Peter Weissman

I Think, Therefore Who Am I? Peter Weissman

The philosopher Rene Descartes declared, "I think, therefore I am." But who is this I that thought posits? In anecdotal style, the narrator of this nonfiction novel relates an odyssey of discovery and confusion, catalyzed by psychedelic drugs, over a year's time: the hippie era of 1967. With humor and passion he tells a story of wrestling with meaning and his own identity. Each chapter is a self-contained story, discrete links in a plotline propelled by epiphanies and vanities, from "Before Almost Everything Changed" and his "Czechoslovak Awakening," with its two fateful capsules, to his "Dark Night of the Soul" and beyond. He explores life as myth, witnesses the solution to the paradoxical mystery of waves and particles, ruminates on the difference between truth and fact, and experiences a sense of liberation that gradually becomes something else. He delves into chivalrous love, a child's anticipation of the adult world, the tao of momentary observation; sees a miracle, loses himself in the crowded crash pads of Haight-Ashbury, seeks answers in astrology and infatuation, wrestles with the capriciousness of his myriad selves, and forty years later, looking back, figures a few things out.