Einstein's Dreams

 

Listen to a preview only of an English version of the audiobook here

 

Unless you understand German, you won't gain much from this audiobook which is all there is on YouTube of Alan Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" — there's no point in learning German now; you blew your chance of learning it by total immersion by not letting us win the last war.

 

 

I can't even offer you a free online copy of the book, which is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the young Einstein is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, it's a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.

Which is perhaps a better way to explain his theory of relativity as we grapple with wanting to press the undo button of life, to unwind the reel of experience, to edit out the word spoken in anger, as we wonder what we would have done had we known then what we know now.

The book offers a wonderful vision of what time has been or might be.

 

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Are you dead yet?

 

 

Are you dead?" may not be the most appropriate of questions, but it must be on the minds of many Chinese - judging by the popularity of a mobile app in China. So why has an app called, 'Are You Dead?' gone viral there?

The concept is simple: you need to check in with it every two days by clicking a large button to confirm that you are still alive. If not, for the low price of eight yuan a month it will get in touch with your appointed emergency contact and inform them that you may be in trouble.

There have been times when I have been wondering about you as well, and so I've built my own app which is freely available by clicking here.

 

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Nine-to-five

 

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Charles Bukowski famously stated, "The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you."

I think that's where I part company with him, as I have never had a nine-to-five job even if I had a nine-to-five job, if you know what I mean. I always had a job that interested me and always thought I worked for myself and my own betterment and benefit. And the 'five' in 'nine-to-five' never stopped me from working longer, not for the paid overtime which I never claimed but for what it gave me in extra satisfaction.

I think I really hit my stride when I began contract work when it was not the hours I worked but the results I achieved, finally culminating in becoming self-employed and running my own business where I was free to work as long and as often as I wanted, usually well into the night and over weekends. "All work and no play ..." was never dull for me.

Reading the letter to his publisher John Martin in which he expressed his relief at having escaped full-time employment, I saw something that reminded me of a time-and-motion study I once did in a metal factory. There the operators stood like robots by their machines, performing the same routine movements many hundreds of times a day, day in, day out, year in, year out, with one operator telling me almost proudly he had been doing the very same job at the very same metal press for twenty years. I had to look into his eyes to see if there was any life left inside.

 

8-12-86 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors." And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?" They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: "I put in 35 years..." "It ain't right..." "I don't know what to do..." They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!" One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. yr boy, Hank

 

The movie "Factotum" is based on the author's highly autobiographical novel by the same name and a handful of stories about the poetically debauched author’s primary subjects: drinking, writing, women and gambling. But mostly drinking. That's where I also part company with him, as I haven't touched the stuff in years - except for an occasional glass of retsina because old Greek habits die hard. "Yamas!"

 

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

 

 

After a very uneasy night's sleep, I woke up this morning with the most unusual thought in my head: a long list of all those friends and acquaintances who have since died! The list was almost endless and seemed to give me a message.

And here comes the spooky bit: as I switched on my computer, I was confronted with a trailer of "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry"! I had seen the movie when it had come out a few years ago and could see the connection immediately. Had all those algorithms gone telepathic?

 

 

For those who haven't seen the movie, you may want to watch it here, if you understand Turkish, or read the book here, if you can read Chinese.

 

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Is there a Diogenes to give me a hand?

 

 

Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher, famously threw away his cup after seeing a child drink water from his cupped hands, exclaiming, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living." I think of Diogenes every time I look at the accumulation of clutter in and around the house. He would have a field day here!

For most of my life I lived like Diogenes, never accumulating anything, or if I did, disposing of it when I moved on, which was scores of times. Everything I owned fitted into one medium-sized suitcase and an expandable pilot case reserved for the heavy reference books I needed for my work (those were the days before the internet!) which I took onto an aircraft as hand-luggage to avoid paying for excess baggage.

The need to travel light through life became almost pathological, so much so that if I stayed in one place for too long — and six months was usually too long — I would do the occasional trial-packing to ensure it all still fitted into the one suitcase. If not, I would dispose of it at once.

Not that I needed role models but I did have two: Noel, my best friend for almost thirty years who never had much because he never had much — money, that is! — and Brian, a latterly-acquired friend who never had much because he didn't want to spend the money — of which he had too much, presumably because he never spent it! Both were living examples of the age-old quote "A man's riches are the fewness of his wants".

That was forty years ago! Against my better judgement, I then turned domestic with a vengeance, acquiring everything that's needed for a comfortable life — and even more that's not needed and only makes life more complex and therefore less comfortable — often in duplicate and even triplicate, to the point that I no longer own the possessions but the possessions own me. That once medium-sized suitcase would morph into several shipping containers if I ever had to move again — unless I did some very radical trial-packing. Is there a Diogenes to give me a hand?

 

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