In 1982, while living in the Boston area and doing research on the history of social science in the Harvard Archives, I was fortunate to meet Barry Johnston, who was then in the early stages of his work on the life and legacy of Pitirim A. Sorokin. Barry was staying with friends in Providence, Rhode Island, and commuting to Cambridge on a motorcycle. We immediately realized the close relationship of our research interests, and began a friendship that would endure for many years.

Some months before our first meeting, Barry had participated in a summer seminar at Duke University, under Ed Tiryakian, on "the importance of schools in the history of sociology." He gave me a draft paper to read, entitled (if I remember correctly), "Russian-American Sociology?" He had been looking into the careers of Russian emigre scholars, and at first I thought this might be in connection with the sociology course he taught at Indiana University Northwest on ethnic relations. I can't say at what point he began to focus almost exclusively on Sorokin's career and his philosophy of Integralism, but it may have been very soon afterward.

Perhaps my strongest impression and memory, regarding Barry's work on Pitirim, was that it was truly a labor of love. It's an interesting question, perhaps, whether one can love someone whom one has not met in person or communicated with directly, but when Barry would speak of Sorokin it always seemed to me that he did so in a tone of genuine affection, mixed with awe at the scope of Sorokin's work and achievement. Perhaps love energy, in a way we do not fully comprehend, transcends the limits of the everyday space-time continuum that we experience. I would like to think so. Certainly Barry seemed to feel that Sorokin had a great heart that gave life to his scientific work, his advocacy of non-violence and altruism and his lover's quarrel with the field of sociology. Sorokin himself liked to say, "Love begets love," and it seems to me that Barry's writings on Sorokin were indeed an instance of "one heart calling out to another" (in Latin, "cor ad cor loquitur," the motto of John Henry Cardinal Newman, a Catholic saint who died in 1889, the year of Pitirim's birth).

At times like these, no words are adequate and we are left with the "inward groaning" described by the apostle Paul. I can only say, "Lux aeterna, dear friend; vita mutatur, non tollitur."