Yi-Fu Tuan - Dear Colleague

May 31, 2005

Dear Colleague,

My Cincinnati brother is an admirer of Schopenhauer. So am I. Schopenhauer says a lot of wise things, but I don't think the following is true to my experience. "If two men who were friends in youth meet in old age after the lapse of an entire generation, the principal feeling the sight of one another will arouse in both will be one of total disappointment with the whole of life, which once lay so fair before them in the rosy dawn of youth, promised so much and performed so little" (Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, Penguin edition 1970).

I don't remember harboring great expectations in childhood that, in old age, seem outrageously romantic and that, in any case, are quite unfulfilled. Children--Schopenhauer seems to have forgotten--live in the present, not in the future. The child I was knew happinesses that have no close parallel later. The sheerest ecstasy over the possession of a football or bicycle is incomprehensible to me now. And it isn't just having things. It is also a state of being--waking up in Canberra, Australia, and smelling the delicious coolness of the air. I have smelt cool and fragrant air since, of course, but, even on the high dry plateaus of New Mexico, it never has quite the power to boost me to the blue yonder of inexplicable joy. The loss is the loss of innocence--of presentness--that many people notice when they reach adulthood.

So, what can Schopenhauer mean when he talks of disappointment with life in old age? Well, I think he is drawing on his own nature and experience. Schopenhauer, it turns out, was inordinately ambitious even as a teenager, but he never achieved anything remotely like fame until toward the end of life, and even then the fame didn't mount to "universal acclaim," which he considered his due. What I want to say, as against Schopenhauer, is this. If as a child you want to grow up to be president, well, you are almost certain to be disappointed, ending up as the mere CEO of a paper company. I can't remember even wanting to be president, or even a full professor. What I have always wanted, so far as I can remember, is to do well with whatever is at hand--a midterm test, a term paper, a thesis proposal, a thesis, a book proposal, a book; and I cunningly measure "doing well" by how far I have progressed from earlier efforts and by how fully I have used the talent nature has given me rather than by comparing myself with my peers and superiors. That way, I feel I am in control and I am less likely to be discouraged by failure. In old age, I look at what I have done and say, "poor things, but mine," as parents do when their offspring turn out to be less than brilliant.

Why did I never want to be fireman or president? How is it that I never looked forward at any stage in life to a future of towering happiness or achievement? The answer is that even at an early age and with the onset of puberty, I knew I wasn't going to have the one peak experience almost all humans want above all else, and that is to fall deeply in love with someone and to have that love reciprocated in kind. To know for certain that I can never have that, even briefly, meant that all other good things--wealth, fame, the sound of applause, the accolades of the great--lose their power to enthrall. The result is a certain unworldliness, a lack of competitiveness, in me that some friends (bless them!) find attractive. The dears don't know that what they see is not a virtue, but a deficiency--a sour indifference to the luxury of a Lexus automobile when I can't have the luxury of a human embrace.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu