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Like Julia  and Laura, I'm having trouble selecting from a rich trove of stories about Paul. He taught me so much, from really helpful practical things (like how to write html code), to really large life-changing things (like the neat trick of telling stories, not in order to preserve what has been, but rather to lay the ground for revising what is and might be: he insisted that there are always alternative ways to tell any story). Two months after our last class ended, I found myself continuing such revisionary conversations in the course forum, talking w/ Paul about "the last chance to see," about science (failing to!) correct its own mistakes, and about mental health and diversity.

My best stories of Paul are all about just such ongoing, ever-revised conversations--many in front of our classes, or with other teachers in the summer institutes; many more in faculty working groups, but mostly one-on-one, sitting on the friendship bench in Morris Woods, leaning against a tree in Ashbridge Park, walking around Appleford, or (in colder weather) just sitting in his car w/ the windows cracked open, to let out the pipe smoke. We argued about fidelity vs. freedom, stability vs. newness, "sticky" brains vs. "slippery" ones, communal company-keeping vs. individual idiosyncrasy; and always, always about the usefulness of constructing binaries like those in this sentence (in which, as you might imagine, I was always the one clinging to the first term, he the one urging consideration of the new possibilities opened up by the second).

Together and with others we published essays about storytelling and emergence and interdisciplinarity.  I tried unsuccessfully to engage him in the interpretation of complex poems; he tried unsuccessfully to teach me some complex mathematics. He got me to read some science fiction, and enticed me from Henry James into a shared love of his brother William  (though I wasn't able to lead him back along the return path). We shared a deep pleasure in big rich contemporary (revisionary!) novels like Ahab's Wife and Middlesex (which we taught together); we brought George Lakoff to campus, and Anne Fausto-Sterling, and Wai Chee Dimock, and--most astonishingly of all--Octavia Butler (now THAT was a night! She wouldn't eat during the dinner we'd planned @ Yangming before her talk, and afterwards we could NOT find a place open in Bryn Mawr that served vegetarian food. We actually drove her back to Swarthmore, where she was staying, w/out ever feeding her, and thereby acquired a VERY BAD reputation among Octavia Butler lovers….)

It also occurs to me that among the stories gathered here should be included some of the best ones Paul told himself--especially, of course, his so-relevant Learning from Extinctions ("maybe we could come to see disappearance not as loss but rather as transformation, an untragic, perhaps even joyful acknowledgement that what has lived beside us now lives inside us?") My personal favorites also include a couple of old chestnuts: his '89 Alumnae Bulletin essay, Diversity and Deviance ("the objective, as seen from the biological standpoint, is clear: a social and political system which respects and nurtures differences instead of attempting to eliminate them") and his '01 thoughts about science education: This Isn't Just My problem, Friend  ("Thinking IS dangerous, and risky…but being able to think, is the only way to make anything BETTER than it is, and … its a hell of a lot better then sitting in one place and trying to hold everything together").

I also really like two essays from '03: War Is a Bad Metaphor  ("there is in the case of terrorism, as in the case of cancer, no well-defined or single invader or enemy the destruction of whom will 'fix the problem'. There is instead a disturbance in the patterns of communication and understandings among human beings") and Some Thoughts on Academic Structure:
" 1) stop trying to find fault with one another
2) proceed on the assumption that we all have relevant and valuable local expertise
3) recognize that what problems we have are problems of coordination/communication to which we all contribute in one way or another
4) get on with the necessary (and endless) task of evolving our forms of information sharing to enhance the intellectual/educational enterprise in which we are all engaged and to which we are all committed."

 And I'm especially fond, too, of a short piece on Cultures of Ability which Paul just wrote last year ("by learning to be less critical and more generous with ourselves we could as well contribute to bringing into being a more humane culture, a culture of ability rather than disability?").

Finally, any list of "the best of Paul" would have to include the amazingly wide-ranging web conversations he generated by Writing Descartes ("I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am"), and by reflecting publicly, and repeatedly, on The Place of the US in the World Commmunity  ("It is … time to … to commit ourselves anew to finding ways to tell our collective human story in a way from which no one feels estranged"). Much more along these lines can be found on his homepage @ /local/grobstein.html