How This Book Came About This book is, in some sense, the soul,
underlying an earlier book that I had written, a book about modern
science, which had the title The Search for the Meaning of Space,
Time and Matter. The book was written for people with interest 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 its origin in a restless wanderlust, which, in the last twenty
years, has driven me irresistibly to travel to the most remote
places on earth. I traveled into the Arctic, the waters between
North Norway and Svalbard, to Tibet over the plateau to the foot of
Mount Everest, to North India to the remote monasteries in the
Ladakh, along the Silk Road around the Taklimakan Desert into Inner
Asia, to Timbuktu at the edge of the Sahara, to the Antarctic, and
to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. These journeys were driven by the
urge to somehow grasp the whole world and make it my own. It was
the Brahma in me who is creating a world in himself, in his mind.
It is Odysseus in me, Faustus, the restless, forever searching
until his life dissolves. I had to wander the many roads that all
led to the same place, that vastly complex unfolding essence of
Being, in all its colors and textures and shapes. I had to go and
see this wonderful tapestry of life that is of deep inner beauty,
even in its squalor, its suffering and pain and the dirty ugliness
that I saw on some of these travels. I had to wander to fully
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
the mysteries of space, of time, and of matter. After WWII, at age
sixteen, I had acquired rudimentary knowledge of Heisenberg's and
Einstein's attempts to create that all-encompassing unified theory
that captures the observed phenomena of space and the world of the
elementary building blocks of matter. A sort of obsession to learn
all that is known about these things 8 Kai Woehler accompanied me
on my journey to study physics, spending some years in Heisenberg's
institute, and eventually, after circuitous routes, teaching
physics at a graduate school for military officers at the
California coast. The above-mentioned book then is somewhat of an
amalgam of these two kinds of journeys during my life. Many dear
nonscientist friends took an interest in that book, and I
recommended to them to just read the first and the last chapters,
which carry more of my personal reflections about our 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 my worldly affairs in order" sometime ago under the title
"The Kai-X-File," containing instructions for the executer of my
will, in the case of my departure. This file contains a letter,
which was to be my farewell letter to 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 that first
book, mentioned above. This then led to this book. It is a
collection of thoughts, essays, some poems of my own, some other
poems that were important to me, some of them German poems, which I
have translated into 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 second book. The items in each chapter were
collected over a span of time, and there are themes to which I
returned often. So there are some duplications of "Kai's sayings"
in this book, but I will leave them as they are and hope you
understand. I am somewhat arbitrarily terminating the collection
now while I am still here and reasonably coherent, and I will share
this collection 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
the b
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