The long and the short of it is that I eventually decided - but this took
many months - that the optimal structure would be a strict alternation
between chapters and dialogues. Once that was clear, then I had the joyous
task of trying to pinpoint the most crucial ideas that I wanted to get across to
my readers and then somehow embodying them in both the form and the
content of fanciful, often punning dialogues between Achilles and the
Tortoise (plus a few new friends).
CEB Is First Cooled off, Then Reheated
In early 1974, I switched Ph.D. advisors for the fourth and final time, taking
on a totally unfamiliar problem in solid-state physics that smelled very sweet
though it threatened thorniness. My new advisor, Gregory Wannier, wanted
me to plunge in deeply, and I knew in my gut that this time it was sink or
swim for me in the world of physics. If I wanted a Ph.D. - a precious but
horribly elusive goal toward which I had been struggling for almost a decade
by then - it was now or never! And so, with great reluctance, I stowed my
beloved manuscript in a desk drawer and told myself, "Hands off! And no
peeking!" I even instituted food-deprivation punishments if I so much as
opened the drawer and riffled through my book-in-the-making. Thinking
GEB thoughts - or rather, GTATHB thoughts - was strictly verboten.
Speaking of German, Wannier was scheduled to go to Germany for a
six-month period in the fall of 1974, and since I had always loved Europe, I
asked if there was any way I could go along. Very kindly, he arranged for me
to be a wissenschaftlicher Assistent - essentially a teaching assistant - in
physics at the Universitiit Regensburg, and so that's what I did for one
semester spanning the end of 1974 and the start of 1975. It was then that I
got most of the work done for my Ph.D. thesis. Since I had no close friends,
my Regensburg days and nights were long and lonely. In a peculiar sense,
my closest friend during that tough period was Frederic Chopin, since I
tuned in to Radio Warsaw nearly every night at midnight and listened to
various pianists playing many of his pieces that I knew and loved, and others
that were new to me and that I came to love.
That whole stretch was GEE-verboten time, and thus it continued until the
end of 1975, when finally I closed the book on my thesis. Although that
work was all about an exquisite visual structure (see Chapter 5 of this book)
and seemed to offer a good launchpad for a career, I had suffered too many
blows to my ego in graduate school to believe I would make a good physicist.
On the other hand, the rekindling of old intellectual flames and especially
the writing of GTATHB had breathed a new kind of self-confidence into me.
Jobless but highly motivated, I moved to my home town of Stanford, and
there, thanks to my parents' unquestioning and generous financial support
("a two-year Hofstadter Fellowship", I jokingly called it), I set out to "retool
myself" as an artificial-intelligence researcher. Even more important,
though, was that I was able to resume my passionate love affair with the
ideas that had so grabbed me a couple of years earlier.
Twentieth-anniversary Preface P-l