May 22, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    People know one another superficially, like billiard balls that touch and then bounce off in all directions. So says Goethe. A rosier view is to see human paths as parabolas that converge, touch at a point, and then diverge, never to meet again. I have got this image from B. F. Cummings, a zoologist who died young, but before he died he wrote a book called The Journal of a Disappointed Man, which became a bestseller and is considered a classic of its genre. In this book, Cummings mentioned a visit to his professor. He was admitted by the maid, who told him that his professor awaited him in the upstairs library. On the way there, he caught a glimpse of a boy sleeping on the carpeted floor of the living room, his blond hair a luminous halo under the afternoon sunlight. For no reason he could fathom, Cummings felt deeply moved. It was then that he thought of himself and the boy as parabolas, life courses that touch and swerve never to meet again.

    We all want to connect, but cannot, or can do so only superficially. Social functions help. We eagerly attend them so that we can reveal ourselves and be revealed to by others. How inconsequential these revelations are! I have a new barber to do my haircut, but before I can elaborate on this astonishing news, it is broken into by a detailed account of last weekend's Packers' game, and then by the relative merits of valium and vicodin as narcotic, and so on. Are we afraid of deeper revelations? Or are we afraid that there are no deeper revelations? For me, it is the latter. Let me explain how this is so. Seven years ago, I made friends with four or five undergraduates at UW. They graduated. Some moved on, some stayed. I kept in touch with all of them, until this year when I realized that all are about to move out of my orbit into Oregon, California, Washington DC, Kenya, and the farthest afield of all—marriage. Over dinner with one of them last night, I said to him, "Well, I am glad you are all going away. You know why? I have used up my stories with you folks. Indeed, I am well aware that I have recycled many of them and am in danger of becoming a bore. What I need now are new friends, on whom I can uninhibitedly tell my stories." And then came a thought out of the blue that I did not pass on to my young friend, which is that these stories are all there is to me, and that there is nothing deeper!

    Such a thought can be damning. It makes for a profound sense of inconsequentiality—and its strange coupling—loneliness. The answer to both is, as everyone knows, drugs, alcohol, sex, and violence. War is another answer. No wonder it is so popular. In war, soldiers bond with an intimacy and total commitment that are unmatched in civilian life. They don't bond by deep conversation. They do so by laying down their life for one another. That is the absolute credo of the American army. "No one is left behind." When Sergeant Ski and three of his men were killed in an ambush in Iraq, their comrades cried out for vengeance. But "I love you, man" was by far the more common response, as they bent over the wounded and the dying. They blurted out the words repeatedly, as though they wished they had used them on Ski and the other brothers-in-arms when they were still alive. "When one of the wounded soldiers insisted that the mushy stuff had gone too far, there was friendly resistance. 'What, I can't love someone now?' a soldier said. 'I love you,' he said. 'I can say I love you if I want to'" (New York Times, May 23, 2007). Are the words "I love you" profound? How do they weigh against my countless stories? And, by the way, do you—dear reader—say them to your girl friend or spouse with the passion that one soldier says to another?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu