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July 20, 2009

Dear Colleague:  

   I've just completed two projects: one is to condense forty-five commonplace books into four, these containing the essence of what I consider worth keeping in my reading of the last forty-five years; the other is to condense my dozen or so books on humanist geography into one, containing the essence of what I think about life and world—the meaning of it all that I first began to ponder over when I was still a child. And now I retire. True, I've said that more than once before, but this time it is for real. George Thompson, director of the Center for American Places and publisher of books under the Center's imprint, has accepted "Humanist Geography: An Individual's Search for Meaning" for consideration. If all goes well—if the Center's reviewers are sympathetic—the book may appear in print as early as December, 2010. I hope so, for in that month and year I'll be eighty years old.

   Eighty years old! I was a sickly child. My parents used to pray that I would live to the ripe age of thirty. I heard them say that when I was in my seventh or eighth year and I thought they were far too optimistic, not because thirty years of age was overly ambitious for a sickly child to aim at, but because age thirty seemed impossibly old and remote to me then. Now that I have almost achieved four-score years, students in their twenties and early thirties look endearingly young, and I can't help feeling a fondness for them as I would my grandchildren if I had any.

   What have I learned? One big disappointment is that one doesn't necessarily grow wiser with age. Experience itself turns out to be not a very good teacher. Or rather, to be fair, I should say that experience's ability to teach—to impart wisdom—depends very much on the student's ability to learn. And I am enough of a biological determinist to believe that we are born with varying degrees of ability to learn—that is, to benefit from experience. Some are simply better endowed than others. My own endowment is limited, and so no amount of input from the outside world can make me wise beyond a certain threshold, one which I reached in my early middle age. How do I know? What is the evidence? Well, I can offer two lines of evidence. One lies in my commonplace books, which fill an entire book shelf. They contain what the world offers me. But what a chasm yawns between the wisdom they contain and the little I possess! The second line of evidence came to me unexpectedly. A few months ago, Australia National University sent me ten tapes of a seminar I gave there in 1975. One night, when I couldn't sleep and didn't want to put on Bach's cantatas one more time, I listened to one of the tapes, expecting to hear something immature and badly expressed. Instead, I heard a command of subject matter and a fluency of expression that I never thought I possessed, certainly not at that stage in my career. So, has it been pretty much downhill since 1975? If I died in that year, what would be the loss even to me? For that matter, what would be the loss to me as a human being if I died a child? Morally, I was as sound at eight as I am now at age seventy-eight—probably sounder! I know far more now, of course, than I did then. But so what? For all that I now know about the state capitals and critical theory, I am still no match for Wikipedia.

   The silver lining, if there is one, in such dark thoughts is that dying young is not quite the tragedy I thought. Its corollary is that a long life like mine is mostly spent just marking time and a drain on the earth's limited resources.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu