Gregory Gleason

Gregory Gleason was born close to Detroit Michigan at the mid-point of the past century. He was still quite young when his parents took him off to other places. So far he has not yet succeeded in returning to Detroit. But in the meantime, he lived for periods of time in other places, in other climes, in other contexts. He worked in factories and fields. Whatever the circumstances and whatever the conditions, he was for some reason inexorably drawn to libraries. That was in a day when libraries were mainly stuffy, poorly lit buildings that housed books crowded on dust-gathering shelves rather than the brilliantly lit, modernistic digital information thoroughfares that most libraries are today.

Along the entire journey he visited different places for lots of different reasons, sometimes moving towards something but often just as much moving away from something. He lived in Atlanta, Tampa, Los Angeles, Sacramento, Juneau, Seattle, Washington DC, New York, Miami, Albuquerque, Almaty, Tashkent, Yekaterinburg, and Munich among other places. He did not live in those places in that sequence or in that order of importance.

He for some reason spent a lot of time considering the Soviet Union. Witnessing the gradual decline of the USSR in the 1980s and then the abrupt fall of the Soviet Union at the end of that period was a major part of his professional life. During those days he spent a lot of time in college classrooms explaining to students how he interpreted that remarkable and widely unexpected sequence of events. He took a lot of time explaining what he expected it to mean for the future. Some of those things proved fairly accurate, some not. For some of them, it is still far too early to tell. That whole experience led him to spend a lot of time thinking of ways to anticipate the unexpected.

Looking back on his experience in farm and factory, library and classroom, he has reached some conclusions. He thinks there might be natural law. He knows for certain there are laws of nature. He understands that some things in nature are given as constants. They are given to us in the sense that they do not depend on what we think or feel. If we are smart, we accept them, adjust to them and either drift gracefully along with them or we find ways agilely to work around them. That is the way it is. That being said, for all the things that matter the most for us, in the end our enterprise is essentially a very human undertaking.

Along the way he spent a lot of time writing articles and books. All of his writings were at least purported to be based on "true facts." But he was often troubled by things that could be represented as fact but were in reality only fiction, products of invention. The works of writers such as Ren Foster illustrated accounts where the facts are invented. As Mark Twain used to put it, all of his stories are absolutely true.