The “How well you look!” and “How unchanged you are!” were soon over, and then the Great Foreigner arrived, pipe in hand and smiling gently. He complimented Bice on looking just the same as ever, and received the same compliment with grace, then inquired about Michele, Bice’s eldest brother and her second link with higher mathematics. Uncle Michele is a gentle little man who sits in Bern, Switzerland, and looks out into the world, leaning on a white beard that descends from almost under his blue eyes to the end of his necktie. Every night for twenty years, in the company of a friend, he has looked into The Divine Comedy, taking time off to look into his soul with a fierce, puritanical spirit tempered by a great deal of natural goodness; he has also looked into the field of economics, trying to find mathematical formulae to solve the crisis of the world; and for a long time, in the company of Einstein, he looked into the mysteries of higher mathematics. We had just finished hearing all about Uncle Michele’s health and his many grandchildren when Bice seemed suddenly to recall an extremely urgent matter—as if, indeed, it were the very reason she had flown all the way over here from Europe. “Herr Professor,” she asked, in German (the whole conversation, in fact, was in German), “this I really meant to ask you for a long time—why hasn’t Michele made some important discovery in mathematics?”
“Aber, Frau Bice,” said Einstein, laughing, “this is a very good sign. Michele is a humanist, a universal spirit, too interested in too many things to become a monomaniac. Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.” And he giggled happily to himself.
Then we spoke about dreams. Bice told us two symbolic dreams she had had years ago; I told the dream that the grandfather of a friend of mine had had the day before he died; Einstein told an absurd dream of his. He seemed the only one to find the conversation interesting, which it was not. Bice was now sleepy (the emotion had been too great for her); Maja sat silent and ate her lunch, which a nurse had brought in on a tray; and I nodded to Einstein’s words, searching impatiently for a way out of dreams to the subject of the responsibility of modern scientists. But the atmosphere somehow weighed on me. The mist was getting thicker, and it had begun to rain, with that quick, fingertip drumming on the leaves, on the roof, on some pail outside, that makes you go to sleep. It was dark in the room now. The only points of light were the white of the bed, the white of the nurse’s uniform, and the white of Maja’s hair and of Einstein’s head against the window—and his laughing eyes, his voice, and the joy that sprang from him. “Damn the responsibility of modern scientists on a damp day like this,” I thought. It made me both envious and angry to see this man in front of me who laughed so heartily at the most trivial things, who listened with such concentration to our nonsense, who was so full of life while I could see no reason even for breathing in that damp, misty air. “Why is he so young,” I asked myself, “and what makes him laugh so? Is he making fun of us, or what is this?” Then I began to understand. He had just come from the other room; he was stretching his mind; he was “abroad.” All these words were only formally addressed to us; actually they were references to some demonstration he must have received, in the heart of his own secret country, that something was exactly as he had suspected it would be. Yes, it could be nothing but this: he had done fruitful work that morning. I saw it now because I recognized myself in him—not as a scientist, alas, but as a child of seven, at which age it was my hobby to make locomotives with tin cans and old shaving brushes (the smokestack with the smoke). The situation was the same. When the joy of toymaking became too great, I had to interrupt my work and run to the living room, where the grownups were boring themselves to death. And I laughed at their words without bothering to inquire what they meant; I found them interesting, new, exciting; I was praised for being such good company while in actuality I was still playing with my locomotive—I was deciding in my mind what colors I would paint it, what I would use for wheels and lanterns—and it was good to know that no one shared my secret. “You and your toys,” I thought, looking at Einstein with the envy that an ailing old man has for a young athlete.
· · ·
Lunch was announced, and we went downstairs, leaving Maja alone. The smell of food consoled me for my humiliation. I began to eat. Einstein asked Bice for her impression of America, and she expressed her disappointment at the bad manners of children in this country. This led to a family argument, in which Einstein was asked to act as arbiter. Bice claimed that American children (she meant mine, of course) have no respect for the authority of their parents, or for that of such people as park attendants. To prove her point, she said that, on the day before, Vieri and his friend Herbert had laughed in the face of a park attendant when he told them not to play ball. Yes, they had obeyed him in the end, but not without making strange noises in his honor. (She didn’t know the name for this Bronx ceremony.) I conceded that this was frightful, but I reminded her that a park attendant in Europe was a sort of Commander-in-Chief of Leaves and Flowers and First Admiral of Public Fountains and of the paper boats in them. Even a smile addressed to him without proper authorization was considered daring. “When I was a boy in Italy, we never questioned anyone’s authority,” I said, “and thus we passed, with the most perfect manners, from the hands of our nurses to those of our tyrants.”
As moderator, Einstein asked me how I had managed to lose authority over my children.
“I didn’t have to work much,” I replied. “It was rather simple. I just told them, ‘Look at the kind of world in which we live. See what we, the grownups, are able to invent, from passports to radioactive clouds.’ ”
Bice contended that nothing is gained by embittering the lives of children with remarks of that nature, but Einstein was in full agreement with me when I answered that less than nothing is gained—in other words, that much is lost—by lulling them into the illusion that all is as it should be in the world. “You, as a scientist,” I said to Einstein, “know that the world is round and not divided naturally by cow fences into holy, restricted fatherlands. When you were young, there was still a semblance of good in governments and institutions, but today—see where we are today.”
He became very serious, as if he were seeing where we are today, but suddenly a smile lit up in his eyes, and it quickly spread all over his face and beyond it. He laughed happily, then said, “Let me tell you what happened to me years ago, before the other war, when there were no passports. The only two countries that required them were Russia and Rumania. Now, I was in Hungary and had to go to Rumania. I didn’t know where and how to apply for a passport, but I was told that it wasn’t necessary. There was a man who had a passport of his own, and he was kind enough to let anybody use it to cross the border. I accepted the offer, but when they asked me at the frontier what my name was, I said, ‘Wait a moment,’ took out the passport from my pocket, and had a great deal of trouble trying to find out who I was. Now, to go back to your point, I agree with you that those who exercise any kind of authority, be it the authority of a father or that of a government, have a definite obligation to show that they deserve respect, but the trouble with grownups in our day is that they have lost the habit of disobedience, and they should quickly learn it again, especially when it comes to the infringement of their individual rights.” He laughed again, this time like a bad boy, then, shaking his head, said, “These grownups. Isn’t it terrible how readily they will obey?”
“Take the loyalty test for federal employees, against which so few have protested,” I said.
“That is a case in point,” he answered. “People are asked to be loyal to their jobs. But who wouldn’t be loyal to his job? Too many people, indeed. Also in Italy and in Germany they used to test people’s loyalty to their jobs, and they found a far greater loyalty to jobs than to democracy. But now tell me another thing. What do you give to your children in the way of good news about the world?”
“Plenty,” I said. “For example, I tell them about Socrates, who was killed by the greatest democracy on earth for
standing at the corner drugstore and asking questions that made the politicians feel uncomfortable.”
“That’s not a cheerful story, either,” he said, “but if they were able to absorb some of the spirit of the Greeks, that would serve them a great deal later on in life. The more I read the Greeks, the more I realize that nothing like them has ever appeared in the world since.”
“You read the Greeks?” I said.
“But of course,” he replied, slightly surprised at my amazement. And so I heard, partly from him and partly from Miss Dukas, that he reads the Greeks to Maja every night for an hour or so, even if he has had a very tiring day. Empedocles, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Thucydides receive the tribute of the most advanced and abstract modern science every night, in the calm voice of this affectionate brother who keeps his sister company.
“You know,” I said, “that is great news. Young Americans, who have an idea of the pure scientist worthy of the comics, should be told that Einstein reads the Greeks. All those who relish the idiotic and dangerous myth of the scientist as a kind of Superman, free from all bonds of responsibility, should know this and draw their conclusions from it. Many people in our day go back to the Greeks out of sheer despair. So you too, Herr Professor, have gone back to the Greeks.”
He seemed a little hurt. “But I have never gone away from them,” he said. “How can an educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science.”
Lunch was over, and Einstein announced that he was going to go upstairs for his nap. Bice was assigned, for hers, a couch under a red-nosed portrait of Schopenhauer in the library-and-music room. The sun was shining again, so Bimba was told that she could go out to the garden to play, and I went for a walk around the town.
· · ·
When, after an hour or so, I came back to the house, I found Bimba still in the garden. I was quite disappointed to hear that I had missed an extraordinary event. Just after I had left and just as Einstein started to go upstairs, Bimba had asked him to play the violin for her. He had not touched his instrument for almost a year, but he took it out and played Bimba a few bars from a Mozart minuet.
I saw Einstein on the porch, waving to me. I joined him there and sat down next to him while he stretched his legs on a deck chair and leaned back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his pipe in mid-air. I had a volume of the German translation of Plato by Preisendanz in my briefcase and asked his permission to read aloud a passage from Gorgias. He listened patiently and was very amused by Socrates’ wit. When I was through, he said, “Beautiful. But your friend Plato”—and he extended his pipe in such a way that it became Plato—“is too much of an aristocrat for my taste.”
“But you would agree,” I said, “that all the qualities that make for a democratic attitude are noble qualities?”
“I would never deny that,” he said. “Only a noble soul can attain true independence of judgment and exercise respect for other people’s rights, while any so-called nobleman prefers to conceal his vulgarity behind such cheap shields as an illustrious name and a coat of arms. But, you see, in Plato’s time and even later, in Jefferson’s time, it was still possible to reconcile democracy with a moral and intellectual aristocracy, while today democracy is based on a different principle—namely, that the other fellow is no better than I am. You will admit that this attitude doesn’t altogether facilitate emulation.”
There was a silence, and he interrupted it, almost talking to himself. “I lived for a while in Italy,” he said, “and I think that the Italians are among the most humane people in the world. When I want to find an example of a naturally noble creature, I must think of the Italian peasants, the artisans, the very simple people, while the higher you go in Italian society …” and as he lifted his pipe a little, it became a contemptible specimen of a class of Italians he does not admire.
A small airplane was appearing and disappearing between treetops, and gargling noisily right into our conversation.
“In the past,” said Einstein, “when man travelled by horse, he was never alone, never away from the measure of man, because”—he laughed—“well, the horse, you might say, is a human being; it belongs to man. And you could never take a horse apart, see how it works, then put it together again, while you can do this with automobiles, trains, airplanes, bicycles. Modern man is besieged by mechanics. And even more ominous than this invasion of our lives is the rise of a class of people born of the machine, so to speak—people to whom certain powers must be delegated without the moral screening of a democratic process. I mean the technicians. You can’t elect them, you can’t control them from below; their work is not of the type that may be improved by public criticism.”
“Yes,” I said, “and they are born Fascists. What can you do against them?”
“Only one thing,” he said. “Try to prevent them from becoming a closed society, as they have become in Russia.”
“This is why,” I said, “now that we have lost the company of the horse, we may get something out of the company of men such as the Greeks were.”
“It may be an antidote to conformism,” he said.
“Don’t you think that American youth is becoming more and more conformist?” I asked.
“Modern conformism,” he said, “is alarming everywhere, and naturally here it is growing worse every day, but, you see, American conformism has always existed to some extent, because American society, being based on the community itself and not on the authority of a strong central state, needs the cooperation of every individual to function well. Therefore, the individual has always considered it his duty to act as a kind of spiritual policeman for himself and his neighbor. The lack of tolerance is also connected with this, but much more with the fact that American communities were religious in their origin, and religion is by its very nature intolerant. This will also help you understand another seemingly strange contradiction. For example, you will find a far greater amount of tolerance in England than over here, where to be ‘different’ is almost a disgrace, for everyone, starting with schoolboys and up to the inhabitants of small towns. But you will find far more democracy over here than in England. That, also, is a fact.”
“Tell me, Herr Professor,” I said. “This has nothing to do with what we were discussing, but what are the chances that a chain reaction may destroy the planet?”
He looked at me with sincere sympathy, took his pipe slowly out of his mouth, stretched out his arm in my direction, and explained why his pipe (now the planet) was not likely to be blown to bits by a chain reaction. And I was so pleased by his answer that I didn’t bother to understand the reasons.
“Tell me,” I now asked, “why is it that most scientists are so cynical with regard to the issues of war and peace today? I know many physicists who worked on nuclear reactions, and I am struck by their complete indifference to what goes on outside their field. Some of them are as conspicuous for their silence as they are for their scientific achievements.”
“So much more credit for those who talk,” said he. “But, believe me, my friend, it’s not only the scientists who are cynical. Everyone is. Some people sit in heated offices and talk for years and write reports and draw their livelihood from the fact that there exist displaced persons who cannot afford to wait. Wouldn’t you call this cynicism? I know that you were going to ask me about the responsibility of the scientists. Well, it is exactly the same as that of any other man. If you think that they are more responsible because in the course of their research they found things that are dangerous, such as the atomic bomb, then also Newton is responsible, because he discovered the law of gravitation. Or the philologists who contributed to the development of languages should be considered responsible for Hitler’s speeches. And for his actions. If scientists were to refrain from investigation for fear of what bad people might do with the results, then all of us might as well refrain from living altogether.”
“In other words,” I said, “it would amount to a f
orm of censorship on all our actions and thoughts.”
“A rather useless censorship,” he said, “for you can trust man to find other channels of evil.” Then he laughed heartily and added, “You may underestimate man’s ability to do evil.”
· · ·
It was time to go. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to Maja and call Bice. “We heard you laugh a good deal,” said Maja. “You must have had a good time downstairs.”
“Indeed,” I said. “And it was a great honor to have Professor Einstein spend such a long time chatting with me.”
“Macchè onore d’Egitto,” said Maja, which means, in colloquial Italian, “Honor, hell.”
Einstein went slowly back into his study. I caught a glimpse of his face; he was miles away from everybody, back in his foreign land.
As Bice, Bimba, and I were walking to the station, Bimba began to cry because she had lost the hat of a paper doll Miss Dukas had given her. She wanted to run back to look for it, but there was no time for that. To console her, Bice said, “Think, Bimba, when you grow up, you will be able to say that Einstein played the violin for you.”
“Oh, come,” said Bimba, “it isn’t true.”
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t he play for you?”
“Call that play?” she said, making a sour face. “He had to use a stick to play it.”
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 53
