Downsizing

What I wanted to know has continued to change over time, even though neither the desire to know nor my fascination for Change and Time has ever become weaker. Quite to the contrary. It is only the naïve belief that I might at some point get a glimpse of what rules those deepest of all mysteries that has dimmed, to an extent. I hoped once that the conceptual tools would soon become available that would help us grasp something of the grand operatic design of things that defies our limited intelligence. “Theory” was the arrogant name of the illusion I shared with my entire generation. Philosophy had a part in it, but it was Science that held the most promise, even as philosophers seemed to ignore the advances it had made after 1800 (they still do). I had become an avid reader of scientists of all stripes, from mathematicians to anthropologists, from linguists to physicists, fully immersing myself in the dizzying discourses emanating from the brightest geniuses of the age. I expected to be able to connect whatever language and literature were able to produce with the inner workings of matter itself, as it [End Page 53] was being redescribed using the new concepts of order and disorder, complexity, self-organization and the like—all intellectual convolutions of the most exalted nature.