Felix Candela's El Altillo church in Mexico City

The writer here failed his starting career as an engineer in 1962 because he could not understand what capacitance was so he failed electricity.

Fortunately for me I continued studying philosophy with the eminent Ramón Xirau. I was not keen on Plato but since then I can happily state that I am Platonist. When I take portraits (people do not smile and my subjects stare into my lens), I feel the retracting (from the Latin to remove) of something of their essence. We cannot be exposed to perfection, so Plato stated, but we do get a glimpse of it. A good portrait does just that.

Fortunately, too, a professor called Chicurel gave me a good basis into understanding the calculus and its quirky infinitesimals.

When Leibniz and Newton independently discovered the calculus in the 17th century the first practical use of it involved killing more people.Calculus could predict where a cannon ball would fall with good accuracy.

Calculus, in showing us what the varying slope of a straight line looks like on a graph, brought us the now famous hyperbolic paraboloids sometimes called hypars.

A few months before Arthur Erickson died he was alone at a table in a function presided by Diane Farris. Nobody wanted to sit with him as he had Alzeimer’s. I went to his table and sat down. I told him, “Arthur, our mutual friend Sean Rossiter told me that you were influenced by Mexican/ Spanish arquitect Felix Candela.” Arthur smiled and for the next hour we talked about hypars and calculus. These usually roofs that show that when a straight line has a varying slope,the result is curved roof.

While I was sniffing in my bathroom yesterday I could smell the fact that I had to change the kitty litter. My Rosemary would have told quite before and I would have followed her instructions. I suddenly stopped and noticed her presence.

I don’t believe in spirits or ghosts. How can I explain this presence? Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 and minutes before she died she asked, “Am I dying?” I now believe, using a combination of Plato, Leibniz and Newton, that whiff of essence that I can see when I look into people’s eyes and which can be retracted by my camera does happen. But most of that essence remains in the person. When Rosemary died, her spirit did not completely go away. Some of it, infinitesimally small, has remained.

I felt it.