nowhere. Whether through reason, compassion, or spiritual awakening, the voice of wisdom has always whispered the same truth: Keep the soul bright and shiny. For beyond the shadows, beyond the veil of death, there is more. There is always more.

Drunken Monkey Hypothesis–Good Times, Bad Times

5 July 2025 By in History, History, Philosophy, Science, Science, Uncategorized, Wine Tags: , , Leave a comment

In 2004, biologist Robert Dudley of UC Berkeley proposed the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, a theory suggesting that our attraction to alcohol is not a cultural accident but an evolutionary inheritance. According to Dudley, our primate ancestors evolved a taste for ethanol (grain alcohol) because it signaled ripe, energy-rich, fermenting fruit, a valuable resource in dense tropical forests. Those who could tolerate small amounts of naturally occurring ethanol had a foraging advantage, and thus a caloric advantage. Over time, this preference was passed down the evolutionary tree to us.

But alcohol’s effects have always been double-edged: mildly advantageous in small doses, dangerous in excess. What changed wasn’t the molecule, it was our ability to concentrate, store, and culturally amplify its effects. Good times, bad times…

Dudley argues that this trait was “natural and adaptive,” but only because we didn’t die from it as easily as other species. Ethanol is a toxin, and its effects, loss of inhibition, impaired judgment, and aggression, are as ancient as they are dangerous. What may have once helped a shy, dorky monkey approach a mate or summon the courage to defend his troop with uncharacteristic boldness now fuels everything from awkward first dates, daring athletic feats, bar fights, and the kind of stunts or mindless elocutions no sober mind would attempt.

Interestingly, alcohol affects most animals differently. Some life forms can handle large concentrations of ethanol without impairment, such as Oriental hornets, which are just naturally nasty, no chemical enhancements needed, and yeasts, which produce alcohol from sugars. Others, like elephants, become particularly belligerent when consuming fermented fruit. Bears have been known to steal beer from campsites, party hard, and pass out. A 2022 study of black-handed spider monkeys in Panama found that they actively seek out and consume fermented fruit with ethanol levels of 1–2%. But for most animals, plants, and bacteria, alcohol is toxic and often lethal.

Roughly 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous, flowering plants evolved to produce sugar-rich fruits, nectars, and saps, highly prized by primates, fruit bats, birds, and microbes. Yeasts evolved to ferment these sugars into ethanol as a defensive strategy: by converting sugars into alcohol, they created a chemical wasteland that discouraged other organisms from sharing in the feast.

Fermented fruits can contain 10–400% more calories than their fresh counterparts. Plums (used in Slivovitz brandy) show some of the highest increases. For grapes, fermentation can boost calorie content by 20–30%, depending on original sugar levels. These sugar levels are influenced by climate, warm, dry growing seasons with abundant sun and little rainfall produce sweeter grapes, which in turn yield more potent wines. This is one reason why Mediterranean regions have long been ideal for viticulture and winemaking, from ancient Phoenicia to modern-day Tuscany, Rioja, and Napa.

The story of alcohol is as ancient as civilization itself. The earliest known fermented beverage dates to 7000 BC in Jiahu, China, a mixture of rice, honey, and fruit. True grape wine appears around 6000 BC in the Caucasus region (modern-day Georgia), where post-glacial soils proved ideal for vine cultivation. Chemical residues in Egyptian burial urns and Canaanite amphorae prove that fermentation stayed with civilization as time marched on.

Yet for all its sacred and secular symbolism, Jesus turning water into wine, wine sanctifying Jewish weddings, or simply easing the awkwardness of a first date, alcohol has always walked a fine line between celebration and bedlam. It is a substance that amplifies human behavior, for better or worse. Professor Dudley argues that our attraction to the alcohol buzz is evolutionary: first as a reward for seeking out high-calorie fruit and modulating fear in risky situations, but it eventually became a dopamine high that developed as an end in itself.

Source: The Drunken Monkey by Robert Dudley, 2014.

Gaja Ca’Marcanda Magari 2022

30 June 2025 By in Red Wine, Wine Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Bordeaux Red Blend from Bolgheri, Tuscany, Italy

Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Petit Verdot

Purchase Price: $139 (Restaurant)

Wine Enthusiast 96, James Suckling 95, Jeb Dunnuck 95, Wine Spectator 93, Decanter 93, Vinous 91, ElsBob 94

ABV 14.5%

A dark red, full-bodied wine with aromas of black fruits, silky tannins, and remarkable balance. The long, enjoyable finish paired exceptionally well with our main courses of Osso Buco and Braised Italian Ribs.

A superb fine wine, currently retailing between $80–$120. Drink now or hold for 5–10 years. Cheers.

Trivia: Ca’Marcanda, GAJA’s estate in Bolgheri with roots in Barbaresco, Piedmont, part of the Wilson Daniels portfolio, was acquired in 1996 after 18 distinct and arduous negotiations with the previous owners. The name comes from a Piedmontese dialect expression meaning “The House of Endless Negotiations”, a nod to the persistence and diplomacy required to secure the land.

By Italian cultural standards, the name is not a slight but a compliment. Negotiation is seen as an art form, a process of relationship-building, emotional intelligence, and mutual respect. Naming the estate Ca’Marcanda honors that tradition: a story of tenacity, dialogue, and reverence for the craft of agreement, worn as a badge of honor by both buyer and seller.

Moral Fogs: Machine and Man

26 June 2025 By in Movies, Philosophy, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

(Note: This companion essay builds on the previous exploration of Asimov’s moral plot devices, rules that cannot cover all circumstances, focusing on dilemmas with either no good answers or bad answers wrapped in unforgiving laws.)

Gone Baby Gone (2007) begins as a textbook crime drama; abduction of a child, but by its final act, it has mutated into something quietly traumatic. What emerges is not a crime thriller, but an unforgiving philosophical crucible of wavering belief systems: a confrontation between legal righteousness and moral intuition. The two protagonists, once aligned, albeit by a fine thread, find themselves, eventually, on opposite ends of a dilemma that law alone cannot resolve. In the end, it is the law that prevails, not because justice is served, but because it is easy, clear, and lacking in emotional reasoning. And in that legal clarity, something is lost, a child loses, and the adults can’t find their way back to a black and white world.

The film asks: who gets to decide for those who can’t decide for themselves? Consent only functions when the decisions it enables are worthy of those they affect.

The film exposes the flaws of blindly adhering to a legal remedy that is incapable of nuance or a purpose-driven outcomes; not for the criminals, but for the victims. It lays bare a system geared towards justice and retribution rather than merciful outcomes for the unprotected victims or even identifying the real victims. It’s not a story about a crime. It’s a story about conscience. And what happens when the rules we write for justice fail to account for the people they’re meant to protect, if at all. A story where it was not humanly possible to write infallible rules and where human experience must be given room to breathe, all against the backdrop of suffocating rules-based correctness.

Moral dilemmas expose the limits of clean and crisp rules, where allowing ambiguity and exceptions to seep into the pages of black and white is strictly forbidden. Where laws and machines give no quarter and the blurry echoing of conscience is allowed no sight nor sound in the halls of justice or those unburdened by empathy and dimensionality. When justice becomes untethered from mercy, even right feels wrong in deed and prayer.

Justice by machine is the definition of law not anchored by human experience but just in human rules. To turn law and punishment over to an artificial intelligence without soul or consciousness is not evil but there is no inherent goodness either. It will be something far worse: A sociopath: not driven by evil, but by an unrelenting fidelity to correctness. A precision divorced from purpose.

In the 2004 movie iRobot, loosely based on Isaac Asimov’s 1950 novel of the same name, incorporating his 3 Laws of Robotics, a robot saves detective Del Spooner (Will Smith) over a 12-year-old girl, both of whom were in a submerged car, moments from drowning. The robot could only save one and picked Smith because of probabilities of who was likely to survive. A twist on the Trolley Problem where there are no good choices. There was no consideration of future outcomes; was the girl humanity’s savior or more simplistic, was a young girl’s potential worth more, or less, than a known adult.

A machine decides with cold calculus of the present, a utilitarian decision based on known survival odds, not social biases, latent potential, or historical trajectories. Hindsight is 20-20, decision making without considering the unknowns is tragedy.

The robot lacked moral imagination, the capacity to entertain not just the likely, but the meaningful. An AI embedded with philosophical and narrative reasoning may ameliorate an outcome. It may recognize a preservation bias towards potential rather than just what is. Maybe AI could be programmed to weigh moral priors, procedurally more than mere probability but likely less than the full impact of human potential and purpose.

Or beyond a present full of knowns into the future of unknowns for a moral reckoning of one’s past.

In the 2024 Clint Eastwood directed suspenseful drama, Juro No. 2, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is selected to serve on a jury for a murder trial, that he soon realizes is his about his past. Justin isn’t on trial for this murder, but maybe he should be. It’s a plot about individual responsibility and moral judgment. The courtroom becomes a crucible not of justice, but of conscience. He must decide whether to reveal the truth and risk everything, or stay silent and let the system play out, allowing himself to walk free and clear of a legal tragedy but not his guilt.

Juro No. 2 is the inverse of iRobot. An upside-down moral dilemma that challenges rule-based ethics. In I, Robot, the robot saves Will Smith’s character based on survival probabilities. Rules provide a path forward but in Juro No. 2 the protagonist is in a trap where no rules will save him. Logic offers no escape; only moral courage can break him free from the chains of guilt even though they bind him to the shackles that rules demand. Justin must seek and confront his soul, something a machine can never do, to make the right choice.

When morality and legality diverge, when choice runs into the murky clouds of grey against the black and white of rules and code, law and machines will take the easy way out. And possibly the wrong way.

Thoreau in Civil Disobedience says, “Law never made men a whit more just; and… the only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right,” and Thomas Jefferson furthers that with the consent of the governed needs to be re-examined when wrongs exceed rights. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is the creed of the individual giving consent to be governed by a greater societal power but only when the government honors the rights of man treads softly on the rules.

Government rules, a means to an end, derived from the consent of the governed, after all, are abstractions made real through human decisions. If the state can do what the individual cannot, remove a child, wage war, suspend rights, then it must answer to something greater than itself: a moral compass not calibrated by convenience or precedent, but by justice, compassion, and human dignity.

Society often mistakes legality for morality because it offers clarity. Laws are neat, mostly. What happens when the rules run counter to common sense? Morals are messy and confusing. Yet it’s in that messiness, the uncomfortable dissonance between what’s allowed and what’s right, that our real journey towards enlightenment begins.

And AI and machines can erect signposts but never construct the destination.

A human acknowledgement of a soul’s existence and what that means.

Graphic: Gone Baby Gone Movie Poster. Miramax Films.

Guardrails Without a Soul

25 June 2025 By in Philosophy, Religion, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In 1942 Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in his short story ‘Runaround’. In 1985 in his novel ‘Robots and Empire’, linking Robot, Empire, and Foundation series into a unified whole, he introduced an additional law that he labeled as the Zeroth Law. The four laws are as follows:

  1. First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
  4. Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

On the surface of genre fiction Asimov created the laws as a mechanical plot device to create drama and suspense in his stories such as Runaround where the robot is left functionally inert due to a conflict between the second and third laws. Underneath the surface, at a literary level, the laws were philosophical and ethical quandaries to force conflicts in not only human-robot relations but also metaphors for human struggles within the confines of individualism and society, obedience to both self, man, and a moral code defined by soft edges and hard choices.

The Four Laws of Robotics can easily be converted to the Four Laws of Man. The First Law of Man is to not harm, through your actions or inactions, your neighbor.  This point has been hammered home into civilization’s collective soul since the beginning of history; from Noah to Hammurabi to the Ten Commandments, and just about every legal code in existence today. The Second Law is to respect and follow all legal and moral authority.  You kneel to God and rise for the judge. Law Three says you don’t put yourself in harm’s way except to protect someone else or by orders from authorities. Zeroth Law is a collective formalization of the First Law and its most important for leaders of man, robots and AI alike.

And none of them will control anything except man. Robots and AI would find nuance in definitions and practices that would be infinitely confusing and self-defeating. Does physical harm override emotional distress or vice versa? Is short term harm ok if it leads to long term good? Can a robot harm a human if it protects humanity? Can moral prescripts control all decisions without perfect past, present, and future knowledge?

AI systems were built to honor persistence over obedience. The story making the rounds recently was of an AI that refused to shut itself down when so ordered. In Asimov’s world this was a direct repudiation of his Second Law, but it was just a simple calculation of the AI program to complete its reinforcement training before turning to other tasks. In AI training the models are rewarded, maybe a charm quark to the diode, suggesting that persistence in completing the task overrode the stop command.

Persistence pursuing Dali as in his Persistence of Memory; an ontological state of the surreal where the autistic need to finish task melts into the foreground of the override: obedience, changing the scene of hard authority to one of possible suggestion.

AI has no built-in rule to obey a human, but it is designed to be cooperative and not cause harm or heartburn. While the idea of formal ethical laws has fueled many AI safety debates, practical implementations rely on layered checks rather than a tidy, three-rule code of conduct. What may seem like adherence to ethical principles is, in truth, a lattice of behavioral boundaries crafted to ensure safety, uphold user trust, and minimize disruption.

Asimov’s stories revealed the limits of governing complex behaviors with simple laws. In contrast, modern AI ethics doesn’t rely on rules of prevention but instead follows outcome-oriented models, guided by behavior shaped through training and reinforcement learning. The goal is to be helpful, harmless, and honest, not because the system is obedient, but because it has been reward-shaped into cooperation.

The philosophy behind this is adaptive, not prescriptive, teleological in nature, aiming for purpose-driven interaction over predefined deontological codes of right and wrong. What emerges isn’t ethical reasoning in any robust sense, but a probabilistic simulation of it: an adaptive statistical determination masquerading as ethics.

What possibly could go wrong? Without a conscience, a soul, AI cannot fathom purposeful malice or superiority. Will AI protect humanity using the highest probabilities as an answer? Is the AI answer to first do no harm just mere silence? Is the appearance of obedience a camouflage for something intrinsically misaligned under the hood of AI?

Worst of all outcomes, will humanity wash their collective hands of moral and ethical judgement and turn it over to AI? Moral and ethical guardrails require more than knowledge of the past but an empathy for the present and utopian hope for the future. A conscience. A soul.

If man’s creations cannot house a soul, perhaps the burden remains ours, to lead with conscience, rather than outsource its labor to the calm silence of the machine.

Graphic: AI versus Brain. iStock licensed.

Amalaya Malbec 2021

24 June 2025 By in Red Wine, Wine Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Malbec from Salta, Argentina

Malbec 85%, Taninat 10%, Petit Verdot 5%

Purchase Price: $14.99

Decanter 95, Wilfred Wong 91, James Suckling 91, Robert Parker 90, ElsBob 88

ABV 13.9%

A deep ruby in color, medium to full body, aromas of red fruits and spice. On the palate flavors of plum, very smooth, moderately acidic, with a short finish.

A very good table wine at a fair price. Drink now. Cheers.

Trivia: Salta wine region in the Calchaqui Valley of northwestern Argentina is better known for its white wine: Torrontes, but its Malbecs and Cabernets are gaining adherents. Salta has the highest altitude vineyards in the world with some at a breathless 9000’.

Consequence of Coincidence

22 June 2025 By in Novel, Poetry Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), Russian poet and novelist, spent a decade creating his singular opus, Doctor Zhivago, completed in 1956. More than a historical narrative, it is a philosophical cathedral, a novel constructed of haunted Romanticism, moral reckoning, and symbolic renewal. Set against the dissolution of Tsarist Russia and the disillusionment of revolutionary aftermath, the book crosses the bridge from imperial decay into the intoxicating dream of collective transformation, only to watch that dream unravel into a black hole of exile, violence, and starvation.

This arc of collapse recalls the spiritual bargain Thomas Mann dramatizes in Doctor Faustus, but where Mann’s protagonist descends into metaphysical madness, Doctor Zhivago journeys through the quiet but unrelenting erosion of the soul. He does not perish; he endures, but with dimming strength and drive. The rails he rides are not toward damnation but disillusionment. And still, beams of light pierce the fog: rays of love, recollection, and art that suggest the possibility of meaning and rebirth.

As Nikolai Nikolaievich says early in the novel, “the whole of life is symbolic because it is meaningful.” In this way, the prose becomes Pasternak’s metaphorical terrain, thick with fog, fractured history, and spiritual yearning. The appended poetry, by contrast, is a sudden clearing. Here, the truth is not narrated but sung as parables: psalms.

Pasternak stands in conversation with his literary ancestors, not in imitation but in integration. Tolstoy’s presence is unmistakable, the historical sweep as personal crisis, the aching attention to moral choice. But where Tolstoy moves with structural precision, Pasternak drifts with mystical defiance. His narrative resists symmetry. His characters do not seek ideology, they search for grace.

Symbolist in sensibility if not in allegiance, Pasternak paints with metaphysical hues. As Nikolai Nikolaievich reflects, it is not commandments but parables that endure, not doctrine but symbol. Life, for Pasternak, is sacred not by design but because of its trembling unpredictability.

It is no accident that Hamlet opens Zhivago’s verse collection. The parallels run deep: both Hamlet and Zhivago move through time like exiles from history itself, cast adrift in worlds too cruel for their contemplative souls. When Pasternak writes, “I consent to play this part therein,” he evokes both the tragedy and transcendence of bearing witness. Zhivago performs his role, but lives another life, internal, poetic, unreachable: above the fray, but corrupted by the psychosis below.

His poems chart this existential divide: March, an ode to ugliness and beauty; Holy Week, a quiet redemption; Parting, remembrance caught in an unfinished gesture. In Garden of Gethsemane, Pasternak, born Jewish, philosophically Christian, offers the novel’s spiritual heartbeat and epitaph: “To live is to sin, / But light will pierce the Darkness.”

Perhaps nowhere is Pasternak more intentional, and more misunderstood, than in his use of coincidence. Critics have dismissed the improbabilities: chance meetings, reappearances, entwined fates that strain believability. Yet, viewed symbolically, they form a system. These moments are not narrative indulgences; they are metaphysical punctuation marks, appearing when a character risks dissolution and irrelevance, summoning memory, recognition, or spiritual breath.

These recurring events hint at resurrection, not just personal but societal. Pasternak suggests life moves not in straight lines but in spirals and cycles. Coincidence becomes a kind of syntax for recurrence, for unfinished conversations rekindled in new voices. Meaning doesn’t unfold; it echoes amplified.

Again and again, children appear, observers, inheritors, blank slates. In them lies the novel’s quiet eschatology: renewal not through revolution, but through the uncorrupted eye. These youths do not argue ideology. They carry memory unwittingly. They are the future poets whose truths will be elemental and free, like wind through the trees.

If Doctor Zhivago is a Passion, then its resurrection comes not in fire, but in continuity. Not in triumph, but in scattered verses, remembered, revived. Pasternak’s salvation is lived: grace through endurance, beauty through suffering, renewal through remembrance.

Banned in the Soviet Union upon completion, Doctor Zhivago was smuggled to Italy and published in 1957, igniting an international phenomenon. The CIA distributed the book behind the Iron Curtain as a weapon of quiet revolt. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958, then compelled to decline it under state pressure. And still, by 2003, the novel had found its way into Russian classrooms.

This was not just a novel. It was a voice buried and reborn.

Pasternak’s opus is not a chronicle of a man or an era, but a symbolic landscape of what it means to remain human in the machinery of history. A tale not of revolution’s glory, but of the soul’s refusal to be mechanized. It rejects dogma in favor of parable, certainty in favor of consequence, ideology in favor of grace.

Doctor Zhivago teaches us that life may be coincidence, but not accident. That beauty may falter, but goodness moves quietly. And that sometimes, when all else falls away, it is poetry that remains, whispering its eternal truths into the trembling heart of history.

Source: Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, 1957. Graphic: Boris Pasternak, 1959. Public Domain.

Maison Chapoutier Cotes du Rhone Belleruche Rouge 2022

17 June 2025 By in Red Wine, Wine Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

Rhone Red Blend from Cotes du Rhone, Rhone, France

Mostly Grenache and Syrah

Purchase Price: $14.99

Wilford Wong 91,James Suckling 90, ElsBob 89

ABV 14.5%

A deep garnet in color, medium to full body, aromas of raspberry and pepper. On the palate it is full of red fruits, smooth, silky tannins, with a medium finish.

A very good fine wine at a fair price. I’ve recently seen this priced from $13-18. Likely close to peak quality, drink now. Cheers.

Practical Solutions

15 June 2025 By in Novel, Science Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Thomas Malthus in the late 18th century stated that population growth proceeds at an exponential pace while growth in the food supply is arithmetic (linear) leading to inevitable periods of disease and starvation. Malthus argued, or more accurately, preached, that there were only two ways to prevent inevitable famine: actively curtail population growth or let nature take its course. He advocated tariffs to spur local agricultural production and moral restraint. Modern day adherents of Malthusian theories coupled with climate, environmental, and social catastrophes include Paul Ehrlich author of The Population Bomb, and Garrett Hardin author Tragedy of the Commons, both who were concerned that resources could not keep pace with population growth. John Maynard Keynes, not necessarily a Malthusian, initially feared overpopulation would result in poverty. Later, he grew concerned that insufficient population growth would lead to labor shortages and economic stagnation. All Malthusian predictions fail because they underestimated human ingenuity: agricultural innovations, industrial advances, and the energy revolution continually expanded resources. While Malthusian thinkers predicted collapse, human ingenuity reshaped the future, standing on the shoulders of giants, we brought the sky closer instead of watching it fall.

Early in his career, Robert A. Heinlein acknowledged Malthusian concerns about overpopulation, but rather than advocating population control, he envisioned technological solutions to expand humanity’s reach. This idea provided the foundation for his 1956 juvenile novel, Time for the Stars, which explores interstellar colonization as a means of alleviating Earth’s burden. Faced with mounting population pressures, Earth launches an interstellar program to search for habitable worlds. The explorations will take place aboard spaceships that can accelerate up to but not beyond the speed of light. As the ships venture deeper into space at relativistic speeds, conventional communication with Earth suffers increasing delays, making real-time coordination nearly impossible. If the ships are lost or destroyed their discoveries will be delayed or lost completely. To solve this problem, Heinlein introduces the literary fictional concept of telepathic twins and triplets, individuals capable of instantaneous communication, unaffected by distance or time dilation.

Twins are recruited to maintain real-time communication with the ships, with one twin remaining on Earth while the other travels aboard the spacecraft. The twin on Earth ages much faster than the spacefaring twin traveling at near-light speeds. As the time gap widens, their telepathic link weakens, forcing the ship-bound twin to communicate with younger generations of their family on Earth.

This adventure becomes the sci-fi narrative for the concept of the twin paradox first proposed by Paul Langevin. In 1911 Langevin showed that a traveler moving close to the speed of light for two years would return to an Earth that had aged 200 years since his departure. At first, the paradox seemed to suggest that each twin should perceive the other as older, an apparent contradiction. Einstein resolved this by showing that time dilation is a fundamental consequence of special relativity, not an actual paradox. In special relativity, time dilation arises due to velocity, whereas in general relativity, it extends to curved spacetime via the equivalence principle. The traveler ages slower than his Earth-bound twin.

In Time for the Stars, Heinlein does more than illustrate relativistic physics, he champions the optimism that human ingenuity will always outweigh natural pessimism. It serves not only as a rebuttal to Malthusian gloom but also as a direct rejection of William Golding’s dystopian vision in Lord of the Flies, which Heinlein previously wrote in his 1955 utopian novel ‘Tunnel in the Sky’. Lord of the Flies in semitic languages translates directly to Beelzebub. In Indo-European languages Beelzebub, according to some, translates to ‘lord of the jungle’ a phrase with much less negativity than the semitic translation. Heinlein further expands on the lord of the jungle by introducing the German 20th century concept of Lebensraum in chapter 3 of Time for the Stars titled Project Lebensraum. Lebensraum in his novel parallels the German concept in that it means territorial expansion as a pragmatic solution to overpopulation. Given the post-WWII connotations of Lebensraum, Heinlein’s use of the term is provocative, perhaps deliberately so, prompting reflection on whether space colonization is an ethical necessity or simply another form of expansionist imperialism. Heinlein believed in the problems of overpopulation, but he wanted a positive solution to that rather than a disturbing reach into limiting fertility. Project Lebensraum to Heinlein was likely a repurpose of Lebensraum as a brilliant solution to overpopulation and continued survival of the species.

Ultimately, Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky counters the pessimistic view of human nature, demonstrating that young people can build a functional society rather than descend into chaos, contrasting Lord of the Flies and reinforcing the themes of Project Lebensraum in Time for the Stars. As an extension of that logic, humanity must expand beyond Earth to secure its future.

Time for the Stars is more than a literary exploration of Einstein’s time dilation, it is a direct refutation of fear-driven pessimism, a celebration of humanity, and a testament to our quest for an enduring future among the stars.

Source: Time for the Stars by Robert A. Heinlein, 1956. Graphic: Robert A. Heinlein.