Date of last letter: 1 Feb 2008

February 12, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    Putting on fat is not good for our health. It is not good at any age, but the harm increases with age. An old man with lots of fat on him invites stroke, thrombosis, and death. At least, this is the sort of medical wisdom we hear from the media. I respond by eating less, and checking the mirror from time to time to see whether my midriff load of blubber has increased. I owe it to myself to be physically healthy.

    Strange, isn't it? No one tells me that too much money in the bank is not good for my spiritual health. It isn't good at any age, but the harm increases with age. Money clogs the spiritual arteries just as cholesterol clogs the biological ones. The effect of both is death—spiritual death in the one, physical death in the other. But giving up one's redundant goods and thinning one's bank account are even more difficult than giving up chocolate donut and lowering one's calorie count, a reason being that no physician tells us to do so. We don't have experts of the spirits as we do experts of the body. Quite the contrary, the advice we get is that the more money we have in old age, the happier and more fulfilled we will be. Advertisement from Pacific Life is a case in point. It is on TV just before and after the Jim Lehrer Newshour. It shows the blue Pacific, with a man and a woman approaching on a private airplane. From the airplane, they see gamboling dolphins and whales. Another scene sees them on a yacht. They look as if they just had a gin in the captain's lounge and are now ready to sit on the deck chair reeling in their catch. A voice says, "Is this all there is to life? Is life just watching nature at play from a seaplane, catching fish from a private yacht, or is it even just having a leisurely dinner with friends in an excellent restaurant?" An artful pause is followed by the triumphant, "Maybe it is!" All the delights we see on the screen are ours if we are wise enough to build a giant nest egg, and insure with Pacific Life.

    Pundits tell me that Americans are religious. Religious? How can people with a grain of religion in them believe that what Pacific Life offers is all there is? Well, maybe there are better things, but remember (the Devil whispers in my ear), "You need plenty of money in the bank for expensive drugs, the nursing home, and first-class nursing care. You especially, since you don't have family to take care of you." I would be convinced if I had not read the autobiography of Bernard Berenson and the biography of Winston Churchill. Did Berenson live in a beautiful Italian vila? Everyone thought so. Not, however, the aged Berenson who claimed to live in a hovel with thinning thatch, clogged piping, and a sewage that was beginning to smell—in other words, in his own decaying body, and there was no way to avoid that. As for Churchill, Lord Moran's biography of him in his last years showed the Great Man as a drooling baby, barely able to swallow his food, and incontinent. Ok, he lived in Marlborough House, or some other palatial residence. But would he be that much worse off if, in great age, he lived in the poor house?

    As "mewling, puking" infants we are more or less equal. As ancients "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste" we are again more or less equal. So maybe there is some justice in the world after all.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu