areas, and the trick worked. Twenty-five souls were snagged, and all were
enthusiastic. I vividly remember the lovely blossoms I could see out the
window each day as I lectured that spring, but even more vividly I remember
David Justman, who was in art history, Scott Buresh, who was in political
science, and Avril Greenberg, who was an art major. These three simply
devoured the ideas, and we talked and talked endlessly about them. My
course thus turned out very well, both for the snaggees and for the snagger.
Sometime during the summer of 1973, I made a stab at sketching out a
table of contents for my "pamphlet", and at that point, the ambitiousness of
my project started dawning on me, but it still felt more like a pamphlet than
a tome to me. It was only in the fall that I started writing in earnest. I had
never written anything more than a few pages long, but I fearlessly plunged
ahead, figuring it would take me just a few days - maybe a week or two. I
was slightly off, for in fact, the very first draft (done in pen, just like my letter
to Robert, but with more cross-outs) took me about a month - a month
that overlapped in time with the "Yom Kippur war", which made a very deep
impression on me. I realized this first draft was not the final product, but I
felt I had done the major work and now it was just a question of revision.
Experiments with Literary Form Start to Take PlaceAs I was writing that draft, I certainly wasn't thinking about Escher pictures.
Nor was I thinking about Bach's music. But one day I found myself on fire
with ideas about mind, brain, and human identity, and so, shamelessly
borrowing Lewis Carroll's odd couple of Achilles and the Tortoise, whose
droll personalities amused me no end, I sat down and in absolute white heat
dashed off a long, complex dialogue, all about a fictitious, unimaginably
large book each of whose pages, on a one-by-one basis, contained exhaustive
information on one specific neuron in Einstein's brain. As it happened, the
dialogue featured a short section where the two characters imagined each
other in another dialogue, and each of them said, "You might then say
this ... to which I might well reply as follows ... and then you would go on ... "
and so forth. Because of this unusual structural feature, after I'd finally put
the final period on the final speech, I flipped back to the top of page one
and there, on a whim, typed out the single word "FUGUE".
My Einstein-book dialogue was not r~ally a fugue, of course - not even
close - and yet it somehow reminded me'of one. From earliest childhood,
I had been profoundly moved by the music ~f Bach, and this off-the-wall
idea of marrying Bach-like contrapuntal for~ to lively dialogues with
intellectually rich content grabbed me with a pa~n. Over the next few
weeks, as I tossed the idea around in my head, I realized how much room
for play there was along these lines, and I could imagine how voraciously I as
a teen-ager might have consumed such dialogues. Thus I was led to the idea
of inserting contrapuntal dialogues every so often, partly to break the
tedium of the heavy ideas in my chapters, and partly to allow me to
introduce lighter, more allegorical versions of all the abstruse concepts.P-IO Twentieth-anniversary Preface