The asking animal.
Throughout history,
from the time of Socrates to our own modern age,
the human race has sought answers to the fundamental
question of life: Who are we and why are we here?

Caught between two eternties -
the vanished past and the unknown future -
human beings never cease to seek their bearings and
sense of direction. We inherit our legacy of the sciences
and the arts - the works of the great discoverers and creators,
the Columbuses and Leonardos - but we all remain seekers.
Man is the asking animal.
In one of his works, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas recalls
his frustration as a boy when he was given a beautiful book at Christmas
that told him everything about the wasp but "why".
All the knowledge in our universities and all the treasures
in our museums do not satisfy us.

Western culture has witnessed at least three grand historical
epochs of seeking - each with a dominant spirit, enduring spokesmen
and distinctive problems. We have gone from the "Why?" to the "How",
from the search for purpose to the search for causes.

First was the heroic way of prophets and philosophers seeking answers -
salvation or truth - from the God above or the reason within each of us.
Then came an age of communal seeking, pursuing civilization in the liberal spirit.
And most recently there was the age of the social sciences, in which man was ruled
by the forces of history.
We can draw on all these ways of seeking in our personal search for purpose,
to find meaning in the seeking.

2,000,000 BC: Homo habilis (able man) appears and learns to use stones as tools
and weapons.

500,000 BC: Fire tamed by Homo erectus

3,000 BC: The Chinese or the Babylonians invent the abacus, the earliest
adding machine.

512 BC: The Chinese produce cast iron from blast furnaces.

430 BC: Greek philosopher Democritus of Abdera develops the idea that
everything made of atoms.

100 AD: Paper is first used for writing in China.

250 AD: The printing press is invented in China.

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NOW, What we should do. That is the question.
January 1, 1998
By Thackery

Thackery's message to Baoying.

Thackery at home