Shadow boxing

Among of the lesser known features of academic life are the weird overlappings generated by its endemic time lags. We tend to plan things much in advance, and the whole process of research and publishing can take aeons, even when you find what you're looking for and someone likes it. The authors we read in books and journal articles only seem close; in fact they're like stars whose light has taken years to reach us. If they're not already dead, they have almost certainly moved on to new research.

A very wise scholar from Trieste named Nadia once told me that the key virtue of academic life was the ability to revive or at least to feign interest in things you cared about years and years ago; she reckoned it usually took about ten years from the time you finished working on something for someone to invite you to speak on it! It's certainly true that things keep coming back to nag you long after you've moved on to greener pastures - as drafts requiring revision, as proofs requiring checking, and then, if you're lucky, as citations in other works, invites to conferences, or even interested prospective graduate students. That's if your lucky. In my experience, sending things out is more commonly like dropping them down a well - no point waiting to hear the splash from the bottom. And if you are lucky enough to hear a splash, it will be from some other well down which you dropped some other thing you can barely remember, years ago!

I mention all this because I've just sent off the revision of the talk I gave at Academia Sinica. (The photos are of art from their campus.) Remember? I went to Taiwan in November for what turned out to be a surreal experience of non-inclusion, every other paper delivered in Mandarin and my various attempts to secure summaries or translations even of the titles falling on deaf sinocentric ears. This essay of mine (whose English title is "Theodicy, disenchantment, and Confucianism's place in the theory of religion," for what it's worth) may see print relatively quickly, but it will do me no good. Translated into Chinese it will join the others in perpetual inaccessibility!

I feel a bit strange about the whole thing, like I'm just going through the motions. I don't think it's a bad essay, but I confess I didn't work as hard on it as I might have. If they showed so little interest in engaging me while I was in Taipei, what reason is there to think anyone will actually read the darn thing?! On the other hand, thanks to it I might get invited to some conference in China in 2017 and finally find out what that symposium in 2006 was about!

I need hardly mention the near-miss overlap of my putting the finishing touches on an essay about Chinese religion with an arm aching from last-minute vaccinations for India!