I came to know David as a singularly skilled teacher and mentor with a fathomless knowledge of history. He was also a remarkably imaginative and divergent thinker who also always managed to bring his ideas to a re-convergence, but only after they had meandered far afield and gathered lots of pollen. Examples abound. Here are some things I remember.

He wrote a novel I had the pleasure of reading–The Shiva Battery–that premised the invention of a battery cell that never lost its charge: a sort of 21st century reincarnation of a 17th century perpetual motion machine. The mysterious inventor of the battery lived somewhere in remote, mountainous northern India and his altogether too terse press release explaining how the battery worked—indeed it did work!–involved a cryptic interplay of Hindu cosmology and particle physics. It was a fascinating book. It took the reader from behind closed doors at Fox newsroom headquarters—they weren’t at all happy about what this meant for BP and Exxon Mobil—to the cities and hinterlands of the Indian subcontinent, where the protagonist–an intrepid US journalist–quested in hope of interviewing the reclusive inventor and shedding more light on the inner-workings of this remarkable new technology. As you can see, it’s a story that goes in all manner of directions, and all over the globe in the process. And doesn’t it sound fascinating? That was David.

I had the great fortune to TA for a course he taught in Integrative Social Sciences. This was a history of social science in the 20th century US that also combined–improbably but incredibly effectively–a history of contemporary social movements and a history of American music. If there was anyone equipped to teach such a course, it was David. I learned a tremendous amount about history and music from this class, and so did the undergrads. The students adored him.

I remember one lecture, David was set on showing that music, like anything else, has a history. It might sound like it had descended from the Spheres, but in fact its whole relational system of tones and tempos is built. People made it. There was a piano in the lecture hall. David played a major scale, and explained there was a long and gradual process of consensus that led to the acceptance of the intervals that we now know as this timeless scale. Then he played—to himself, noodling around–the major scale of chords. This became an impromptu version of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” (which is built on this scale of chords). The students loved it—lots started clapping on the beat, a few started singing.

There was another lecture he gave on George Lakoff’s ‘cognitive framing’ and the power of negative presences (i.e. “don’t think of an elephant!”). He stressed how this feature of thought and language could work as a powerful rhetorical tool in the hands of politicians and policy makers. ‘How can you not think of an elephant, once I’ve told you not to?’ David said to the class. We all tried very hard not to. This then led him to muse extemporaneously on elephants themselves—their remarkable memory, their gentleness, their peregrinations, their lovably ambling disheveled-ness as they made their way together, wherever they were going. When I think of David now, I do not think of an elephant.

David pointed me in all sorts of different directions that ended up being invaluable to my research. But these were directions I simply could not have known would be useful at the outset. This is the hindsight of history. Yet, it was a hindsight that David–over his long experience studying history–had cultivated as a kind of foresight. He knew I’d have to meander. I’d stop by his office, lost in the leaves of my project, and in a rush to get out of the thicket. He’d slow me down. ‘Sit down, sit down,’ he’d say. And I’d plop into the arm chair he kept for visitors in the corner—it was very hard to get out of once you were in it—and I’d recount what little trails I had come across recently in my reading and I’d ask him where he thought they led.