COLUMN: Invited to dinner with Andre

From David Kim's, "Aspirin for Your Postmodem Headache," Fall '98 From David Kim's, "Aspirin for Your Postmodem Headache," Fall '98In the salon of a patron's home in the late-19th century, Peter Tchaikovsky's "First String Quartet" was performed for a small group of Moscow's intelligentsia and aristocracy. During the now famous "Andante Cantabile" movement, the great author Leo Tolstoy -- one of the honored guests -- began to weep. This meeting without words is a classic example of one of the most important and influential forces ever to move this world. I call this force Dialogue. Dialogue is an activity that has been taking place since the dawning of time and will continue long after the world as we know it is gone. It is the powerful exchange of ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions -- everything, really -- that occurs daily and perpetually. Although we take part in this Dialogue in the present, and we all do, it doesn't take place exclusively with our own contemporaries. Rather, Dialogue is continuous and inextricably interconnected. Artists, thinkers and innovators have always played upon the creations, thoughts and actions of others. Likewise, we are constantly influenced by our participation in Dialogue, regardless of whether it is active or passive. We make decisions based on wisdoms gained through Hamlet's pondering, construe our understanding of situations in Freudian terms and base our judgment of a Velazquez painting in the context of earlier and related works. And in its fascinating, ever-expanding way, Dialogue knows no boundaries. Today we have Bossa Nova a la Beck. The minimalist Robert Wilson produces Wagner's traditionally lavish and wildly romantic Lohengrin. Manet's controversial and groundbreaking "Olympia" was partially a response to the 19th-century Parisian sexual revolution. Through deliberate allusions to his own and others' paintings, plays and novels, he arguably created the first modern nude and one of the most significant paintings of his time. Goethe, Beethoven and Tolstoy all produced works in response to the rise and wars of Napoleon, and today we draw upon them in efforts to better understand the nature of nationalism and political organization, among other things. Likewise, we still learn lessons in geopolitics from Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars. Yet I prefer to think of the column as a contribution to the greater Dialogue. The topics on which I have written have generally been those about which nothing can be said to be true or false in absolute terms. In fact, the worst reading I can imagine of this column (or of anything, for that matter) would be an automatic, contented acceptance. Rather, I would hope that it would be met with both interest and scrutiny, such that the end result is a more enriched opinion on the matter, whether in agreement or contradiction. That is, after all, the nature of Dialogue. It is provocative and anything but static. During our mid-teens and at the advent of our intellectual maturity, when East of Eden, Anna Karinina or The Brothers Karamazov asked us to reassess our concepts of religious faith and belief, that was Dialogue. When a piece of music can still move us to tears and invoke images and thoughts centuries after its composition, that is Dialogue. When we engage in discussions on interpretations of these original works, that is again Dialogue. And in every way, the entirety of academia is Dialogue. To raise the question once again, Why is it important to suggest all of this? Because once we recognize the magnitude and the interconnected nature of Dialogue, the world is infinitely smaller, our everyday lives present ceaseless opportunities for contributions to it -- no matter how minor -- and "humanity" and "mankind" become tangible concepts, the attainment of which suddenly seem possible. So when you are hard at work on that paper or studying for that exam this month, remember the spirit in which knowledge and advancement have been sought after. That paper, that class and this education are about much more than a grade on your transcript. And the benefits reaped from them may very well extend further than this semester, your chances for a good job or even your own life.