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The service that Jed, Rachel and Anneliese planned for Paul last night was beautiful. I loved sitting out on the terrace of Harriton House, looking up @ the sky, ringed by the trees, remembering together that copper beech who was our friend and colleague...I loved all the stories, of course, and I loved, especially, the mobiles featuring photos from all the different eras of Paul's life, the ever-expanding circle of those he knew.

One of my strongest emotions was the surprising realization of how many of you who gathered for that ceremony I first met, and became friends with, through Paul. Because I spent so much time hanging out with him, I was lucky enough to come to know, and work with, that Swarthmore social science cohort, as well as many of the scientists @ Bryn Mawr. I really enjoyed speaking w/ so many of you yesterday evening, and was full of gratitude to Paul for having enlarged my own circle in that way; I felt full of joy and connection last night.

I'm hoping that those who didn't get a chance to speak about Paul yesterday evening will take the opportunity to do so here. And that those who did speak might be willing to record some of what they said?

Here are the notes I spoke from:

He was my friend.

He was a difficult friend.  Paul and I had very different personalities. There were a lot of things he could not be bothered with, including many of the social niceties: he shrugged off others’ expectations, forgot to pay his bills on time, laughed @ what he was fond of calling the human comedy. He also suffered from debilitating depressions, and came to believe that such periods were productive ones, times of relative disengagement that allowed a “needed rebuilding,” an "internal realignment.”

So, we kept each other company, for these past ten years, as depressive periods alternated with bursts of energy—writing, teaching, working, and always talking, talking, talking—together. Paul wasn’t the easiest friend for an extrovert like me. He called himself an “unstable loner,” identified himself as somewhere “on the spectrum,” and wrote once that  “a little more conversational handicappedness might be good for all of us.”

Paul celebrated change, but he could be also maddeningly unwilling to change his own settled habits--@ least in most of the directions I pointed out to him as offering real possibilities! (How many of us tried to get him to stop smoking?) But maybe, he said often, when I complained about some irritating predilection or another, we should start with the presumption that such difference is valuable?

Because, of course, it was precisely Paul’s freedom from social convention and expectation that made him such a good friend.  He saw things differently. He could surprise me by taking up the role (as he called it) of “spear carrier” for some absurd or hopeless cause. He could be unimaginably generous with his time and energy, if there were a particular project or conversation that engaged his attention.

Paul’s philosophy of life celebrated randomness, chance, and serendipity—these, he thought, made the world a place of possibility, and gave us freedom: if we don’t know what’s going to happen, if we (therefore) can’t get it right, if we (therefore) can’t control the outcome, then there was space there for him—there is space for all of us—to make a difference in the way the world is going.

As Leonard Cohen sang,
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.”

That crack was key to Paul’s teaching—he was always on the look-out for what wasn’t “perfect,” for the sentence that didn’t cohere in the otherwise well-ordered essay, for the observation that didn’t “fit” the larger claim--that’s where the light got in. The “crack” was cultural background, personal temperament, individual creativity—whatever enables each one of us to see things differently from the rest, and so enlarges the picture for us all.

Paul also believed, quite strongly, that we could learn to see things differently than  we ourselves saw them. One Sunday afternoon about seven years ago, he sat down at his office computer to write a letter to Rene Descartes, telling him that his phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” needed some correcting: “it encourages people to believe that there is a stable ‘I,’ something that itself is not to be changed. And that misses entirely the point of "thinking”… the ability to reflect on and bring about changes in who we are: "I am, and I can think, therefore I can change who I am."

Paul believed in—and encouraged many of us to believe in-- the possibility of individual change. He also believed in—and encouraged many of us to believe in-- the possibility of social change. One of the weirdest of his many weird locutions was the “fuchsia dot”: the key to evolving social structures, he thought, was continual renovation in response to group feedback. This model requires someone like himself, positioned to "read" the input from group members, able to recognize the patterns articulated by them, and feed them back to the group for correction. For some reason, he called the people, like himself, who could detect these large patterns, “fuchsia dots.” Only one of the many mysteries to emerge from his unruly, generative unconscious.

Paul’s friend Tim Burke called him “the last to occupy his niche in the academic ecosystem”: “the role of the generalist, integrative, and speculative thinker who was once at the heart of the idea of the liberal arts…. As in nature, emptying out such an ecological niche can sometimes damage the entire web of life in unexpected ways.”

I don’t think so. We are all here tonight, filling that niche. As another old friend wrote in the Serendip blog of Paul stories, “yes, you are gone. But it's OK, we have you all backed up at home.”

Not just backed up, but carried within us. As another friend, David Ross, mused, “What a marvelous, subversive legacy Paul created at Bryn Mawr! When someone questions, when unexpected light fills the room, when the stately dance toward mediocrity is disrupted – I will think of Paul. “

As will I, of my difficult, different, disruptive friend.