Farewell/See You Soon

Long—at least 15 years—before he launched me in the University of Hawai'i Department of Philosophy, I happened to meet Eliot Deutsch very briefly when I was a doctoral student at Oxford. With his deceptive nonchalance, he abruptly wanted to look at a paper of mine. I sent him a hand-written paper which, with unconcealed irritation, he got typed with some suggested edits, and surprised me within a year by my first refereed publication in PEW!

Like my Indian and British professors, he never praised my work in front of me, but for the 15 years we were colleagues, knocked at my door regularly and demanded to read my current research. And of course, dinner at his place was the most congenial cultural high point, gawk as I would at an original Picasso "Minotaur" drawing hanging on his bedroom wall, on my way to the restroom, as Indian classical music and Johann Sebastian Bach would be playing in a low volume, while drinks were served outside! Even when he walked with a walker and came only once a week to the department, and was writing those beautiful Zen Koan style poems, he afforded me the honor of sharing my philosophically unkempt overenthusiasm with the living legend of a world-philosopher that he was. Not just his incomparably canonical monograph called Advaita Vedanta, which generations of teachers have taught and will keep teaching, but his early work on Truth, and late work on Aesthetics, Creativity, and Friendship will keep him alive in what I learned from him to call comparative philosophy without borders.

Like the other Eliot (T.S.), our Eliot kept returning to the Bhagavadgita. In his Four Quartets, the other Eliot "wondered if this is what Krishna meant" when he talked about time past, time future, and the intervening moment of death. If we trust Krishna, Eliot has gone for a change of dress for the next leg of his spiritual/aesthetic/philosophical journey. So we should say to him, in the words of The Dry Salvages: "Not fare well/But fare forward" voyager!