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May. 24th, 2002 02:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
botiasfrom the preface of I Have Landed
"Thus, when I realized that my three-hundredth monthly essay for Natural History ... would fall fortuitously into the millennial issue of January 2001, the inception of a year that also marks the centenary of my family's arrival in the United States, I did choose to read this coincidence of numerological "evenness" as a sign that this particular forum should now close at the equally portentious number of 10 volumes (made worthy of mention only by the contingency of our decimal mathmatics. Were I a Mayan prince, counting by twenties, I would not have been so impressed, but then I wouldn't have been writing scientific essays either). When I then felt the double whammy of an exact and notable twenty-five years ... between two odd and fortuitous conjunctions in life's passage--the yoking of my first essay and first technical book in 1977, followed by a similar duality in 2002 of this tenth and last essay book from Natural History and my life's major technical "monstergraph" (as we tend to call overly long monographs in the trade), well then, despite my full trust and knowledge of probability, how could I deny that something must be beaming me a marching order to move on to other scholarly and literary matters (but never to slow the pace or lose an iota of interest--for no such option exists within my temperment)."
"Thus, when I realized that my three-hundredth monthly essay for Natural History ... would fall fortuitously into the millennial issue of January 2001, the inception of a year that also marks the centenary of my family's arrival in the United States, I did choose to read this coincidence of numerological "evenness" as a sign that this particular forum should now close at the equally portentious number of 10 volumes (made worthy of mention only by the contingency of our decimal mathmatics. Were I a Mayan prince, counting by twenties, I would not have been so impressed, but then I wouldn't have been writing scientific essays either). When I then felt the double whammy of an exact and notable twenty-five years ... between two odd and fortuitous conjunctions in life's passage--the yoking of my first essay and first technical book in 1977, followed by a similar duality in 2002 of this tenth and last essay book from Natural History and my life's major technical "monstergraph" (as we tend to call overly long monographs in the trade), well then, despite my full trust and knowledge of probability, how could I deny that something must be beaming me a marching order to move on to other scholarly and literary matters (but never to slow the pace or lose an iota of interest--for no such option exists within my temperment)."
