‘Emptiness’ is a tricky word. It’s easy for me to understand providing it doesn’t become a thing, that is, a noun. Once I read, “Form is emptiness. Emptiness is form” I get into trouble. So sit, sit, let know-nothing mind have a chance.

Smith and Hanh write a good deal about impermanence of the physical body. This slides down easy. I am a chemist so my awareness that the atoms and molecules of my body change with every breath is simple stuff. Impermanence in the physical world, you might say, is a chemist’s bread-and-butter.

But what about those other skandhas? Feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness? There are a lot of strong ‘self’ thoughts that I cling to. When I say, “this happened to me at my Bar Mitzvah”, the “me” in that story somehow feels so close to the “me” that is typing on this keyboard. I can remember his joys and pains. Our histories feel so strongly connected. Isn’t there a mental “me” that is ongoing, happening inside my head, and separate from you?

Surely “I” have changed over the last 40-odd years, but it all seems so gradual and memories seem to take me right back to where I was then. Can that old me be gone for good? I think so. Let’s try a thought experiment: Suppose you tell me a joke that I have never heard. The punchline is so terrific and so unexpected. It hits me like a pie in the face. I laugh. A moment later, you try to tell me the same joke (it was that good). “Wait a moment,” I say. “I’ve heard that one already.” The pie never lands. I have already ducked.

So the old “me”, the old “feelings, perceptions, mental formations, consciousness” have all changed. And they keep changing with every passing moment. Change cannot be stopped, it can only be forgotten or overlooked.

Last night, in the few minutes that passed between the end of kinhin and the start of dokusan, I composed this poem for my teacher:

Before the boat slips away from the dock,
Birds fly overhead,
A fish craps in the water -
Everything is in motion.

Life is the only joke whose punchline always changes.

It felt so good to hear her voice and see her face (even if it was inclined downward – someone needs to design a camera that sits in the center of the screen). I even tried playing peek-a-book by substituting this little smiley guy (drawn hastily on a small white board) for me. He looks happy, doesn’t he? I know I was (am).

Now to the The Locked Room … unlike many of the other plots in this series, I had to spend nearly the entire book with a dead body and no clear idea of how, or even if, a crime could have been committed. Of course, once I learned how it was done, I slapped my forehead. So “obvious”.

Sometimes it seems that the raison d’etre for this series is to lampoon the incompetence of Swedish police (who, despite their inability to keep the streets safe, are incredibly savvy when it comes to finessing the political system). Even prosecuting attorneys come in for their share of ridicule here.

But what we care about, of course, is the recovery of Martin Beck from his gunshot wound. Is he healthy again? Is he sane? Can he ever be happy? Physical health turns out to be the least of his problems. Although he is incapable of reaching this conclusion for himself (at least, not before his nose is rubbed in it), the love and companionship of a good woman are what he needs.

The Personalized System of Instruction, or PSI, became very popular in the late 60′s, and then went through a decline in the mid 80′s, but it lingers on in many forms today (check out CAPSI). Since that time many other forms of instruction, such as POGIL, have climbed on the “lecture is dead” bandwagon even if they don’t subscribe to many of Keller’s other ideas.

So it’s interesting to see academics re-discover personalized instruction (this time with online videos): D. Kroll, “Death Knell for the Lecture: Technology as a Passport to Personalized Education,” NY Times, Dec. 5, 2011. What is it about “lecture is dead” that threatens teachers so much?

We’ll see. I fell in love with the book in elementary school (the book was only three or four years old then) when Mrs. Anschel introduced it into our fourth grade classroom. When Chanukah rolled around a few months later, or maybe it was my birthday?, it became the first book that I ever asked my parents to buy for me. Years later I couldn’t wait for my children to discover it so I bought each of them a copy as soon as I thought they would be old enough to appreciate it. Once I even urged my younger daughter through a dark doorway in downtown Portland so that some strange man (Norton Juster, sitting behind a table) could sign her copy of the book. And just before I graduated from high school, I threw aside all teen-aged self respect and waded into a movie theater strewn with noisy 8 and 9-year olds so that I could watch the animated version. (It was awful.)

The pleasure of the book lies, of course, in its wordplay. As Gopnik perceptively explains, the book makes “funny and concrete some familiar idea or turn of speech.” But it was better than that because it was a story that we could mine over and over again for fresh discoveries.

For example, my 4th grade friends and I immediately felt sorry for Milo (admittedly, in a sort of mocking superior sort of way) when he discovered that he would literally have to eat his words (“Should have made a tastier speech,” someone advises him), but only now do I discover that the denizens of Dictionopolis must eat words for their very survival. Of course.

Likewise, where the Mathemagician’s miserliness added a vague menacing quality to the story when I was young, I now see that his miserliness is inextricably bound up with his ability to measure and calculate.

Perhaps the best discovery of all, given the fact that I have been a professor at a small liberal arts college for nearly 30 years now, is Gopnik’s assertion that the book is a paean to the liberal arts. In his eyes, the book makes “knowing too much about one thing” into a “moral sin”. Milo is “the perfect first-generation American undergraduate, scanning the course catalogue, wide-eyed.” He “doesn’t educate himself; he gets educated. His epiphany is that math and reading and even spelling are themselves subjects of adventure, if seen from the right angle.”

Although none of my faculty colleagues has ever admitted to being raised on The Phantom Tollbooth, I’m sure there are many fans who will appreciate the following story. In 1972 or 1973, during my first year of college. I was sitting in an honors chemistry class next to my childhood friend and 4th grade classmate Tom. Our teacher, a grad student named Dan Harris, had just finished explaining that atomic orbital energies rose with the number of nodes in the orbitals. Somehow, this knowledge triggered the same thought in Tom’s head and mine because we turned to face each other and simultaneously said, “no node is good node.”

But the book turns a corner and I began to wish that he were dead. His obsession with his past, and our (his, mine) failure to discover what went wrong back there, began to wear me down. Even as I started to spend more and more hours with the book, an anger welled up. “Why can’t you just let go? Don’t you see what you are doing to everyone around you? And to yourself?”

Given my flip view of Roman numerals, I was utterly blown away to learn from Keith Devlin‘s slim new book of mathematical history (subtitled Fibonacci’s Arithmetic Revolution) that the transition from Roman to Hindu-Arabic numerals began only recently (the latter appeared in Europe after 1200 C.E. and it took a couple of centuries before they had clearly carried the day), that it was instigated by the writings of a single man, a certain Leonardo of Pisa (who many of us recognize more readily as “Fibonacci”), and was driven by commercial interests.

It turns out that Leonardo did far more than describe a new way to represent numbers, he also described how to perform all manner of calculations with them, which he illustrated through hundreds of practical problems (some of which schoolchildren will still recognize!). We know very little about Leonardo, but we can guess that he learned the new system as an adolescent assisting his merchant father in northern Africa and his writings appeared at just the right time, neatly dovetailing with the expanding activities of Italian traders. The new Hindu-Arabic numerals made computation far more convenient, and once one could compute conveniently, one could begin to solve all sorts of problems like currency exchanges, interest on loans, and dividing profits among unequal investors, that had been difficult or nearly impossible under the Roman numeral system.

But there’s so much more I would like to know. The Italian traders were the ‘globalizers’ of their day, dominating trade across the Mediterranean. These innovations in trade and math appeared just before the Black Death would wipe out a vast portion of Europe’s population. How did trade and arithmetic survive? Would our global information network survive a modern health/environmental catastrophe?

On a personal level, what compelled Leonardo to write his methods down? He wasn’t the inventor of Hindu-Arabic numerals or the inventor of the arithmetic procedures that they permitted, and much of what he wrote had already been written down in Arabic and spread throughout that culture. What made him (besides his young age) receptive to these ideas, and what made him decide to organize them so comprehensively?

And, more generally, what determines when an idea will take root and flourish?

Unfortunately for Beck, evidence of either man’s involvement proves hard to come by, and when two policemen are shot dead during a late night traffic stop, pressure mounts on Beck and his team to pin the woman’s murder on whoever is most convenient so that they can assist the mini-army that is being assembled to hunt down the suspected cop killer. Fortunately, as was the case in book #7, Gunvald Larsson’s enthusiasm for insubordination saves the day.

A prominent theme in books #7 and #8 is the way that politically well-connected incompetents (represented by Beck’s boss, Superintendent Malm of the National Police) turn to highly orchestrated displays of overwhelming police force as a substitute for competent police work. Gunvald Larsson, a thinking man of action, however turns out to be worth a hundred bimbos in blue.

What lies between these bookends is an investigation that reveals decades of sanctioned police brutality. That, and the uncomfortable feeling that justice was on the murderer’s side all along.

“Thus, do not be careless even when you work with poor materials, and sustain your efforts even when you have excellent materials. Never change your attitude according to the materials. If you do, it is like varying your truth when speaking with different people; then you are not a practitioner of the way.”

Read more at the Tricycle Wisdom Collection (Summer 1993)