Paul Krugman reviews Martin Wolf's The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned—and Have Still to Learn—from the Financial Crisis, in The New York Review of Books:

The Shifts and the Shocks opens with a long quotation from the late Hyman Minsky, a heterodox economist who had little influence on mainstream economists and policymakers during his lifetime, but whose analysis is now central to the Standard Model. Minsky’s ideas have been cited by monetary officials including Janet Yellen, by business economists like Pimco’s Paul McCulley, and by many academics, myself included. You could say that we are all Minskyites now.

What did Minsky bring to economics? In part, he argued that conventional views of financial crisis were too narrowly focused on the specific issue of bank runs. In Minsky’s vision, excessive leverage—too much reliance on borrowed money—creates a risk of crisis whoever the borrower. Banks, which in effect borrow money short-term from their depositors but invest in assets that can’t easily be converted to cash, may be especially vulnerable. But business and household debt also expose the economy to the possibility of a self-reinforcing downward spiral.

Minsky was not, of course, the first to make this observation; during the Great Depression the great American economist Irving Fisher, in a paper that reads remarkably well to this day, argued that the economy was suffering from “debt deflation,” in which borrowers of all kinds were trying to pay down their debts at the same time, which led to plunging prices of assets and a severe economic slump, which made their debts even less supportable and led to further pullbacks.

What Minsky added, however, was the notion that deflation as a result of excessive debt is fated to happen every once in a while, that periodic financial crises are a more or less unavoidable feature of capitalism. According to his “financial instability hypothesis,” eras of economic stability carry within themselves the seeds of their own down- fall. If there hasn’t been a financial crisis for many years, both borrowers and lenders will become complacent, underestimating the risks of high levels of debt.

More here.

Brian Leiter in 3:AM Magazine:

[W]hy don’t Anglo-American philosophers engage with non-Western philosophical traditions? In my experience, professional philosophers today often perceive non-Western thinkers as inferior. Of course, few would say this explicitly. Rather, philosophers often point to non-Western philosophy’s unusual and unfamiliar methodology as the primary reason for the disconnect.’

There is much that seems to me strange and a bit dubious about this. Do we have any evidence that Asian-Americans generally expect the fields they study to feature Asian thinkers? And should we really add East Asian philosophers to the curriculum to satisfy the consumer demands of Asian students rather than because these philosophers are interesting and important in their own right? (Mr. Park, oddly, never explains, or even affirms, the merits of these thinkers.)

But what is quite surprising, and unsupported, is the claim that the absence of non-Western thinkers is due to Anglophone philosophers thinking them “inferior.” I suppose some think that, but philosophers, who are quite opinionated as a group, no doubt hold every opinion under the sun. (My former colleague Herb Hochberg, about as unabashed an apologist for the most parochial conception of analytic philosophy imaginable, thought Kripke “inferior” to Russell.) My own impression, from having talked to a lot more philosophers than Mr. Park and for a much longer period of time, is that most Anglophone philosophers have no opinion at all about non-Western philosophy because they are simply ignorant of it. Some regret the ignorance, others think it is excusable since there are so many philosophical traditions in the world and one can only master so many, and others just don’t think about it at all because it is possible to pursue an academic career in philosophy ignorant of a lot of things, including large swaths of the history of European philosophy (and the further back in the past we go, the more the boundary lines of “what’s European, what’s not” get harder to draw).

More here. (See Terrence Blake's response here.)

Robert Pippin at nonsite:

What we have instead is typical of Ray’s much more psychologically than politically complex films; that is, we have a great investiture of importance in love and being loved as the central human problem,42 or, we should probably say, we have what has become the central and most difficult human problem, since the Western is now noticeably of historical rather than thematic significance. This is so even though Ray was certainly aware, as few directors ever were or are, of the nearly certain impossibility of such redemption. And yet this does not mean that the film should be characterized as another of the more “psychological” Westerns, such as those by Anthony Mann or Budd Boetticher. It is fair to say that those Westerns explore more self-consciously the psychological costs of the frontier-town transition or the legal-extra-legal violence problem, than the “objective” problem itself. But the Western framework itself is secure, just given a different, more-psychological-than-epic inflection. A question like, “What really is the difference between a sheriff and a bounty hunter, if any?” might be explored by asking “What does it mean for this individual (the Jimmy Stewart character in Mann’s Westerns) to face that challenge?” But it is still the classical question at issue. We are still within the generic language and concerns of the Western.

There is one more element that connects the love story melodrama with the “Western” plot. Put simply, both raise the question of the possibility of “new beginnings,” sort of escape from, or reconciliation with, the past.

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Sophia Nguyen at The Point:

In the dog days of August, two books about the Ivy League landed comfortably on the New York Times bestseller list. One was William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep. The other was Lev Grossman’s The Magician’s Land. Despite their disparate genres, the nonfiction tract ends up in fantasy, while the escapist entertainment roots itself in reality—and both are invested in the drama of gifted children.

Heavily quoting emails and essays from his former students at Yale, Deresiewicz’s higher-ed polemic takes down elite colleges and the adults they produce—zombies with status anxiety where their curiosity and humanity used to be. Rather than challenge students with a rigorous education, Deresiewicz argues, the Ivy League and other elite colleges now promote a narrow notion of success. It begins with admissions offices, which have become inhumanly ruthless sorting machines further stratifying the upper class. Having selected for a certain breed of strivers, the schools then encourage their students to become a conformist herd, seeking meaning in credentials. Failing to find that meaning, the hunger only intensifies.

more here.

Cynthia Haven at the Times Literary Supplement:

The Russian poet Regina Derieva was born on the Black Sea in Odessa, and enjoyed the shifting rhythms of the sea: “Water is the ideal apparel. However many times you get into it, it’s the same”. Her passion for water was shared by her epistolary friend, Joseph Brodsky, who grew up alongside St Petersburg’s canals and spent as much time as he could in Venice, where he is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele. Derieva, whom Brodsky called “a great poet”, viewed a very different landscape, however: from the age of six, she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, “perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city”, according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova. For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn “the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance”.

A few days after Derieva’s sudden death last December at the age of sixty-four, I received a letter from her husband, Alexander Deriev, and our ensuing correspondence eventually led to the Stanford Libraries’ acquisition of this astonishing poet’s archive. A single cardboard box postmarked Märsta, Sweden, is all that remains of a long and productive literary life, augmented by a few files of unpublished manuscripts, photographs, letters and drawings Deriev brought with him to California in his backpack.

more here.

Eric Dean Wilson at The American Reader:

Generally, a diptych is two panels of equal size joined together by some device, usually a hinge. The form follows a long tradition that began in late Western antiquity, when Romans appointed to the consulate in the 4th – 6th centuries A.D. commissioned ivory tablets carved with their own likenesses on each panel (before we criticize smartphone selfies as a symptom of contemporary narcissism, we might look first to our uncanny doppelgangers, the Ancient Romans). The tablets were connected by a hinge, and closed like a book to protect the inside—a thin layer of cool wax where the consul could write with a stylus and, if necessary, erase. The diptych was, essentially, a ceremonial notebook used to track and record consular appointments by year. When, in the next few centuries, the consular diptychs were reused by the early Christians, the insides of the tablets were erased and used to record prayers for the living church community in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe, they were used to record prayers for the dead. Elsewhere, the ivory tablets were used to keep track of the growing list of saints and their appointments by year. (The early history of the diptych, then, is history itself.)

more here.

Ask The Moon

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Alan Cowell in the New York Times:

Reaching across gulfs of age, gender, faith, nationality and even international celebrity, the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday awarded the 2014 peace prize to Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan and Kailash Satyarthi of India, joining a teenage Pakistani known around the world with a 60-year-old Indian veteran of campaigns on behalf of children.

The awards, announced in Oslo by Thorbjorn Jagland, the committee’s chairman, were in acknowledgment of their work in helping to promote universal schooling and in protecting children worldwide from abuse and exploitation.

Pointedly, Mr. Jagland said, “The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.” Ms. Yousafzai is 17 while Mr. Satyarthi is 60.

“Children must go to school and not be financially exploited,” Mr. Jagland said, adding: “It is a prerequisite for peaceful global development that the rights of children and young people be respected. In conflict-ridden areas in particular, the violation of children leads to the continuation of violence from generation to generation.”

“Showing great personal courage, Kailash Satyarthi, maintaining Gandhi’s tradition, has headed various forms of protests and demonstrations, all peaceful, focusing on the grave exploitation of children for financial gain,” Mr. Jagland said. “He has also contributed to the development of important international conventions on children’s rights.”

Despite his works, Mr. Satyarthi is not nearly so widely known as Ms. Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban in 2012 for her campaigning on behalf of girls’ education in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.

More here.

Anita Singh in The Telegraph:

Accusations of 'Islamophobia' are being levelled at anyone who dares to speak out against the “hate-filled rhetoric” of Islamic fanaticism, Salman Rushdie has claimed in a speech condemning Isil and “this new age of religious mayhem”. Rushdie voiced his fears that the language of “jihadi-cool” is seducing young British Muslims, many via Twitter and YouTube, into joining the “decapitating barbarianism” of Isil, the group also referred to as Islamic State or Isis. In his PEN/Pinter Prize Lecture, the author said all religions have their extremists but “the overwhelming weight of the problem lies in the world of Islam”. Last week, Isil beheaded taxi driver and charity worker Alan Henning, the latest Western hostage to die at their hands. The so-called “jihadi-cool” image romanticises Isil, using rap videos and social networking to recruit followers – posing with AK-47s and bragging about their “five star jihad” in videos showing fighters lounging around in luxury villas as they urged the destruction of the West.

Rushdie defined “jihadi-cool” as “the deformed medievalist language of fanaticism, backed up by modern weaponry”, saying: “It's hard not to conclude that this hate-filled religious rhetoric, pouring from the mouths of ruthless fanatics into the ears of angry young men, has become the most dangerous new weapon in the world today”. He said: “A word I dislike greatly, 'Islamophobia', has been coined to discredit those who point at these excesses, by labelling them as bigots. But in the first place, if I don't like your ideas, it must be acceptable for me to say so, just as it is acceptable for you to say that you don't like mine. Ideas cannot be ring-fenced just because they claim to have this or that fictional sky god on their side. “And in the second place, it's important to remember that most of those who suffer under the yoke of the new Islamic fanaticism are other Muslims…

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

For the last two decades of the twentieth century, a cold war rumbled on between the laboratories of physicists in Moscow and in the West over the quality of sapphire. The Russian scientists claimed to have measured the rate of decay of the material’s resonance — a signal of its quality — with what researchers elsewhere considered impossible precision. The stakes were high: sapphire mirrors were being considered for use in a new generation of laser interfero­meter gravitational-wave detectors. But were they up to the task? Labs in the United States and United Kingdom could not reproduce the Moscow findings. The discrepancy fuelled mistrust and antagonism. At the turn of the millennium, the mystery was solved. Measuring the quality of sapphire, it turns out, is as much art as science. The Moscow scientists were expert experimenters, but this expertise was not transferred through the methods sections of their academic papers. The fine fibres used to suspend the sapphire cylinders under investigation were greased with “the presence of a fatty film”, one of their translated papers pointed out. Less explicit was the source of the grease. Only after years of struggling with various lubricants did the Western researchers realize that one member of the Russian group would sometimes run the thread across the bridge of his nose or behind his ear. With the right amount of human ‘flossing’ (and the right human), the Western scientists managed to get similar results.

The thread greasing is an example of tacit knowledge: know-how that can be passed on only through direct contact, and not by written or verbal instruction. How to ride a bicycle is a classic case. How to make an atomic bomb is a less-well-known example: all the instructions to build a nuclear weapon may be there on the Internet, but the ‘been there, done that’ personal experience is not. Indeed, security analysts have suggested that the lack of active testing and consequent erosion of nuclear-weapon tacit knowledge is leading to the “uninvention” of the bomb, and reduced credibility of the nuclear deterrent. In a paper published this month in the journal Science and Public Policy, researchers in the United Kingdom suggest that a reverse process is under way when it comes to biology and biological weapons (J. Revill and C. Jefferson Sci. Public Policy 41, 597–610; 2014). Access to tacit knowledge in the life sciences is not dwindling but proliferating, argue James Revill and Catherine Jefferson. As secrets are shared, chiefly through advances in information and communications technology, tacit knowledge becomes explicit and barriers are demolished.

More here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

Less known are Cornell’s films; they are Cornell’s boxes in motion. The films are collages of industrial, scientific and home movies purchased from fellow collectors or pillaged from the trash bins of New York. In By Night With Torch and Spear upside-down men toil away upon their metal fire machines under the watch of silent clouds. Their factory is dark and the machines spit fire — they move in a pagan dance of industry. Titles flash throughout. But the words are backwards and the messages move too fast to read. All at once the men disappear; the machines no longer need them. The factory men become a tribe, marching in the night with arrows and drums, back and forth before a mass of smoke. The word ‘Shepard’ and something else flash in front of a young man blowing into a reed instrument of some primitive kind. He wears a robe and a turban. The word “Egyptian” flashes and “purpose.” We are in the desert with camels. The camels morph into caterpillars that writhe on a leaf. The glowing effect of the negative film turns the caterpillars into amoebic angels. Maybe the caterpillars are a return to a lost primordial state. The caterpillars lead once more to the men, who walk by night, with torch and spear. Finally, we are left with pulsating blobs. Another cycle of history is complete.

By Night With Torch and Spear was never shown publicly while Cornell was alive. It was found after Cornell’s death, in the house on Utopia Parkway where the artist had spent most of his days. Cornell stopped showing his films after a screening in 1936, when Salvador Dalí publicly accused Cornell of plagiarizing his unconscious mind. Dalí knocked over the projector with his umbrella, traumatizing the quiet Cornell. After that, Cornell continued making his films in secret.

more here.

Jonathan P. Eburne at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On the occasion of two major retrospective events in David Lynch’s career, we can return anew to Twin Peaks, in advance of the Showtime series. In late July, CBS and Paramount Pictures released Twin Peaks: The Entire Mystery on Blu-ray; compiling the television series together with the film, the set includes 90 minutes of long-rumored “missing pieces” deleted from the final cut of Fire Walk with Me, among other features.

The second event is all the more comprehensive. On September 12, thefirst major US exhibition of David Lynch’s art opened at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art (PAFA) in Philadelphia; the career retrospective of Lynch’s paintings, drawings, and early short films runs through January 11, 2015.

Do the “missing pieces” of the Blu-ray resolve the lingering questions inTwin Peaks, whether the fate of its characters or the workings of its otherworldly cosmology: the Black Lodge, the Red Waiting Room, and BOB? The box set is terrific, but it remains steadfast in its refusal to do so.

more here.

Joshua Hersh at Virginia Quarterly Review:

Refugees and the displaced never have it good, but by all accounts the conditions at Atmeh by late 2012, when its population was estimated at roughly 15,000 people, were especially wretched. (Atmeh’s population is now believed to be closer to 30,000). In March 2013, the UN conducted a satellite survey of the area and counted around 2,000 tents in a sprawling mass. Two months later, a second tally found more than 3,000 bunched together over two discrete areas—an increase of almost half.

The camp was slowly but undeniably becoming a slum—one that under any other circumstances would be considered uninhabitable. The refugees at Atmeh had just endured the second winter of the war, many of them suffering through it without heat, electricity, running water, or decent toilets, only to find their problems were getting worse. Desperate to keep warm, many took risks—with catastrophic effects. Over New Year’s, a tent fire caused by a family burning a kerosene lantern killed two children and left several others in critical condition. Lina Sergie Attar, a Syrian-American writer and humanitarian worker, happened to be in the camp shortly before the fire, and she met a twenty-year-old mother of two named Manar, who told of a similar experience.

more here.

Researchers are divided over what processes should be considered fundamental.

From Nature:

Does evolutionary theory need a rethink? Yes, urgently

Without an extended evolutionary framework, the theory neglects key processes, say Kevin Laland and colleagues.

Charles Darwin conceived of evolution by natural selection without knowing that genes exist. Now mainstream evolutionary theory has come to focus almost exclusively on genetic inheritance and processes that change gene frequencies.

Yet new data pouring out of adjacent fields are starting to undermine this narrow stance. An alternative vision of evolution is beginning to crystallize, in which the processes by which organisms grow and develop are recognized as causes of evolution.

Some of us first met to discuss these advances six years ago. In the time since, as members of an interdisciplinary team, we have worked intensively to develop a broader framework, termed the extended evolutionary synthesis¹ (EES), and to flesh out its structure, assumptions and predictions. In essence, this synthesis maintains that important drivers of evolution, ones that cannot be reduced to genes, must be woven into the very fabric of evolutionary theory.

We believe that the EES will shed new light on how evolution works. We hold that organisms are constructed in development, not simply ‘programmed’ to develop by genes. Living things do not evolve to fit into pre-existing environments, but co-construct and coevolve with their environments, in the process changing the structure of ecosystems.

The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science. We contend that evolutionary biology needs revision if it is to benefit fully from these other disciplines. The data supporting our position gets stronger every day.

More here.

Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times:

A few days ago, I was on a panel on Bill Maher’s television show on HBO that became a religious war.

Whether or not Islam itself inspires conflict, debates about it certainly do. Our conversation degenerated into something close to a shouting match and went viral on the web. Maher and a guest, Sam Harris, argued that Islam is dangerous yet gets a pass from politically correct liberals, while the actor Ben Affleck denounced their comments as “gross” and “racist.” I sided with Affleck.

After the show ended, we panelists continued to wrangle on the topic for another hour with the cameras off. Maher ignited a debate that is rippling onward, so let me offer three points of nuance.

First, historically, Islam was not particularly intolerant, and it initially elevated the status of women. Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.

Likewise, it is true that the Quran has passages hailing violence, but so does the Bible, which recounts God ordering genocides, such as the one against the Amalekites.

More here.

An interview of Robert Crease, historian and philosopher of science at Stony Brook University, New York, on the cultural impact of Heisenberg’s principle on homunculus:

What led Heisenberg to formulate the uncertainty principle? Was it something that fell out of the formalism in mathematical terms?

That’s a rather dramatic story. The uncertainty principle emerged in exchange of letters between Heisenberg and Pauli, and fell out of the work that Heisenberg had done on quantum theory the previous year, called matrix mechanics. In autumn 1926, he and Pauli were corresponding about how to understand its implications. Heisenberg insisted that the only way to understand it involved junking classical concepts such as position and momentum in the quantum world. In February 1927 he visited Niels Bohr in Copenhagen. Bohr usually helped Heisenberg to think, but this time the visit didn’t have the usual effect. They grew frustrated, and Bohr abandoned Heisenberg to go skiing. One night, walking by himself in the park behind Bohr’s institute, Heisenberg had an insight. He wrote to Pauli: “One will always find that all thought experiments have this property: when a quantity p is pinned down to within an accuracy characterized by the average error p, then… q can only be given at the same time to within an accuracy characterized by the average error q1 ≈ h/p1.” That’s the uncertainty principle. But like many equations, including E = mc2 and Maxwell’s equations, its first appearance is not in its now-famous form. Anyway, Heisenberg sent off a paper on his idea that was published in May.

How did Heisenberg interpret it in physical terms?

He didn’t, really; at the time he kept claiming that the uncertainty principle couldn’t be interpreted in physical terms, and simply reflected the fact that the subatomic world could not be visualized. Newtonian mechanics is visualizable: each thing in it occupies a particular place at a particular time. Heisenberg thought the attempt to construct a visualizable solution for quantum mechanics might lead to trouble, and so he advised paying attention only to the mathematics. Michael Frayn captures this side of Heisenberg well in his play Copenhagen. When the Bohr character charges that Heisenberg doesn’t pay attention to the sense of what he’s doing so long as the mathematics works out, the Heisenberg character indignantly responds, “Mathematics is sense. That’s what sense is”.

Read more here.

Oliver Morton in MoreIntelligentLife:

The clear plastic bags contain a liquid somewhere between orange and pink; quite fetching, but more importantly an indication that the alkalinity is just right. They sit on metal shelves in a small, steel-lined room which, at a steady 37˚C, is more than warm. The setting, fragrance-free and almost silent, looks and feels purely industrial. But it is dedicated to life—as a molecular process of bewildering complexity, and as something worth saving. This room is on a campus in South San Francisco where the biotech company Genentech—the first of its kind, now part of the Swiss pharma giant Roche—produces designer proteins. The liquid in the bags is an exacting cocktail of 50 nutrients and trace elements, mixed to a precision of a few parts per million. The purpose of the mixology, and of the temperature, and of all the other technologies and procedures here, is to create the best environment you could imagine—if your sense of what is good had been built up by the millions of years of evolution that were required to create the ovaries of the Chinese hamster, and then modified with a few decades of intensive genetic tinkering. Because it is on keeping such ovary-derived cells as happy as possible that Genentech’s fortunes are based; they are the cells res­ponsible for mass-producing antibodies that recognise and help the body regulate various sorts of target, notably cancers.

Quite how fast these fine-tuned cells make antibodies is not something Genentech likes to discuss, but the scientific literature has similar cells producing hundreds or even thousands per second. When you consider that each antibody requires the carefully co-ordinated production of four interwoven proteins and some precise adding of sugars to make a final product hundreds of times bigger and spectacularly more complex than an everyday pharmaceutical such as aspirin or morphine or warfarin, that rate sounds remarkable. But when you think of how many antibodies it takes to intervene in even a single human life, you realise that you need a remarkable amount of that remarkable quantity. You need remarkable squared—a system to mass-produce mass production.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

A new miniaturized biomedical “lab-on-a-chip” testing device for exosomes — molecular messengers between cells — promises faster, earlier, less-invasive diagnosis of cancer, according to its developers at the University of Kansas Medical Center and the University of Kansas Cancer Center. “A lab-on-a-chip shrinks the pipettes, test tubes and analysis instruments of a modern chemistry lab onto a microchip-sized wafer,” explained Yong Zeng, assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas. Zeng and his fellow researchers developed the lab-on-a-chip initially for early detection of lung cancer — the number-one cancer killer in the U.S. Lung cancer is currently detected mostly with an invasive biopsy, after tumors are larger than 3 centimeters in diameter and even metastatic. Using the lab-on-a-chip, lung cancer could be detected much earlier, using only a small drop of a patient’s blood, according to Zeng.

The prototype lab-on-a-chip is made of a widely used silicone rubber called polydimethylsiloxane and uses a technique called “on-chip immunoisolation.” “We used magnetic beads of 3 micrometers in diameter to pull down the exosomes in plasma samples,” Zeng said. “To avoid other interfering species present in plasma, the bead surface was chemically modified with an antibody that recognizes and binds with a specific target protein — for example, a protein receptor — present on the exosome membrane. The plasma containing magnetic beads then flows through the microchannels on the diagnostic chip in which the beads can be readily collected using a magnet to extract circulating exosomes from the plasma.”

More here.

Forgetfulness
.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.
.

by Billy Collins