Images from a Long Journey

How This Book Came AboutThis book is, in some sense, the soul, underlying an earlier book that I hadwritten, a book about modern science, which had the title The Search for theMeaning of Space, Time and Matter. The book was written for people withinterest in modern science. It had the subtitle Images from Many Travels.The subtitle of that earlier book and the final decision to write it had itsorigin in a restless wanderlust, which, in the last twenty years, has drivenme irresistibly to travel to the most remote places on earth. I traveled intothe Arctic, the waters between North Norway and Svalbard, to Tibet overthe plateau to the foot of Mount Everest, to North India to the remotemonasteries in the Ladakh, along the Silk Road around the TaklimakanDesert into Inner Asia, to Timbuktu at the edge of the Sahara, to theAntarctic, and to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. These journeys weredriven by the urge to somehow grasp the whole world and make it myown. It was the Brahma in me who is creating a world in himself, in hismind. It is Odysseus in me, Faustus, the restless, forever searching untilhis life dissolves. I had to wander the many roads that all led to the sameplace, that vastly complex unfolding essence of Being, in all its colors andtextures and shapes. I had to go and see this wonderful tapestry of lifethat is of deep inner beauty, even in its squalor, its suffering and pain andthe dirty ugliness that I saw on some of these travels. I had to wander tofully accept all that life is, into myself, to feel at home on the earth.That same kind of yearning had driven me in my youth to discover themysteries of space, of time, and of matter. After WWII, at age sixteen, I hadacquired rudimentary knowledge of Heisenberg’s and Einstein’s attemptsto create that all-encompassing unified theory that captures the observedphenomena of space and the world of the elementary building blocks ofmatter. A sort of obsession to learn all that is known about these things8 Kai Woehleraccompanied me on my journey to study physics, spending some yearsin Heisenberg’s institute, and eventually, after circuitous routes, teachingphysics at a graduate school for military officers at the California coast.The above-mentioned book then is somewhat of an amalgam of thesetwo kinds of journeys during my life. Many dear nonscientist friends tookan interest in that book, and I recommended to them to just read the firstand the last chapters, which carry more of my personal reflections aboutour lives in this cosmos.The final impetus to write this separate book, which is in your hands,was the fact that, as an orderly, circumspect person, I had 'put myworldly affairs in order' sometime ago under the title 'The Kai-X-File,'containing instructions for the executer of my will, in the case of mydeparture. This file contains a letter, which was to be my farewell letterto my closer friends, to be sent instead of some standard obituary notice.The file contains many other writings, some short, others not so short,reflections about my life, writings, which did not have a good place in thatfirst book, mentioned above. This then led to this book. It is a collectionof thoughts, essays, some poems of my own, some other poems that wereimportant to me, some of them German poems, which I have translatedinto English as I could, some dreams that had great meaning in my life.The above-mentioned farewell letter is now at the very end of this secondbook. The items in each chapter were collected over a span of time, andthere are themes to which I returned often. So there are some duplicationsof 'Kai’s sayings' in this book, but I will leave them as they are and hopeyou understand. I am somewhat arbitrarily terminating the collectionnow while I am still here and reasonably coherent, and I will share thiscollection with you, my friends, when there is a good time for this.And just a brief comment about the image of the Taj Mahal on theb