April 17, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    New experiences can occur at any age, including the very old. That's what I discovered last week. In Saturday's mail, for instance, there was a postcard from Cress Funeral Home, offering me a reduced rate for cremation if I take up the offer before 2007. Always on the lookout for a good buy, I was fleetingly tempted to accept.

    Two days later, I received a long letter from a former student. The student attended three of my classes at Minnesota between the years 1979-1982. He said that I won't remember him, for these were large undergraduate classes and he never raised his hand to ask a question or visited with me in my office. Except once. That was when he lost his copy of Topophilia. In the letter, he said that he walked into my office somehow expecting the lost book to find its way there. He now wonders at the naivete of his youth. The book, of course, wasn't there. But what I did when I heard of his loss--so he now tells me--was to pick a new, hard-bound copy off my shelf, sign it, and give it to him. That gesture he still remembers after a quarter of a century.

    Getting this kind of letter is only possible—and is indeed fairly common—in old age. Students who have dropped out of sight for decades appear out of the blue to tell you what they appreciated in their brief association with you. And this "what", in my experience, is almost never the knowledge they gained, which they have long since forgotten, but rather a courteous gesture or a small act of kindness on your part. In the humanities, what we professors pass on to students who do not themselves become academics is not likely to be a skill, or a body of facts and ideas, but rather a way of being human. From our example, the young learn to be a little more considerate, a little more generous, rather than how to interpret a landscape or parse a Shakespearean sonnet. That's not such a bad effect of education in the humanities, is it? I mean becoming a little more moral rather than a little more learned?

    My young roommate, Kevin, and I had dinner at the Firefly. In the car, on our way back home, I missed my cap. Had I left it at the restaurant? We were too far from the restaurant to turn back. So we continued. As soon as we reached home, Kevin, before he even took off his coat, picked up the phone to make enquiries about my cap. Yes, it was left there and we could retrieve it the next morning. I appreciated Kevin's take-charge attitude. I felt cared for, protected. I think to myself: I am enjoying, if only in passing, the joy of parenthood without its enormous expense, worries and responsibilites. I am getting an excellent arrrangement on the cheap. But, of course, Kevin won't be around—nor anyone else—to hold my hand on my deathbed. And what about decrepitude before death, the utter inability to take care of oneself? I am reminded of a Jewish doggerel, which goes like this:

    "Grow old along with me? The best is yet to be"?
    Well, maybe. But in what sense? Will you,
    Rabbi Ben Ezra, cut my toenails when I can no longer reach them?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu