In his prospectus for All and Everything, printed at the beginning of each part of the trilogy, Gurdjieff states his aim in publishing these texts:
FIRST SERIES: Three books under the title of 'An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man,' or, 'Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson.'
SECOND SERIES: Three books under the common title of 'Meetings with Remarkable Men.'
THIRD SERIES: Four books under the common title of 'Life is Real Only Then, When I Am.'
All written according to entirely new principles of logical reasoning and strictly directed towards the solution of the following three cardinal problems:
FIRST SERIES: To destroy, mercilessly, without any compromises whatsoever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.
SECOND SERIES: To acquaint the reader with the material required for a new creation and to prove the soundness and good quality of it.
THIRD SERIES: To assist the arising, in the mentation and in the feelings of the reader, of a veritable, non-fantastic representation not of that illusory world which he now perceives, but of the world existing in reality.
A theory of everything is needed to explain phenonmenon such as the big bang or gravitational singularities in which the current theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics self-destruct.
Theoreticial motivations for finding a theory of everything include the Platonic belief that the ultimate nature of the universe is simple and therefore the current models of the universe such as the standard model cannot be complete because they are too complicated.
The primary problem in producing a theory of everything is that quantum mechanics and general relativity have radicially different descriptions of the universe, and the obvious ways of combining the two lead quickly to the renormalization problem in which the theory does not give finite results for experimentally testable quantities.
Based on the critically-acclaimed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated tells the story of a young man's quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather in a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map by the Nazi invasion.
Everything Is Illuminated hasn't been adapted so much as gutted, stuffed, and mounted.
Everything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I'd have preferred a fiasco—something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.
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