without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts. - Douglas Hofstadter

Poised midway between the unvisualizable cosmic vastness of curved spacetime and the dubious shadowy flickerings of charged quanta, we human beings, more like rainbows and mirages than like raindrops or boulders, are unpredictable self-writing poems - vague, metaphorical, ambiguous, sometimes exceedingly beautiful.

It sometimes feels as if I had shouted a deeply cherished message out into an empty chasm and nobody heard me.

But finally I realized that to me, Godel and Escher and Bach were only shadows cast in different directions by some central solid essence. I tried to construct the central object, and came up with this book.