First, my name: I publish now as Sam Crane, though my birth name, and the name on my first two books, is George T. Crane. There is no organic connection between "Sam" and "George T." (though I sometimes say the "T" in the "Tsam" is silent...). But Sam is a long time nickname, and as my writing has turned to the more personal (with Aidan's Way) and philosophical (with Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao) I have decided to use Sam. Friends call me "Sam," so you should, too.
I teach contemporary Chinese politics and ancient Chinese philosophy at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where I have been on the faculty since 1989. Before that I taught at the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Center in Nanjing, China (1988-1989) and Georgetown University (1985-1988). I completed my Ph.D. in political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (go Badgers!) in 1986. My undergraduate education happened at SUNY Purchase (class of 1979), back when its school colors were still heliotrope and puce.
My hometown is Rye, New York and I tend to identify culturally as a New Yorker. Thus, I fight the good fight as a Yankees fan in Western Massachusetts. I travel to China fairly often (about once a year).
I'll leave you, for now, with some lines from Zhuangzi, from David Hinton's translation:
Sufficient because "sufficient." Insufficient because "insufficient."
Traveling the Way makes it Tao. Naming things makes them real. Why real?
Real because "real." Why nonreal? Nonreal because "nonreal." So the real
is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in
things. There's nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not
suffucient.
Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing
[beauty] Hsi Shih, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange
- in Tao they all move as one and the same. In difference is the whole;
in wholeness is the broken. Once they are neither whole nor broken, all
things move freely as one and the same again.
