Welträson: Reason for Being in the World

An Experiment in Intellectual and Spiritual Accounting

Painting by physicist Robbert Dijkgraaf commemorating the ninetieth birthday of mathematician and physicist Freeman Dyson

Introduction

The experiment is partly in the process: I begin publicly before I have finished privately. I know where I’m going. That’s in the title. I know the impulses in myself and the provocations in the world that prompt me to write. I know much of what I want to say and, generally, how I want to present it. But there are many decisions, of expression and selection – inclusion and exclusion – and a final vision yet to be determined. This is all to say that while I know the town I’m traveling to, I don’t yet know what station I’m getting off at. I can’t see the platform and the faces are vague. I’ll be filling in those blanks almost in real time, week to week. There will be multiple, consecutive parts, I think, though I don’t know yet how many. More than two, fewer than six seems right.

This is very unlike me. Though I create not quite in the manner of Alfred Hitc…