April 24, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    Tolstoy has this to say in a diary entry of the year 1904. "People ask, 'Why do children die, young people who have not lived much?' How do you know they have not lived much? It is your crude measurement in terms of time, but life is not measured by time. It's like saying, 'Why is this aphorism, this poem, this picture, this work of music so short?... Just as the measurement of length is not applicable to the importance (greatness) of works of wisdom, neither is it applicable to life. How do you know what inner growth this soul has achieved in its short time span, and what influence it has had on others?"

    Tolstoy's obervation makes me conclude that I live to be 75 because God, in his magnanimity and patience, still hopes--by extending my life from one year to the next--that my soul will finally do the good deed, or realize the wisdom, for which I was born. Opportunities are thrown in my direction by the shovelful every year, but somehow my teflon-coated soul always manages to shrug them off.

    Consider, by contrast, 37-year old Helmuth Janus von Motke. He was one of the noblest figures in the German resistance to Nazism. On the day before his execution, he wrote to his wife: "My life is completed, and I can say to myself: he died old and satiated with life."

    Here are a few more observations on time. Jared and I talked about religion over salad (for him) and beef cabernet (for me) in the Admiralty Room of the Edgewater Hotel. Jared is an agnostic, perhaps even a true believer in the sense that he truly believes that God is a totally empty concept. I did not try to persuade him to my theistic point of view, saying to him that I am saving the topic for the after-life, when we shall have eternity to thresh it out, with God looking on as referee.

    One thing that constantly amazes me is the humility of most human beings. We torture ourselves with exercise, go easy on the bouillabaisse, just so that we can live a bit longer. We don't ask for enlightenment, revelation, the bolt out of the blue that shatters the frozen core of our being. No, just another round of golf, please! If only the humble go to heaven, then surely the octogenarian golfers of Sun City are well represented.

    Last March, at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Chicago, I was given an award for longevity—for my 50-year membership in the profession. I felt humiliated. Yet maybe deep down that was all I asked of life?

    Now, here is someone who was never humble—Saint Augustine. He asked himself the question: "When you have learned that you are immortal, will that be enough for you?" To which he himself gave the remarkable answer: "It will be something great; but it is too little for me."

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu