Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

December 7, 2004

Dear Colleague,

I listened to Beethoven's Fifth symphony, Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, conducted by Claudio Abbado, on DVD, and enjoyed it immensely. I should confess, however, that a great deal of the enjoyment--a great deal of the reason why I was so taken by the performance--was that it not only emitted glorious sound, but was also a ballet of the upper arms and body. The enthusiasm and earnestness of the young players helped, their presence itself a pleasant surprise, for I had assumed that the Berlin Philharmonic, a venerable institution, would be packed with oldsters exhausted by a work that they must have played a hundred times. When the young players sweated in ecstatic engagement at the climactic moments, their violin bows rising and falling in unison, I had the impression that they held nothing back and gave all they had in the way of skill, talent, and idealism. After the last chords came to a stop and the briefest silence--in itself very eloquent--the audience gave thunderous and sustained applause in sheer physical release and not only because they liked what they heard. I mentioned this DVD to my musically-sophisticated brother Tai-Fu and asked whether he would like to hear it. He said no. From the tone of the "no," I gathered that he either didn't like Abbado as a conductor, or didn't care for that particular rendition of the Fifth. I quickly dropped the subject because I wanted to protect my naivete--and a capacity for enjoyment based on it--against his critical knowledge and judgment.

This raises the general question, To what degree is our enjoyment of life and the world based on naivete (ignorance), and do we have a right to protect it? I no longer enjoy mountain scenery as I once did because of a rather sudden loss of innocence, one day, forty years ago, in New Mexico. I went to El Moro National Monument, west of Albuquerque, as I had done many times, to soak in its surreal atmosphere of mesas and buttes. On the flank of one of the buttes, one can see signatures inscribed by Spanish explorers passing through. Some were three hundred years old. I contemplated the signatures, now protected by a glass plate, and I was suddenly plunged into a vertigo of time, which yawned before me like the Grand Canyon. As a geomorphologist, I knew that that particular flank had retreated, through a combination of weathering, rain wash, and wind, about a half-mile and that the time it took to do so was a mere page from the hefty book of geology. Yet, in three hundred years--a long period by human standard--the retreat had not been sufficient to remove the signatures. The sudden realization of human insignificance in the enormity of geological time made me dizzy. I felt sick, and ever since I couldn't look at the contorted beds of a mountain flank without feeling slightly nauseous. Space still doesn't bother me, for I know that spatial distances--at least those to be found on earth--can always be spanned. But time? My sickness is not physiological, as a sense of vertigo before plunging space is, but intellectual. My intelligence, yoked to a lively imagination, has destroyed my naive vision and made me sick. Even as I retch, shouldn't I pat myself on the back for my achievement?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu