Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

January 1, 2005

Dear Colleague,

In old Hollywood movies, a gust of wind flips over the pages of a book, and that's supposed to indicate the rapid passage of time: in one scene, you see David Copperfield as a child and in the next you see him as a young man. Life itself is pretty much like that, isn't it? In art, whether it be a novel or a film, life is disjoint, never a smooth flow from one year to the next. Of course, art can't be otherwise. To try to be otherwise would be like coming up with a map on the same scale as the earth! What baffles me is that we don't live from year to year either. Our life as experienced and in recapitulation is much like the novel we read or the film we see--high points separated by sheer forgetfulness, corresponding to the pages that the wind turns. Does time pass faster as one gets older? Most people say "yes," and I would, too. It seems only yesterday that I learned to write 2004 on my correspondence or check. Now I have to teach my hand to do 2005. But though the years flow, the days hardly move at all. That's one of the subtle tortures inflicted on the old--the sluggishness of the hour-hand on the clock, especially in the afternoon or late at night. In the darkness of night, I would glance at the illuminated face of the clock and say to myself in despair, Is it only two? Then, is it only three? How am I to go through the next few hours before I can reasonably get up? The very old yearn for time to come to a stop. Every night, Jorge Luis Borges' 95 year-old mother prayed that she would die in her sleep, only to find that she still breathed the next morning. She wept for the mortality that the fates denied her.

Time imposes change, and this is certainly true of my body, now a dry shell of its former self. But what about the inner being? In essentials I don't feel I have changed at all since puberty. I can't prove that, but I can prove that I haven't changed in the last thirty-five years because the entries in my commonplace books, now thirty-nine in number, have remained remarkably unvarying: throughout this period, it would appear that I have raised the same sort of questions and have been struck by the same sort of oddities. Yet this belief in my stable self can't be entirely true, for one important aspect of life has altered for the worse, especially in the last decade or so. It is the untroubled assumption that the world is kindly disposed toward me--that the car, though spitting oil, is not going to break down, that the steps, though covered with ice, are not going to make me stumble, and--most important--that there is plenty of time, that time heals, that time is on my side. What favoritism time plays! To the young, it is a beckoning horizon; to the old, a cruel taunt, precious because so little of it is left, yet a burden as it drags from moment to moment.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu

P. S. My local newspaper tells me that countless people died by tsunami in the last days of December. And I can't find anything to say! What can I, or anyone, say?