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Two days ago, while working late on my proposal for a master’s thesis, my Mac Powerbook took a dive. I was editing a footnote in Word, trying to change an Endnote citation, and the thing froze up on me. The fan started humming louder and louder, and I couldn’t switch from one application to another. The system just sat there, whirring away, unresponsive. I waited for something to crash, which usually returns control to the Finder, but after several minutes I gave up and hit the power button. When it went dark, the disk made a sound that didn’t seem right, even for a crash.

When I tried to boot up again: bad news. Gray start-up screen, spinning “wait” icon, and then the computer shut itself down. I tried booting again. Same thing.

Uh-oh. My thesis proposal is on that machine, and the last backup was over an hour ago. Now what? Fortunately, DiskWarrior saved the day, although it took what seemed like an hour to get the computer running again. When I finally logged in, my Word document was still there and I hadn’t lost any work.

That was a close call.

Then I read about the “herioc computer” that died in order to save the world from a boring master’s thesis, and I began to wonder if my computer was trying to tell me something.

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I would like to have heard Tom Wolfe deliver the 35th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. Here are some of the highlights as reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Mr. Wolfe’s lecture, “The Human Beast,” took its title from a novel by Émile Zola, the 19th-century French novelist who described himself as a “naturalist” and whom Mr. Wolfe called “my idol.” But he also gave the author of La bête humaine and his scientific inspiration a mock scolding: “I love you, Émile, but by the time you and Darwin got hold of it, evolution had been irrelevant for 11,000 years. Why couldn’t you two see it? Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, ‘man reasoning,’ but Homo loquax, ‘man talking’!” . . .

He also referred to Max Weber, and then Clifford Geertz:

The work of scientists, in particular neurobiologists, Mr. Wolfe concluded, offers proof that culture, or “those things in human life that could not exist without speech,” trumps evolution. “It becomes difficult for neo-Darwinists to continue to say that structures consisting only of words are not real and durable,” the writer argued. He offered a quote from the Princeton anthropologist Clifford Geertz: “There is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not even be the clever savages of Lord of the Flies.”

I’ll keep an eye on the interweb for the entire lecture.

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