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the author has had to refer
to literature on the questions he touched, it has never been his intention to
exhaust all this literature or to indicate its main currents or the principal
works or the latest ideas. All he has wished to do in these cases has been to
show examples of one or another trend of thought

All round me walls are crumbling, and
horizons infinitely remote and incredibly beautiful stand revealed. It is as though
threads, previously unknown and unsuspected, begin to reach out and bind things
together. For the first time in my life my world emerges from chaos. Everything
becomes connected, forming an orderly and harmonious whole. I understand, I link
together, a series of phenomena which were disconnected and appeared to have
nothing in common.

I am reading the chapter on levers. And all at once a multitude of simple things,
which I knew as independent and having nothing in common, become connected and
united into a great whole. A stick pushed under a stone, a penknife, a shovel, a see
saw, all these things are one and the same, they are all " levers ". In this idea there is
something both terrifying and alluring. How is it that I did not know it? Why has
nobody spoken to me about it? Why am I made to learn a thousand useless things
and am not told about this?

All that I am discovering is so wonderful and so
miraculous that I become more and more enraptured, and am gripped by a certain
presentiment of further revelations awaiting me. It is as though I already feel the
unity of all and am overcome with awe at the sensation.

I can no longer keep to myself all the emotions which thrill me. I want to try to
share them with my neighbour at the desk, a great friend of mine with whom I often
have breathless talks. In a whisper I begin to tell him of my discoveries. But I feel
that my words do not convey anything to him and that I cannot express what I feel.
My friend listens to me absent-mindedly, evidently not hearing half of what I say. I
see this and feel hurt and want to stop talking to him. But the tall German at the
master's desk has already noticed that we are " talking " and that I am showing
something to my friend under the desk. He hurries over to us and the next moment
my beloved " Physics " is in his stupid and unsympathetic hands.

But what can I say? It is all so tedious.
Diplomats and all kinds of statesmen will gather together and talk, papers
will approve or disapprove, sympathise or not sympathise. Then everything
will be as it was, or even worse.

What is the
use of attempting to expose lies when people like them and live in them? It
is their own affair; but I am tired of lying. There are enough lies without
mine

there is a strange flavour of truth. I feel it particularly
strongly now, because for so long I have held myself in, have kept myself within
artificial " materialistic " bounds, have denied myself all dreams about things that
could not be held within these bounds. I had been living in a desiccated and sterilised
world, with an infinite number of taboos imposed on my thought. And suddenly these
strange books broke down all the walls round me, and made me think and dream
about things of which for a long time I had feared to think and dream

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