myself even then that it was just displaced longing for female loveliness. ... I was then fifteen. Tuan has not focused on either his ethnicity or his sexual orientation in his research. Rather than stress axes of difference or social power relations, he has attempted to capture universal human experiences. He works to show nuances of common phenomena such as the experience of "home" that cut across cultural divides even as they reveal distinct manifestations in different places and times. Tuan died on August 10, 2022, at the age of 91. Key ideas and approaches Humanism Tuan describes his approach as humanist, however his humanism does not entail replacing spirituality with rationalism or promoting human beings as wholly self-directed. Instead, he sees humanist geography as a way to reveal "how geographical activities and phenomena reveal the quality of human awareness" and to show "human experience in its ambiguity, ambivalence, and complexity". To do so requires empathy, and for this he seeks assistance from literature, the arts, history, biography, social science, philosophy, and theology. Tuan's approach is qualitative, but more narrative and descriptive than philosophical, in light of his concern that a philosophical theory can become "so highly structured that it seems to exist in its own right, to be almost 'solid,' and thus able to cast (paradoxically) a shadow over the phenomena it is intended to illuminate" whereas he prefers for theories to "hover supportively in the background." Contradictions and paradoxes Tuan is most interested in ambivalent human experiences that resonate with the opposing pulls of space and place, the intimate and the distant. His approach is suggested by titles such as Segmented Worlds and Self, Continuity and Discontinuity, Morality and Imagination, Cosmos and Hearth, Dominance and Affection, and above all, Space and Place. These existential dialectics propel people between a pole of experience characterized by rootedness, security and grounding, on the one hand, and a pole characterized by outreach, potentiality and expansiveness, on the other hand. These opposites interact: there is a certain distance in what is nearby and a certain nearness in what is far away. Therefore, ambivalence is the norm when it comes to the human experience of dwelling in the world with its existential pulls between space and place, mobility and stasis, the distant view and embodied engagement. Optimism Tuan is fundamentally an optimist. Even Tuan's gloomiest book, Landscapes of Fear, concludes that things were worse