Einstein did have views about God, but he was a physicist, not a moral philosopher, and, along with a tendency to make gnomic utterances—“God does not play dice with the universe” is his best-known aperçu on the topic—he seems to have held a standard belief for a scientist of his generation. He regarded organized religion as a superstition, but he believed that, by means of scientific inquiry, a person might gain an insight into the exquisite rationality of the world’s structure, and he called this experience “cosmic religion.”
It was a misleading choice of words. “Cosmic religion” has nothing to do with morality or free will or sin and redemption. It’s just a recognition of the way things ultimately are, which is what Einstein meant by “God.” The reason that God does not play dice in Einstein’s universe is that physical laws are inexorable. And it is precisely by getting that they are inexorable that we experience this religious feeling. There are no supernatural entities out there for Einstein, and there is no uncaused cause. The only mystery is why there is something when there could be nothing.
The hero’s journey, according to Joseph Campbell, features a descent into the belly of the beast: Think of Jonah in the whale, or me locked in the cargo bay of my Ram ProMaster on my second day on the job, until I figured out how to work the latch from the inside. During this phase of the journey, the hero becomes “annihilate to the self”—brought low, his ego shrunk, his horizons expanded. This has definitely been my experience working for Jeff Bezos.
During my 33 years at Sports Illustrated, I wrote six books, interviewed five U.S. presidents, and composed thousands of articles for SI and SI.com. Roughly 140 of those stories were for the cover of the magazine, with which I parted ways in May of 2017. Since then, as Jeff Lebowski explains to Maude between hits on a postcoital roach, “my career has slowed down a little bit.”
All day long I’m surrounded by reminders of nearly a quarter-century in this house. Who I am and who I’ve been, and who everyone else I love has been — it’s all laid out before me like a life-size version of a fourth-grade social studies diorama.
Then the Christmas boxes come down from the attic, and time extends backward even further, beyond this house, and forward to a future in which the broadest outlines are already clear though the details are still unknown. Getting down the Christmas decorations is always a reminder of eternity, that unfamiliar space where past and present and future exist simultaneously — a space I can enter, even figuratively, only at Christmastime.
I have come to appreciate my wheelchair as an empowering tool that enables me to live a full and active life, so don’t ever call me “wheelchair bound”. My wheelchair doesn’t bind me – it liberates me, and for that I love it.
For Gilman, who survived her near breakdown to conduct a vigorous intellectual life, the only effective cure was divorce. Benjamin (like Penelope) is firmly married, but her fascination with female sleep as a form of subjugation, and insomnia as instinctive rebellion, ripples through the book.
Is the work all that matters? The critical and popular adulation that greeted the recent Picasso show at Tate Modern would seem to say that it is. But The Italian Teacher pushes us further. If success is at least as much about the artist as the work, and its value as much about the market as the artist, then what possible hope is there for authenticity?
Few characters steer their own fates. Their lives are immutably organized according to the fiction of race. But they are alert to the fact of each other, and to beauty. The narrator describes a woman’s profile with such wonder it might be a skyline. Toomer’s personal impulses would run to experiments with racial definition and communal living. But here, in this lush, bleak book, in his evocation of the world as it is instead of how it ought to be, something hardier, more useful is conveyed — of the possibilities for epiphany, the reliable consolations of love and revenge. And in his style — this pastiche of poem, autobiography and fable — there is an integration of the self that the life never afforded.