Tough choices

Lately I've been reading at the engineering library on campus. Last week I arrived there just in time to see Carly Fiorina sitting at a table in the courtyard next to a stack of her new book, "Tough Choices." Apparently she had just given a talk in the auditorium and was now signing copies for a long, admiring queue of Stanford electrical engineering grad students. I found a friend standing off to the side and asked if she'd been acquitted for the accusations of surveilling her employees at Hewlett-Packard. He didn't know. He asked what I was doing here. This was a dig at my being a humanities, rather than hard science kind of guy. I said I was writing poetry up on the third floor. He ignored this and apologized for the remark. He added that, in fact, he would be studying literature and philosophy like me if only the world was such that he could live forever.

Carly, at the table, had sacrificed the individual freedoms of her employees for the good of her corporation. Likewise, my friend, in grad school, had sacrificed his own individual desires for the good of his own life.

And on and on.