Atomized

According to a recent Times obit, Evelyn Einstein, the granddaughter of Albert Einstein who purportedly was adopted by Einstein’s son Hans Albert and his wife Frieda, “had been told as a child that she was actually the child of Albert Einstein and a ballet dancer…” (“Evelyn Einstein Dies at 70; Shaped by a Link to Fame,” NYT, 4/18/11). Einstein had a strange life according to the Times obit. She was fluent in many tongues. She was a protestor against HUAC, and studied at Berkeley. Despite “a master’s in medieval literature…she worked as a dogcatcher, a cult deprogrammer and a police officer.” Some women complain about being sex objects. Einstein’s problem seemed to be her name, which one would assume had an aphrodisiac effect on certain scientists and intellectuals. “Ms. Einstein,” the Times reported, “was married for 13 years to Grover Krantz, an anthropology professor at Washington State University, who became known for trying to prove the existence of Bigfoot.” Perhaps her most noteworthy act in a life that, according to the Times, even included “a period of homelessness,” was research that led to the unearthing of a trove of Einstein’s correspondences concerning his relationships with women. Einstein was revealed in some of these as being far from the quirky and ethereal genius with messed-up hair. “You will expect no affection from me,” the Times quoted one letter as saying, “You must leave my bedroom or study at once without protesting when I ask you to.” Energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light was Einstein’s great equation, but Evelyn, like her grandfather, seemed to have trouble finding a unified theory.

My Kingdom for a Horse!

If a person loses their glasses, how do they find them? This simple question creates conundrums that may lead all the way to the unification theory Einstein spent a lifetime trying to resolve—without success, it should be noted. How to relate the microcosm to the macrocosm, the forces affecting quanta—the smallest particles that scientists are seeking to discover in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider—to those involved in cosmic events like the Big Bang?

But let’s return to the simple pair of glasses left in a health food restaurant by a man in late middle-age who is still tormented by the infamous Twilight Zone episode in which the Burgess Meredith character, only wanting to be left alone with his books, cracks his glasses, and, in a world devoid of people but chock-full of reading material, is left unable to read. The discovery that the glasses may be tantalizingly within reach yet impossible to find unleashes a host of singularities that epitomize the Sisyphean nature of the human project. How many words are left stranded on the tip of the tongue? How many things that could have been said in a crucial moment of adversity are left unsaid as the mind goes blank? The internal dialogue following such dumbstruck episodes is astonishing in its eloquence, and in the facility with which derisive language is conjured up.

Outside the health food restaurant, wives and friends are waiting, cabs come and go, and the hands grow sweaty as they sweep the table top, the leather seat cushion, the stained and polyurethaned wood floor. But nothing is to be found. Glasses are uncomplicated objects, seemingly easy to replace. Certainly losing glasses is nothing like the loss of a kidney or a breast, and yet it is impossible for our hero to pull himself away from his search. Just one more minute and the world can be set aright. Those who care about him are growing impatient. What is it the blind man is seeking?  Plainly, it is not simply a pair of glasses. Why is this so hard to understand?