A search for wisdom.

摘要

In my late 20s, during those years when I served as a US Public Health Service officer and National Institutes of Health Fellow stationed in Taiwan, I kept a journal that was filled with pithy quotations from the reading I was then doing of early 20th-century Continental philosophers. There were also in those pages the words of American pragmatists, especially John Dewey and William James. I reopened the scarred, yellowed pages of the journal and reread those short excerpts again in Spring, 2011, after the death of my wife and collaborator, the sinologist Joan Kleinman, with whom I had lived and loved for almost a half century.