Paul Pinet         As the years drop away, I'm astonished at how richer they seem to become the older I get. Learning by reading, teaching, and writing remains central to my life. Lately, I've immersed myself in Colgate's Core Program, specifically the "Challenge of Modernity," "Ecology, Ethics, and Wilderness" (a science core perspective), "Technology and the Human Prospect" (a Core Distinction course), and a First-Year Seminar course "Landscapes and Longing." Each time I teach them, I vary their focus, themes, readings, and pedagogy. Not surprisingly this mixture imparts forbearance and teaches me mostly about what I'm unable to comprehend, and that reality is what now informs much of my teaching and writing. Values, I keep learning, deserve as much attention as science. Two years ago, I started painting landscapes in watercolor, striving to express with color, form, and texture the essence of wildness infused deeply into me by my experiences as an educator, geologist, mountaineer, self-taught philosopher, and dreamer. The process of painting, I've discovered, helps me address an age-old concern, "What do landscapes have to say about me?" When and where appropriate, I use some of these painting in classes and public lectures to help reveal a deeper aspect of a landscape's meaning than can be expressed by language alone.       For the past five years I've been writing a bunch of essays dealing with the Earth and human presence. The current working title of the book is Living in Deep Time: Essays on Wildness. Paradoxically, this has turned out to be the most difficult and yet the most gratifying kind of scholarship that I have ever attempted. Each of the essays endeavors to examine human presence against an incomprehensibly deep past and deep future, an apt subject for a geologist. A few essay titles - "The philosophy of mountains," "the natural history of the soul," "The randomness of true harmony," "What am I?" - perhaps reveal the book's perspective. I've completed ten essays and am working on four more, and about to begin the onerous task of searching for a publisher.       During the past two years, a number of alumni have visited Hamilton, and I've enjoyed sharing their life stores. These visits remind me how rich life can be for people open to new experiences, which always revitalizes me. And for that gift I'm very grateful.