February 23, 2009
Dear Colleague:
"At our very first meeting, we talked with continually increasing intimacy. We seemed to sink through layer after layer of what was superficial, till gradually both reached the central fire. It was an experience unlike any other that I have known. We looked into each other's eyes half appalled and half intoxicated to find ourselves together in such a region. The emotion was as intense as passionate love, and at the same time all-embracing. I came away bewildered, and hardly able to find my way among ordinary affairs."
Thus Bertrand Russell recorded his encounter with Joseph Conrad.
Nothing is more often engaged in than talking with a friend, yet in all my reading (and I am pretty well read), I have never met an example of conversational depth that is at all comparable to the one between Russell and Conrad. I can also draw on my own experience in a long life. Again, willing as I am both to listen and to speak, I and my conversational partner have seldom managed to dive beyond the superficial layers. So I have come to think that intimacy of the kind that Russell spoke of is only possible at the physical level for ordinary mortals. Lovers have known such intimacy, and the procedure that leads to it is surprisingly similar to the one Russell mentioned: "sink layer after layer" until the "central fire" is reached.
Why the Russell-Conrad achievement is so rare is that complete mutual understanding and appreciation rest, not on fundamental similarity, but on fundamental and irreconcilable difference. Man and woman can love each other because they are different, not because they are alike. A woman looks in aching fondness at her husband's devotion to baseball game because baseball is not something she can truly lose herself in. A man, for his part, is lost in adoration of his wife in summery dress, cutting flowers and humming a tune. It is easy to come up with more examples. What, after all, is there in common between a man and his dog? How is it that when one sits in an armchair reading the newspaper and the other lies on the carpet, thumping its tail, the two look in perfect sync—an ideal couple? If they just think a moment, they will see the total incompatibility of their respective worlds and so feel alienation rather than warm union. Paradoxically, then, yawning gap makes for closeness. The problem with two adults talking is that, in the absence of an obvious yawning gap, they presume similarities that do not in fact exist. If bodies differ, and they do, minds differ more. It is wisdom and not superficiality that when we talk we confine ourselves to weather, sports, and children. It is wisdom and not lack of learning that we use a limited vocabulary so as to minimize occasions for incomprehension and misunderstanding. And, lastly, it is wisdom and not a lack of forthrightness or courage that we avoid certain emotionally charged topics. Positions not reasoned into cannot be reasoned out of, so why waste time and good will?
Best wishes,
Yi-Fu
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