The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

2008 Business Forecast - University of Chicago Graduate School of Business

After Slow First Half, U.S. Economy Will Grow in 2008

"A continued surge in exports and modest gains in business investment will support 2 percent real GDP growth for 2008, with about a one-third risk of recession that will be particularly acute during the first half of the year, said Michael Mussa, senior fellow of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. 'This risk reflects the danger that a number of things could go wrong and slow the economy below its stall speed.'"

"Marvin Zonis, professor emeritus of business administration, predicted that Democrat Barack Obama, senior lecturer at the Law School, will defeat Republican Rudy Giuliani for the U.S. presidency in November."

"'The next two quarters will be painfully slow, between 0 and 1 percent growth in GDP,' Raghuram Rajan, Eric Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance said, 'But barring a low probability default by a major financial institution, trend growth should resume by the second or third quarter of next year.'"

from Chicago GSB Magazine, December 2007