Story

The Unexpected

Warmest heartfelt, like a crackling fireplace in winter. Loudest and stormiest, like a hairdryer in autumn. Cheerfulst like the azure blue sky on a summer morning, and also like a dark thundercloud that discharges with lightning.

All of these are characteristics I attribute to him. Many things remain undescribed. For example, his quirk of starting many new things and delving into the most remote corners of different areas that appear unclear and disconnected at first and even second glance. Setting limits is a term that least describes him. He only saw continuity in constant change. "The same, but different" was written on a sign above the door to his study. He was mostly reclusive. He never spoke about himself or his work. If you ever caught a glimpse of him, he would ask questions or communicate through silent looks. He lived outside of everything that can be defined as structure. Everything about his existence seemed to have dissolved in favor of his inner undertakings. When he occasionally invited me for tea, I would find him deeply immersed in a large armchair in his salon. After he spotted me, he would often pause for a long period and then quote a sentence from the book he was currently immersed in, adding a hesitant question to what he had said. It seemed to me as if he wanted to build a comprehensive picture of the knowledge of our time. Naturally, an undertaking that maybe only Goethe could accomplish in his time. Gödel was the last person to achieve this in a significant field. In short: an impossible task. Yet my friend's pursuit was always connected to the mundane. Something that took too long for him, an anomaly in his garden that he couldn't understand, or an optical phenomenon he discovered during one of his walks. After he posed questions from his books to me, hours-long conversations would ensue. These conversations left me confused. One characteristic of these conversations was that he never took a stance. Instead, we illuminated all possibilities from all perspectives. I felt like a rain barrel constantly filling up but always with limits.

There would be plenty more idiosyncrasies to report on. But I want to focus on the essential. Therefore, I will only describe one more idiosyncrasy that is crucial for what I recently discovered and has been troubling me day and night since then. To do so, it is necessary to observe my friend from a greater distance and at the same time in time-lapse. Based on everything I have described, one would assume that his interest and especially his questions became increasingly focused on details. But the opposite was true. While he would start with a tiny and barely visible excerpt, he would then swing back to the visible and rise higher and higher. As a result, he increasingly gained in abstraction overall and over the years, so to speak, ascended from the concrete to the abstract. In my eyes, this is an important clue to explain what had happened.

The usual tea invitations were taking longer and longer to arrive. During my last invitation, he said goodbye to me as usual and mentioned that he was going for a walk. That was the last we heard from him. He never contacted us again and was also unreachable. But that's not all. A few weeks after this incident, the mailman came and handed me a small package. Inside were a little book and a letter. He wrote that he was doing well. Something had happened that led to him being away for some time.

Since this incident is already over a year ago, I now want to pass on this little book to you. As to what is described in it, I naturally cannot judge for myself.

So please read for yourself what he had to tell us.