One of the best books I have read of all time is 'When We Cease to Understand the World', 2020 by Benjamín Labatut.
"A year before the Munich conference, Heisenberg had become a monster.
In June 1925, while he was working at the University of Göttingen, an allergic reaction to pollen had deformed his face so that he was no longer recognizable. His lips looked like a rotten peach with the skin ready to come off, his eyelids puffed up until he could barely see. Unable to tolerate even one more day of spring, he boarded a ship to travel as far as possible from the microscopic particles that were torturing him.
His destiny was Heligoland—the name translates as “holy land”—Germany’s only outlying island, so dry and inclement that trees barely rise from the ground and not a single flower blossoms amid its stones...."
"...Sweating from head to toe, he (Heisenberg) spent the day
memorizing the West-Eastern Divan, a book of poems by Goethe that a previous
guest had left behind in his room. He read the poems aloud, over and over, and
certain verses echoed from his room and through the empty hallways of the
hotel, to the bafflement of the other guests, who heard them as if they were
the whispers of a ghost. Goethe had written them in 1819, inspired by the Sufi
mystic Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, known simply as Hafez. The
German genius encountered the great Persian poet of the fourteenth century in a
bad translation published in his home country and came to believe he had
received the book at the behest of the divinity. He identified with him so
closely that his voice changed completely, melding with that of the man who had
sung the glories of God and wine four hundred years before. Hafez had been a
drunken saint, a mystic and a hedonist. He devoted himself to prayer, poetry
and alcohol. When he turned sixty years old, he traced a circle in the desert
sand, sat down in its centre, and swore not to rise until he had touched the
mind of Allah, the one and only God, mighty and sublime. He spent forty days in
silence, tormented by the sun and wind, and when he broke his fast with a cup
of wine given to him by a man who had found him on the verge of death, he felt
a second consciousness awaken within him, superimposing itself over his own.
That other voice dictated more than five hundred poems to him, helping Hafez to
become the pinnacle of Persian literature...."
inside a 19th-century copy of the Divān of Hafez (courtesy: Wikipedia)
