In his poem, "To a Mouse," the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) wrote these immortal lines: "The

best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft a-gley." To paraphrase Burns's archaic dialect in modern English: No matter how carefully we plan our projects, something can still go wrong with them. Assignment: Are even our best plans always at the mercy of unexpected, chance events? If you want to make the gods laugh, goes the ancient adage, tell them your plans. Though lacking in either the omniscience or wisdom that planning in an uncertain universe would seem to require, human beings persist in drawing up the most detailed goals. No matter how well we plan, however, as the great poet Robert Burns wrote, we often discover that our hopes have been dashed along with our schemes. This universal notion is exemplified throughout literature as well as history. One amusing illustration of the futility of human planning occurs early in Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's witty and ironic novel about how our pride and our prejudices can get in the way of true love. We are introduced to the imperious aristocrat Darcy, who is scheming with the sisters of his good friend Charles Bingley to scuttle the budding romance between Charles and the sweet and lovely - yet middle class - Jane Bennet. Not only does Darcy's plan fail to deter his understandably love-struck friend, but in the process of carrying out his plan, Darcy himself falls under the spell of Jane's equally lovely sister, Elizabeth. The theme that our plans frequently go awry is also illustrated throughout Shakespeare's signature play, Hamlet. Indeed, there are so many instances of shattered schemes that it is hard to single out just one. Claudius's belief that he can get away with murder goes sour when Hamlet encounters the ghost of his - Hamlet's - murdered father. Claudius's subsequent scheme to have Hamlet executed when the young Prince arrives in England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is upended when Hamlet discovers the plot and substitutes the names of his friends for his own - resulting in their demise, not his. And then there's poor Polonius who hatched a plan to discover whether Hamlet was truly mad or merely feigning madness - only to be on the receiving end of Hamlet's sword. (Hamlet, in turn, though he was skewering Claudius behind the tapestry, not Polonius, so Hamlet's plan failed, too.) Finally, the evil King's plan to poison his nephew backfires when Gertrude, not Hamlet, drinks from the tainted goblet. Of course, the theme of the frequent (if not virtually inevitable failure) of our best-prepared plans is not limited to literary examples; we see this immutable principle illustrated throughout history, too. Consider the Second World War. The outcome of this conflict was still largely undetermined when Hitler inexplicably decided to attack Russia in violation of the nonaggression pact he had made with the Russians in 1939. This mistake marked one of the decisive turning points in the war. As we have seen with these literary and historical examples, human beings are apparently doomed to a fate of forever planning and forever having those plans dashed. Indeed, I think ruefully of countless plans of my own in the past, and of the reception they met when I tried to carry out these plans in the real world. Of course, this is not to say that planning is foolish. My father once quoted something General Eisenhower said during World War II: "I have found that plans are generally useless, but the act of planning is indispensable."