Not indifferent to the critical judgment of others, I should say. More helpless in the face of it. My life would have been a lot easier if I really didn’t care about the judgment of others. But unfortunately, I feel it keenly; keener, perhaps, even than it is meant. But at the same time, I’m practically helpless in having to do things my own way. Certainly it’s been like that in my professional and academic life as a philosopher and teacher of philosophy. I was groomed by graduate school for the elite of contemporary academic philosophy, and threw the opportunity away to follow what seemed to me the intellectually most compelling path—one that what deeply unaccept—able to the professors of my graduate school (except my supervisor, who subsequently left for another university). I was made to pay for this misbehaviour by being cut out of all grace and favor and left to fend for myself. It was only by the good () of my supervisor that I was able to get a teaching position. After that, publication was a constant struggle with disappointment and rejection. But I persevered, eventually won tenure and promotion from my university, and gradually came to accept what seemed to be my () to be on the marging of what is intellectually and academically acceptable in the small, silly world of academic philosophy in the English-speaking world at the end of the twentieth century.

At this moment, as I write those these words, I am in the ancient town of Lijiang, in China’s Yunnan province, in the foothills of the Himaliya Mountains. I sit at a table in my hotel, with a view over the rooftops to the mountains. I am alone. Jane is in our room. She my be reading David Copperfield, as reading about excursions we can make from Lijiang, or sleeping. Probably sleeping, despite the nap she took, with her head on my lap, on a bench in a square in the old city earlier this afternoon. In this ancient town, in the shadow of the great Himalayas, it is probably as far away from everything that I’ve ever been.

I’ve traveled a long way in my life—my life so far, as I shall insist on () it, as I feel there is still a great deal more living to do. Travel not just physically, geographically, but also spiritually, mentally intellectually. Jane criticizes me for not being humble, but I feel misunderstood. I think I am self-effacing, and refrain from putting myself forward, often to my disadvantage. Further, I think that what Chinese regard as humility is hypocritical, a form of humility without the content, a form fully consistent with extraordinary egocentricity, or so it seems to me in the Chinese men I have observed. And, anyway, if I refuse, whether from humility or some other motive, to speak of myself, this story will be very incomplete. So I have to say that I am conscious of being rather ahead of many of my contemporian in the academic, intellectual, and especially philosophical world. I feel like I have traveled through lands they are still desperately trying to find a settle in –that I have gone through them, taken in what they offer, and moved on, which often still struggle to figure out where they are.

That’s been to pattern of my intellectual life ever since I started having an intellectual life, as a university student in the late 1970s. over and over again, I have found some big topic or field of investigation and research, worked at it very diligently for some gears, till I felt I had taken all it had to offer—certainly all it had to offer me. Then moved on to some other. Thus did I travel from ‘analytic’ philosophy to ‘continental’ philosophy, from academic philosophy in all contemporary form to the new possibilities I learned from my () friend Grand, an () with little patience for academic philosophy, with whom I enjoying () conversations in the last five years of his life, and which inspired the highly unacceptable ideas of my second book, KNOWLEDGE AND CIVILIZATION。They intellectual journeys include the excursion into Chinese philosophy, as well as the exciting experience of linking philosophy, with hard physical discipline in the practice of martial arts.

Besides thse intellectual journies, which (apart from martial arts) might as well have been taken while at my writing table, I have been taken every opportunity to travel the world. There’s no need to go into these destinations now. but this is not the first time I’ve taken leave of my teaching responsibilities, parceled up a backpack, and transported myself very far from my accustomed surroundings, to deliver myself to whatever can be learned from places far from home. Get China remains my most exotic destination, and it () for which my hopes were highest.

Hopes for what? To forget. To learn the not-learning way of learning. To wander like a cloud. My mind was full of such daoist thoughts as I left Canada. I have been studying Chinese philosophy quite avidly for a couple of years, being especially impressed with Daoism above all the writings of Zhuangzi. I thought I understood both why it would be a great accomplishment to really wander like a cloud—shut off the rationalizing intellect—and why it would be difficult for an inveterately rational mind like mind. Could I? I want to try I made plans, but constantly told myself that I’d drop any or all of these plans. The moment anything better presented itself in the course of my travels. Past travel had encouraged me. I’ve been pretty good at seeing and seizing opportunities to experience something unique and unpredictable in the course of travel. That was especially true of y last major excursion, during a year spent in the Middle East. So I set my imaginative hopes on learning, at what cost, what pains, I knew not, to wonder, like a cloud.

Did I succed? Not as yet! But, as I said, I consider my life still very much in program. Perhaps that is the other side of my struggles with disappointment. Every accomplishment in my life so far has always had a sting, a dark side, a gratification, a ‘but’. My () work is at best () as ‘interesting, but……’or ‘how, but……’ instead of being disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm by my contemporaries, I can see this spector of qualification as proof that I have not reached my summit, that there are still many more changes ahead, that I am still, as it were, a child. In the good sense Daoism attaches to that imag—the child as unfinished, still full of potential, unrigid, capable of be coming, anything for want of being definitively this or that. I am definitely not definitively this or that. That much is definite.

And now, whatever it is I am, or am not, is linked to Jane. Whoever she is, what ever she is, or is not.