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October 1, 2009

Dear Colleague:  

     Wallace Shawn is a playwright and the son of a famous father who was a long-time editor of The New Yorker. The son wrote an essay on "privacy" in which he claimed:

Everything you are affects me, and everything I am, all my thoughts...affect the course of history whether I like it or not, whether I know about it or not, whether I care or not. My power over history is inescapable except through death. Privacy is an illusion. What I do is public, and what I think is public. The fragility of my own thoughts becomes the fragility of the world. The ease with which I could become a swine is the ease with which the world could fall apart like something rotten (Essays, p. 45).

     Wow! Talk about megalomania! Does Wallace Shawn really think that we have such power, that everything we do affects the world? Sure, Barack Obama has the power–and so, alas, does Rush Limbaugh. But Wallace Shawn, you and I? Sometimes a student comes into my office feeling dejected, not because he has failed to achieve the perfect score in his courses but because of his conviction that nothing he does matters, that his existence–even if it be long and prosperous–makes any difference to the world. I say to him, "Yes, I see your point. On the other hand, isn't another possible?" I then present the other point, which–now that I think of it–is rather like Shawn’s, though less forcefully put. "Think of the world as a lake," I say. "Throw a pebble into it and waves will propagate outward such that, in time, they reach the farthest shore. A big pebble makes big waves. A tiny pebble makes waves so small that they can hardly be seen. None the less, they are there and they too propagate until they reach the farthest shore. So, my boy, never underestimate your influence."

     The student remains skeptical. He sees the waves he makes as growing so faint so quickly that they surely can make no difference to the lake and its denizens. But that's where the propagating waves–a purely physical phenomenon–fail as metaphor. In real life, I say to the student, the waves you send out do not just grow weaker and weaker, for at some point in their outward paths they are almost certain to be intercepted. So intercepted, they are likely to be recharged. The smile or frown, the comforting word or slander, the hand raised in solicitude or in anger, reaches first one person, then another, and so on, growing fainter in impact all the while until it inexplicably pauses at one person, stirring him or her to the quick, making him or her beam with happiness or droop in sadness, smile in gratitude or frown in anger. Whatever the case may be, the gesture or emotion becomes a new force–a rejuvenated wave–that initiates another cycle of propagation, and who knows where it will finally come to a stop?

     So we have power. We are all public figures as Shawn understands these words. So we can all affect not only our neighbor but the most distant strangers in the world. Shouldn't such awareness make us feel important and proud? How come so few of us do? Can it be that we deny this power in us because we dread the responsibility it carries, not just now and then when we blow our top, but with the smallest gesture in every waking hour?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu