In trying to gauge the breadth of Fred’s perspective, knowledge, and accomplishment, the word that comes to mind is consilience, whether defined as “the linking together of principles from different disciplines especially when forming a comprehensive theory,” or in the words of biologist E.O. Wilson in his 1998 book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation.”

Like many (but still too few), Fred knew that the book of nature (as revealed in both the quantitative measurements of scientific instruments, and the theories devised by scientists to interpret them) and the book of myth (the treasury of human imagination recorded in poetry and the other arts, as passed down through countless generations of civilization) both grasped the same cosmos, and shed light on the same basic reality.

But like few others, Fred had the depth of knowledge, and the intelligence, to weave both books together in ever-new, delightful and surprising ways. Another one of Fred’s projects, with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, was The Golden Goblet, a translation of poems by the German Enlightenment polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 2019 (and reviewed by Mark Olival-Bartley in Issue 5 of Athenaeum Review). Goethe would have been one of the very few minds who could have kept abreast of Fred’s thinking, and been able to knowledgeably question him about his more baroque speculations.

Although amounting to only a small fraction of his overall output, Fred’s contributions to Athenaeum Review were substantial, provocative, wide-ranging, and much-anticipated. He first sat down for a podcast interview in 2019 when The Golden Goblet was published, and talked at length about his thinking and work as a poet. Then in 2023, he returned to the podcast studio for another conversation about his latest poetry collection, Latter Days (of which a few poems had appeared in Issue 6 of Athenaeum Review, subtitled “Poems from a plague season”). Although having grown out of the “plague season” of 2020, the sober and serious thinking about mortality and human finitude in Latter Days spoke well to readers and listeners at all stages of life. Although he had already retired from his chair at the university, Fred’s lively and sensitive reading and conversation in 2023 left one with the hope of many more productive years to come.

Fred’s first essay for Athenaeum Review, “The Ancient and Future Art of Terraforming” (Issue 5), held out both the possibility and necessity of harmony between human-made technology and the natural world, with the gardener as one exemplary figure. He took readers on a brisk tour from the Great Oxidation Event of 2.5 billion years ago through the present, with a survey of several epic poems and a study of the dialogue between Perdita and Polixenes about floral arrangements in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale.

With “Damn Lies and Statistics: A Critique of Probability” in the following issue (first presented as a lecture for the International Society for the Study of Time), he took aim at deterministic theories that could not account for freedom and decision-making. He focused on the idea of the threshold as the place where freedom meets determination and the quantitative meets the qualitative.

Co-authored with his UT Dallas colleagues Robert J. Stern and Roger Malina, Fred’s last two essays for Athenaeum Review were the fruits of their collaboration in an ongoing research project on the subject of emergence. “A Brief History of Emergence” (from Issue 9) points to the continuity of human and natural processes of creation. They wrote:

Molecular clouds formed, coalesced, collapsed into stars and planets; star bellies created heavier atoms and large stars exploded, repeating the cycle again and again. [….]

The inspiration that built and is restoring Notre Dame de Paris, the fertile divine stories that generated the Taj Mahal and Mozart’s Requiem, and the Balinese temple culture that points the way to a sustainable ecological future, are examples of the “shining,” “breathing” forces that we recognize in our experience of the world’s continuing evolution.

“Understanding The Senex: The Figure of the Older Human Being” (Issue 11), also coauthored with Tina Qin Chen, addressed a subject of great journalistic interest—the widespread aging of human populations—at a much more profound and interesting level than the mere recitation of actuarial tables with which most journalistic accounts begin and end. Incorporating new translations of several Chinese poems from the 3rd through the 9th centuries, and commenting on aged figures in Shakespeare’s King Lear and poems by Donne, Arnold, and Tennyson, the authors gently but firmly argued against simply abandoning older people to idle retirement, and reminded their younger colleagues of what is to be gained from the wisdom and experience of their elders. They wrote:

We are less interested in fixing what goes wrong with young people when they age, than in what grows and deepens in people more than 65 years old. […] In the Hindu tradition, for instance, an appropriate acceptance of the roles of the life cycle, the Ashrama, is the path to happiness and fulfillment in life. […] The old have nothing to gain—this is the contentment celebrated in so many of those poems from ancient China—and thus their motivations can be purified of bias and ambition.

Needless to say, in his inspiringly active and productive later years, Fred exemplified the ideal senex. Every page of Athenaeum Review has benefited from his example and his encouragement. We are forever in his debt, and mourn his passing.