How to Cite These Archived Letters
Dear Colleague Archive 1990
| Date of Letter | Topic Summary | ID |
|---|---|---|
| 1990-January-01 | "The acid test for whether one likes a culture or not is whether one approves of its funeral rites." | 79 |
| 1990-January-15 | "Structuralism teaches that there are certain fundamental operations of thought that all humans share. Bantu or Swede, people tend to organize reality in opposed pairs..." | 80 |
| 1990-February-01 | On Natalia Ginzburg: "...great virtues are like blasts of fresh air, or a sudden visitation by gods and goddeses from the past that temporarily eclipses the shabby moral facilitators of our time." | 81 |
| 1990-February-15 | Regarding ROTC on campus and reactions to homosexuality. | 81 |
| 1990-March-01 | Yi-Fu Tuan, in numbers. | 82 |
| 1990-March-15 | On the occasion of looking through his old personal files. | 83 |
| 1990-April-01 | "...I admire the old-fashioned, curmurdgeonly critics who, like children, seem utterly proof against the fickle winds of fashion." | 84 |
| 1990-April-15 | About value lessons in Chinese school and Tiananmen. | 85 |
| 1990-May-01 | "...although religion in the West may be in rapid decline and although reason cannot by itself be a source of passionate commitment to virtue, moral life may well endure a while." | 86 |
| 1990-May-15 | "Geography is an animal-and-human universal; history, by contrast, is only a human universal, for only humans tell each other stories..." | 87 |
| 1990-June-01 | On summer: "What should a civilization aim at?" | 88 |
| 1990-September-01 | About universalism, and "two passions are still powerful enough to triumph over the pettiness of nationalism and tribalism—science and love." | 89 |
| 1990-September-15 | Regarding "the transcendental importance of the human individual" in society, and what if this belief disappeared? | 90 |
| 1990-October-01 | On views of friendship by three authors: Henry David Thoreau, David Plante, and E.M. Forster. | 91 |
| 1990-October-15 | About multiculturalism: "Increasingly, we have come to see that New York is the real America; Iowa, by comparison, is a stray piece of Disney World." | 92 |
| 1990-November-01 | On college students and society: the gay fraternity Delta Lambda Phi and sperm banks at UC-Berkeley, and Iowa's Riverfest oatmeal diving. | 93 |
| 1990-November-15 | Regarding the author Cao Xueqin: "To the traditional Chinese, intellect is manifest most luminously in the deep understanding of people and society rather than in analytical prowess applied to the manipulaton of physical reality or to fun-and-games." | 94 |
| 1990-December-01 | "Jealousy and resentment are perhaps the most destructive of human emotions. Hatred seems more surgical--you destroy your enemy without also destroying yourself in the process. Jealousy and resentment, by contrast, bring down not only the other but also self..." | 95 |
| 1990-December-15 | "What is the perfect community?" and Alfred North Whitehead | 96 |
Terms of Use, How to Cite.