A Purple Gentian

I once went to see a woman who was a sort of psychic and read the future through stones.

She arranged them on a tray and you put your feet into a tub of them. It sounds a little cuckoo, but she was delightful, in her 80s, laughed a great deal and kept chickens. Part of her routine was telling you which dead people wanted to say hello to you. She mentioned various people who didn’t sound at all familiar, and I nodded politely. Then she said, ‘There’s someone here who looks a bit like Albert Einstein.’ I said, ‘Oh! Could it be Einstein?’ She giggled and said, ‘Yes, it could.’ Then she said, ‘He watches you a lot, and finds you amusing.’ Albert Einstein finds me amusing. This was the highlight of my day, my decade. You see, I have a bit of a crush on Einstein. I have two large posters of him; in one, in my study, he is saying ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge.’ The one in my bedroom declares: ‘I never said gravity was responsible for people falling in love.’ I’ve also written several short stories featuring Einstein – so the idea that this might tickle him was rather wonderful. I mention all this not to entertain you – well, not just to entertain you – but to explain how the whole damn thing started. I read Einstein’s Dreams (1992), by Alan Lightman, not long after it was published. I was in my mid-20s, freshly released from a degree in maths and physics I had understood very little of, and then a diploma in journalism. I wasn’t a scientist, certainly not a physicist (I loved physics but just wasn’t any good at it). I was working as a science journalist, but what I really wanted to write was fiction that somehow incorporated science. And Alan Lightman was the first author I’d come across who did this, beautifully. Lightman is a former astrophysicist, now a professor of science and writing at MIT. Einstein’s Dreams was his first book-length work. In a nutshell, it is his fantasy of what Einstein might have been dreaming about as he formulated his Theory of Relativity. For those of you without physics qualifications, here’s the gist: Einstein demonstrated that time is not fixed, it’s relative. During our degree, we undergraduates found Relativity so baffling that the lecturer used to stop midway and tell jokes to break it all up. Basically, it’s about getting overlong cars into too-short garages, and one twin being younger than the other when returning from space, and so on . . . In fact the easiest way to explain it is this: a person who is moving will observe things differently from someone who is standing still. In fact, ‘still’ and ‘moving’ are relative, as becomes clear when you’re on a stationary train and the train next to you moves. So, if for a person on the street two things happen simultaneously (someone throws an orange in the air while someone else sneezes), a person on a bus might see the person sneeze first, then the orange ascend, because her frame of reference is different. Anyway, the crux is this: time is flexible, and Lightman let his imagination take flight in order to explore other concepts of time that Einstein may have contemplated on the way to his theory. But this glorious book – which really isn’t a novel, despite the publisher’s insistence – contains all of life in its thirty sections, each of which is a short story illustrating a different theory of time, interspersed with three interludes involving Einstein and his friend Besso, and a prologue and an epilogue. As befits a scientist, the book is rigidly structured: a prologue, eight stories, then an interlude, another eight stories, another interlude, eight more stories, a third interlude, then a final six stories. (Is there some mathematical significance to all this – very likely!) The edition I have, from 1994, is also a physically small, almost square, pocket-sized book, with delightfully ragged edges. The book is set in Bern, where Einstein was living and working as a patent clerk. The short stories are untitled, but dated – from 14 April 1905 to 28 June 1905 – as if they are field reports. (Einstein’s paper on Special Relativity was published on 30 June 1905, just one of four papers he published that year.) All the stories involve unnamed Swiss villagers and townspeople. We begin with a Prologue, which starts thus:

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops. The young man slumps at his desk. He has come to the office at dawn, after another upheaval. His hair is  uncombed and his trousers are too big. In his hand he holds twenty crumpled pages, his new theory of time, which he will mail today to the German journal of physics . . . In the dim light that seeps through the room, the desks appear shadowy and soft, like large sleeping animals . . .

This opening, taken together with the title of the book, gives the reader an excellent impression of what is to come. The language is poetic, yet we are immediately introduced to the notion of time and the framework of physics – and to the man himself, young and dishevelled. The atmosphere is dreamlike; we are very firmly not in the stereotypical world of science, with its rationality, its tangibles and equations. Boundaries are blurred; we are on that border between sleep and wakefulness. The first story, ‘14 April 1905’, plunges us straight in: ‘Suppose time is a circle, bending back on itself.’ The second story begins: ‘In this world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze.’ But not all the stories begin in the same way – and, contrary to what you might expect, this is not science fiction, not in the traditional sense. Each short story is a different world, but Lightman’s genius, for me anyway, is that he uses us humans and this life, with all its joys and tragedies, to illustrate thirty different approaches to time. For example, in a world where there are two times, mechanical time (‘rigid and metallic’) and body time (‘squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay’), Lightman reflects us back at ourselves: ‘Many are convinced that mechanical time does not exist . . . They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats . . . Then, there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning . . .  They make love between eight and ten at night.’ Love comes up often in these stories; I guess love and time are inextricably linked. But what Lightman does, in fact, is to show how time – and how we feel about time – is linked to everything: pain, doubt, uncertainty, truth, humour, hope, knowledge, science, philosophy, beauty, what it means to be human. He doesn’t pull his punches; he is clearly on the side of those who live by body time, for instance, the people who understand that whatever time is doing, each drop of it is precious. One of the most beautiful scenes comes in a story in which everyone knows on precisely which day the world will end:

One minute before the end of the world, everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum. Men, women and children form a giant circle and hold hands. No one moves. No one speaks . . . This is the last minute of the world. In the absolute silence a purple gentian in the garden catches the light on the underside of its blossom, glows for a moment, then dissolves among the other flowers.

I learned so much from this book. It filled me with wonder, it added poetry and dreaming to my notions of science, it opened me up to other ways of noticing what is happening around me. Einstein’s Dreams was the start of a journey that I am still on – I am midway through a PhD in Creative Writing and am taking inspiration from particle physics – and I can’t recommend it highly enough. At the end of the book, Einstein ‘feels empty, and he stares without interest at the tiny black speck and the Alps’. I think Lightman is saying that if we stop dreaming, this is what happens. Einstein never stopped. Were he watching me write this, he might smile and nod, and, I hope, feel that in some tiny and most ungenius-like way I’m carrying on his legacy. Or, at the very least, I’m making him chuckle, which is just as good.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 51 © Tania Hershman 2016