IT WAS MY FAVORITE JOB. I only got work five or six times a year, but it paid well.

Having taken economics and finance in graduate school, I later taught both subjects as adjunct faculty for a couple small private universities. I had also spent 30 years in the financial services space holding several FINRA licenses.

A friend of mine was the office manager for Strategic Economic Decisions. The president was a top economist named Dr. Horace Brock. He went by “Woody.” He lives north of Boston and had attended Harvard and Princeton, receiving many degrees and studying under recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics. He was even invited to the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm in the 1990s as a guest of one of the winners of the prize.

I had read extensively, more fiction than not. I had done some writing as well, and certainly graded thousands of reports from college students, often recommending edits in the process. I didn’t have the background in English or communications, but my comprehension of the content in Dr. Brock’s reports was close to the level of his clients. He gave me a chance.

When I first began editing his “Profiles” as he called them, I became aware of a writing style that at the time seemed overly formal or pedagogical—scientific, perhaps. Wordy occasionally. He didn’t raise a fuss. But as time went on, I realized that he had been writing these reports for over 25 years already.

His clients often served prestigious insurance companies, pension funds, or investment houses. Others came from families with household names and lived in Europe.

There were hundreds of them and they paid a base amount to receive the reports, more for so many hours of consulting work. Ten years ago, he came to Wisconsin and I picked him up at the airport and drove him to consulting appointments, one a sprawling national corporate headquarters.

I soon decided my edits were close to heresy: he had developed a style, a voice of his own and an inimitable one. As a result, to the last day, yesterday, as I suggested the last edits to his Grand Finale Profile, I let him apply the passive voice, place his modifiers before or after the object, and I indulged the omission of hyphens because economics is fertile ground for double nouns that become adjectives (e.g. “rate hike”) and thus prompt readers to stop and clean their glasses.

But his voice, a unique blend of very formal education, tacit authority, and occasional rebuke, was only the packaging. Economics, as a science, is relatively young. Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, was written in 1776. The profound breakthroughs happened in the middle of the last century. He cited the giants of his day in those reports. He applied their theories to conditions in the present. The findings and recommendations were, as he explained, “the result of a process of deduction based on first principles.” A trend that began in the latter part of the 20th century used “big data” to sift through data banks for truth. He dismissed that as the inferior “induction” which relied on the continuation of historical relationships and correlations.

He noted, more than once, that the great achievements in science derived from logic and first principles. Einstein, he would declare, formed his theory of general relativity using nothing else.

“This is how I was trained,” he said in one of our recent phone conversations. It was a declaration and also a lament where the unspoken part was that people weren’t trained like that anymore.

He called to let me know he had sent me a Profile to edit and that it would be his last. When I found the email and the attachment, it occurred to me that eras end one characteristic at a time. Classical thinking, rigorous science, the search for answers and a devotion to the process— were only some of the characteristics of the Late Anthropocene, the Modern Human Era. Some say a new era is racing forward. It features a society increasingly integrating the functions of smart machines and humans.

At one point, I learned from Woody, from Dr. Brock, that beauty could be explained by science. The formula represented the variables of symmetry and transformation. Like the Apple logo. A perfectly symmetrical apple, but the leaf is exactly the shape of the transforming bite-like gap in the outer edge.

One of his longstanding hobbies is collecting antique European furniture.

WRH