Publicly, Feynman was as serene as ever. Privately, he agonized over his inability to find the right problem. He wanted to stay clear of the pack. He knew he was not keeping up with even the published work of Gell-Mann and other high-energy physicists, yet he could not bear to sit down with the journals or preprints that arrived daily on his desk and piled up on his shelves and merely read them. Every arriving paper was like a detective novel with the last chapter printed first. He wanted to read just enough to understand the problem; then he wanted to solve it his own way. Almost alone among
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