Subodh Patil writes:

We’ve all felt the need. To just drop whatever loads we’re bearing, retreating to some private realm where our worldly concerns fade into oblivion. Freed from responsibilities, anxieties, hurts, and other miscellaneous burdens, if only transiently.

My earliest recollection of the urge must’ve been when I was around 5. My mother was colorfully scolding me the way Indian mothers do, for something I probably did but nevertheless felt unjustly prosecuted for. Turning to the sky beyond the window of our apartment building, I remember becoming consumed by what it would be like to be the letter R. Just being the letter R. Where I could exist wherever it was that letters existed, in solid form, bathed in saturated white light, finding solace in the emptiness, where feelings didn’t exist.

The urge to retreat from reality can take on a compulsive nature for some, whether it’s into the worlds in video games, literature, or some other obsession. For others, the choice instead is to palliate reality through alcohol or other assorted fixes. Although I’m no stranger to any of these, the most soothing flight from the mundane I’ve come to seek comfort in over the years has been the retreat into my work. The real stuff of my work that is, not the worldly responsibilities that go along with it. Although I do take great pride in the latter, nothing comes close to providing me the solace, sometimes even deliverance, as some of my flights into the corner realms of theoretical physics. I recognize the solipsism and selfishness in this, but also the act of self-preservation that it represents.

Perhaps the seeds were planted in a somewhat difficult childhood and adolescence growing up in Hong Kong and onto a young adulthood, struggling to navigate the different worlds I had to straddle as a many-time immigrant. Perhaps it was perpetuated by the need to seek refuge whenever something about the world would confuse or frighten me. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my reflexive retreats into abstract realms was the nursery in which my individuality was fostered as a teenager. It wasn’t just that my parents would leave me alone when I was hunched over a desk, scribbling on scraps of paper or buried in a book; that nursery was an invisible and formidable shield against any of their expectations that conflicted with the personhood I was beginning to assert. A struggle for the self that many immigrant children have to confront in some way.

But there was another edge to it. Like many of my fellow travelers, what drew me to the worlds of theoretical physics was also seeded in my earliest existential doubts, and the struggle to come to terms with the answers the people around me seemed to content themselves with. [Continue reading…]