Lori's Reviews > Einstein’s Dreams

Consisting of two- and three-page bits that represent Einstein's dreams about time when he's still a clerk in a patent office, when he's just finished sending off the theory of relativity, in "Einstein's Dreams" Lightman writes beautiful prose. Same place, same people, same landmarks and balconies and lovers, each one with a different twist. Some are more creative than others but it's the writing that made the book for me.

"At some time in the past, scientists discovered that time flows more slowly the farther from the center of earth. The effect is minuscule, but it can be measured with extremely sensitive instruments. Once the phenomenon was known, a few people, anxious to stay young, moved to the mountains. Now all houses are built on Dom, the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa, and other high ground. It is impossible to sell living quarters elsewhere.

"Many are not content simply to locate their homes on a mountain. To get the maximum effect, they have constructed their houses on stilts. The mountaintops all over the world are nested with such houses, which from a distance look like a flock of fat birds squatting on long skinny legs. People most eager to live longest have built their houses on the highest stilts. Indeed, some houses rise half a mile high on their spindly wooden legs."

and

"In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time. The first is as rigid and metallic as a massive pendulum of iron that swings back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. The second squirms and wriggles like a bluefish in a bay. The first is unyielding, predetermined. The second makes up its mind as it goes along."

It's, naturally, Proustian. I loved reading most of it because most of it is entrancing. I could have done without details of Einstein's unhappy marriage; perhaps this went over my head because it added nothing that I could discern.

Something I loved but can't verify: Lightman writes that Einstein sometimes sent patents he rejected back to the applicants with instructions on how to make their inventions work. Maybe it didn't happen or maybe he was bored or maybe the thoughts never stopped churning (churning beautifully in his invented dreams) no matter; I hope it's true. It's a sentimental book, and so that touched me.

"Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined.

"Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment.

"It is a world of sincerity."