Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

January 18, 2005

Dear Colleague,

My brother Tai-Fu was at the home of S.S. Chern, a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago, some fifty years ago. While there he looked at the books on the shelves--a perfectly natural thing to do--and found there works that one would expect of a serious scholar, except one, a novel by Daphne du Maurier called Mary Anne. Tai-Fu expressed mild surprise. The next time he went to Chern's home, the novel was gone.

I have many books in my small condo. When visitors come, they too cast their eyes over them to pass the time while I make coffee. Again, this is a perfectly natural thing to do. But the impact on me is strangely embarrassing. I suddenly feel as though I am standing in my condo naked. The books in their shining covers look innocent enough, but they expose me totally. Of course I have plenty of respectable books on philosophy, history, and current affairs, but I also have books, including--yes--picture books that are X-rated. Even more revealing of the sort of person I am is the extensive collection of videos and DVDs. Many are respectable--classics such as Casablanca and Waterloo Bridge and PG-13 thrillers such as The Matrix and Lethal Weapon 1 and 2. But many cater to my special taste in the crooked ways of the heart that is not shared by ninety percent of the population, and a few have no redeeming artistic merit whatsoever.

In addition, I have a couple of hundred CDs, nearly all of them recordings of classical music--pure music in the sense that they are wordless. Included are Beethoven's Kreutzer sonata and Wagner's Liebestod. The one is condemned by Tolstoy as sexually arousing and the other, as everyone knows, is the musical rendering of copulation rising to orgasmic climax. Am I embarrassed by these CDs? Of course not. Music conveys the most intimate emotions, yet so abstractly that the pictures that may emerge in the listener's mind are quite arbitrary. In other words, Tolstoy's X-rating of the Kreutzer sonata is his problem and casts no blight on my propriety.

In 1967, I visited my cousin in Ithaca. In the course of small talk, he suddenly asked me, "What do you fear most in life?"--the sort of question that makes me feel truly valued and understood. I said, "What I fear most is to die in my apartment in the middle of summer. No one will know that I have died and so my corpse will rot until it sticks to the mattress." I explained to my cousin that it is intolerable to me that my last bequeathal to my fellow humans is an odor of the utmost repugnance. I am vain enough not to want people to remember me as corruption. Physical corruption. But what about spiritual corruption? That, curiously, I am more ready to accept. I will not remove Mary Anne from my bookshelf. I will not even remove (so to speak) the nude magazines under my bed. I will not censure my DVDs. In other words, I see them as my deathbed confession--the last opportunity to be totally honest before I confront Peter at the pearly gates.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu