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April 17, 2009

Dear Colleague:  

   I admire people who can tell stories that they have made up themselves. I've a pretty good imagination, but in a long life I can come up with only two stories. One is a Christmas story. I am so proud of it that I got it published in that Tuan omnibus, called Dear Colleague (University of Minnesota Press, 2002). The other story is a ghost story. I've told it many times—maybe even in a "Dear Colleague" letter—but I can't remember. In any case, let me tell it again. It is, after all, the privilege of the old to repeat himself. Unfortunately, this ghost story doesn't work with the young. It can only be appreciated by people sixty-years of age and older. Why? Its effectiveness depends on familiarity with the use of the card catalog. Here it goes.

     I started to teach at the University of New Mexico in 1959. Every summer I drove back to UC-Berkeley, my alma mater, to make use of its library. In 1961, on my way there, I got into a traffic accident and nearly totaled my car. I survived unharmed. So the next year, in 1962, I was extra careful. Nothing untoward happened. I went into Berkeley's magnificent library building and stopped in the huge catalog room with its stack-after-stack of cards. The room was nearly empty, except for two or three librarians, sitting on their stools, opening drawer after drawer to update or otherwise make changes on the cards. Suddenly, I was bowled over by an unworthy thought. My PhD dissertation was published in 1959, which meant that there should be a card for me. To think that I would be rubbing shoulders with the immortals! I wanted to check, but didn't want to be caught. Should I resist? In the end, I couldn't. I moved quietly toward the stack that housed authors from R to Z. A librarian had just opened a drawer and was flipping through the cards. I stood close behind her, looked over her shoulder—practically breathed down her neck—and saw that she slowed down over the T cards and finally stopped at my name! My surge of pride was rudely checked when I saw the librarian add the date of my death on the card: 1930, date of my birth, was there in printed letters, but the librarian had just neatly penciled in—after the dash—the year 1961. So I was killed in that awful accident. And no wonder the librarian never took notice of me. I was a ghost.

   This is a neat ghost story, even if I say so. Moreover, it is also a moral tale that discourages vanity. Unfortunately, as a moral tale it is pretty impotent. It has not changed me in the least. Here is what I mean. I have just received a copy of The Book of Touch, edited by Constance Classen. I opened it and found a paper in the collection, titled "Landscapes of Touch." I browsed through it, liked it, though the material felt vaguely familiar. I turned to the references, ran my eyes down the row of authors and couldn't find my name. So I muttered under my breath and in righteous indignation, "Just look at the shoddy scholarship that gets into print nowadays!" And then I checked on the paper's author, ready to put him or her on my black list. The author? It was me—or rather, it was I!

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu