Dear Colleague Letters Archive

August 23, 2004

Dear Colleague,

The French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, became rather depressed toward the end of his life. His intellectual partner, Simone de Beauvoir, tried to cheer him up. She reminded him of his life-long work and the wisdom that came to be his, which he could draw on. He dismissed all that as psychologically unsound. He said something like this: "I don't walk around carrying a library of knowledge in my head, from which I can pick a choice volume with its distillations of wisdom. That's not how the mind works. Most of the time, I don't feel I've anything in my head at all. Certainly I am not at liberty to generate sound maxims from an accessible store."

As you know, many societies respect their elders for their knowledge and wisdom. If by knowledge one has in mind practical knowledge, there is ground for such respect. The old know how to do certain things because they have done them before. They can tell the young and inexperienced, for example, how to outrun an antelope or build a dam to deflect the next flood. Such knowledge is not easily forgotten because it is encoded in the body and its movements. It is no longer something at the forefront of the mind, like a text to be read. And then there is wisdom. The elders of the tribe are also respected for wisdom. Now, that wisdom is-in my opinion-largely balderdash. It is just stories that the old have inherited and embroidered to make life tolerable. Are the stories true? That has never been the question until modern times. People are not interested in whether they are true or not. They are interested in one thing only, whether the stories make them feel better.

I am now an elder of the tribe. The young certainly do not respect me for knowledge. When it comes to practical skills, what do I know of the computer? As for empirical knowledge, or facts, why consult the eccentric and crumbling store of an old man when there is the constantly updated Internet? What about wisdom? Now, despite what the sour pundits of American society say, the young of this country do respect the old for wisdom. They sometimes question me as though I can dip into my wealth of experience and come up with a helpful insight or advice. Well, I feed greedily on this trust, for it is enormously flattering. But it also embarrasses me to no end. For, like Jean-Paul Satre, I don't feel I have anything in my head at all. Whatever I know is there in my published works, on the shelf, a part of the furniture of the world. They no more belong to me, or are more accessible to me, than they belong to and are accessible to the good student. So where does that leave me? Where does that leave us, the old? I have tried various consoling images. The best I can come up with is a coil of dry skin left behind as the caterpillar turns into a butterfly. Now, be careful not to tread on us, for in a frail, almost translucent way we too are beautiful.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu