einstein

Intimations of Mortality
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE END
1955
For his seventy-fifth birthday in March 1954, Einstein received from a medical center, unsolicited, a pet parrot that was delivered in a box to his
doorstep. It had been a difficult journey, and the parrot seemed traumatized. At the time, Einstein was seeing a woman who worked in one of
Princeton University’s libraries named Johanna Fantova, whom he had met back in Germany in the 1920s. “The pet parrot is depressed after his
traumatic delivery and Einstein is trying to cheer him up with his jokes, which the bird doesn’t seem to appreciate,” she wrote in the wonderful
journal she kept of their dates and conversations. 1
The parrot rebounded psychologically and was soon eating out of Einstein’s hand, but it developed an infection. That necessitated a series of
injections, and Einstein worried that the bird would not survive. But it was a tough bird, and after only two injections he bounced back.
Einstein likewise had repeatedly bounced back from bouts of anemia and stomach ailments. But he knew that the aneurysm on his abdominal
aorta should soon prove fatal, and he began to display a peaceful sense of his own mortality. When he stood at the graveside and eulogized the
physicist Rudolf Ladenberg, who had been his colleague in Berlin and then Princeton, the words seemed to be ones he felt personally. “Brief is this
existence, as a fleeting visit in a strange house,” he said. “The path to be pursued is poorly lit by a flickering consciousness.” 2
He seemed to sense that this final transition he was going through was at once natural and somewhat spiritual. “The strange thing about growing
old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost,” he wrote his friend the queen mother of Belgium. “One feels transposed
into infinity, more or less alone.” 3
After his colleagues updated, as a seventy-fifth birthday gift, the music system they had given him five years earlier, Einstein began repeatedly to
play an RCA Victor recording of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. It was an unusual choice for two reasons. He tended to regard Beethoven, who was
not his favorite composer, as “too personal, almost naked.” 4 Also, his religious instincts did not usually include these sorts of trappings. “I am a
deeply religious nonbeliever,” he noted to a friend who had sent him birthday greetings. “This is a somewhat new kind of religion.” 5
It was time for reminiscing. When his old friends Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine wrote a postcard from Paris recalling their time together
in Bern, more than a half century earlier, as members of their self-proclaimed Olympia Academy, Einstein replied with a paean addressed to that
bygone institution: “Though somewhat decrepit, we still follow the solitary path of our life by your pure and inspiring light.” As he later lamented in
another letter to Solovine, “The devil counts out the years conscientiously.” 6
Despite his stomach problems, he still loved to walk. Sometimes it was with Gödel to and from the Institute, at other times it was in the woods
near Princeton with his stepdaughter Margot. Their relationship had become even closer, but their walks were usually enjoyed in silence. She
noticed that he was becoming mellower, both personally and politically. His judgments were mild, even sweet, rather than harsh. 7
He had, in particular, made his peace with Hans Albert. Shortly after he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday, his son turned 50. Einstein, thanks to
a reminder from his son’s wife, wrote him a letter that was slightly formal, as if created for a special occasion. But it contained a nice tribute both to
his son and to the value of a life in science: “It is a joy for me to have a son who has inherited the main traits of my personality: the ability to rise
above mere existence by sacrificing one’s self through the years for an impersonal goal.” 8 That fall, Hans Albert came east for a visit.
By then Einstein had finally discovered what was fundamental about America: it can be swept by waves of what may seem, to outsiders, to be
dangerous political passions but are, instead, passing sentiments that are absorbed by its democracy and righted by its constitutional gyroscope.
McCarthyism had died down, and Eisenhower had proved a calming influence. “God’s own country becomes stranger and stranger,” Einstein wrote
Hans Albert that Christmas, “but somehow they manage to return to normality. Everything—even lunacy—is mass produced here. But everything
goes out of fashion very quickly.” 9
Almost every day he continued to amble to the Institute to wrestle with his equations and try to push them a little closer toward the horizon of a
unified field theory. He would come in with his new ideas, often clutching equations on scraps of paper he had scribbled the night before, and go
over them with his assistant of that final year, Bruria Kaufman, a physicist from Israel.
She would write the new equations on a blackboard so they could ponder them together, and point out problems. Einstein would then try to
counter them.“He had certain criteria by which to judge whether this is relevant to physical reality or not,” she recounted. Even when they were
defeated by the obstacles to a new approach, as they invariably were, Einstein remained optimistic. “Well, we’ve learned something,” he would say
as the clock ticked down. 10