Are scientists to be imprisoned for not predicting the imponderable with precision?
One framed painting, "The Rape of Europa," adds complexities and the overtones of a familiar myth, with its dark eroticism, but it is imponderable, with its imagery of bulls and models.
Of course not: the independence decision is freighted with imponderables, starting assumptions and blind faith.
It demands the acknowledgment that we are all fragile beings, nexuses of hope and fear, children of some mother and perhaps parents to others: that is, no more and no less than fellow human beings in a world fraught with imponderables.
One of the reasons the art market is so hard to analyze is that it is filled with imponderables; Deitch told me, for example, that the owner of a chain of Tokyo clothing stores named Masao Wanibuchi took out a mortgage on his two-floor shop in the Ginza and used the proceeds to buy some of the top lots at Christie's and Sotheby's.
Children need not bother with such imponderables.
Finally there were the imponderables, things we do with our hearing simply because we can.
It is certainly hard to spot bubbles; but central banks already grapple with other imponderables, such as the size of the output gap or the level of structural unemployment.
The Secret Service declined to disclose its part of the $50 million allocated by Congress for the Republican convention, but it is poised to cope with the imponderables of terrorist threats and the concentrated displeasure of hundreds of thousands of protesters.
It has to do with the imponderables of life: meaning, purpose, and the things of the spirit; the sacredness of the human person as an end in itself, not as a beast of burden to be used, exploited, and then cast aside; human rights, care for the poor; ideals and values that make life worth living - for everyone.
