THE NIGHT I MET EINSTEIN
When I was a young man, just beginning to make
my way, I was invited to dine at the home of a
distinguished New York philanthropist, Lady Jane Vanderbilt.
After dinner, our hostess led us to an
enormous drawing room. Other guests were pouring in. My eyes
set on two unnerving sights. Servants were arranging small gilt chairs
in long, straight rows. Up front, leaning against the wall, were
several classical musical instruments. Apparently we were in
for an evening of symphony music. I use the phrase “in for” because music meant nothing to me. I am almost tone
deaf. I was born with poor hearing and became almost totally deaf in my left ear at age
eight when I contacted a mastoid infection in my left middle ear. Only with great effort can I carry
the simplest tune.
In those days,
symphony musicians had long hair, hence, I called their stuff ‘long hair;’ they
played violins, piccolos, trumpets, clarinets, and such. The
drummer’s clash the symbols, and pound on the timpani drums, gongs, gourds, triangles, cow bells, and so
forth. Over and over all evening long, no vocals--guitars or drum sets, just instrumentals. It’s all
guaranteed to wave me to sleep and then wake me up at the crescendos. I avoided attending symphony
concerts as if my life depended on it. Very few times have I been forced or trapped, as in this situation,
to be here in the first place.
So, what I have
learned to do (out of desperation) is bide my time until the tuning stops, the
conductor raises both arms, stops the tuning, brings his
arms down which starts the musicians. With the audience now comfortably seated, I start fixing my face in
what I hope has an appearance of intelligent appreciation of the music. I close both ears from the inside
and tuck my palm under my chin for support-usually my right palm as I am right handed. Next, I begin
the process of what I call “first stage dream-hand submergence.” Practiced as I am, it takes but a few
moments, and those nearby who happen to look my way observe only a contemplating lover of the arts
with his eye lids hanging partly open. On this occasion there must not have been enough crescendos.
Suddenly, the
audience was on their feet clapping. It was intermission. I had slept through
the first
half. I quickly stood up, embarrassed and afraid I had
snored or worse? Just then I heard a gentle,
accented voice on my right say.
“You’re not fond
of Ravel?”
I knew as much
about Ravel as I did about nuclear fission. But I did know one of the most
famous
faces in the world, with his well-known shock of untidy
white hair and piercing eyes. I was standing next to Albert Einstein.
“Well,” I said,
hesitating uncomfortably. I had been asked a casual question so all I had to do
was be equally casual in my reply. I could see, however, from the
look in my neighbor’s extraordinary blue eyes that their owner had no intention of merely going through
the perfunctory duties of elementary politeness. Regardless of what value I might place on my
part in the verbal exchange with this man, hispart mattered very much. Above all, I knew this was a man to
who you did not tell a lie.
“I don’t know
anything about Ravel,” I blubbered out. “I’ve never heard of him.”
A look of perplexed astonishment washed across his mobile
face. “You have never heard Ravel?”
He made it sound as though I had said; I'd never taken a
bath. “It isn’t that I don’t want to like Ravel,” I replied
hastily. “It’s just that I’m tone deaf, or almost tone deaf, and actually I’ve
never really enjoyed this stuff.”
A look of concern
came upon his face,
. “Please,” he
said abruptly, “You will come with me.”
Einstein took my arm with one hand and at the same time placed his
famous pipe at the side of his mouth. As helped me down the hall and across the crowded foyer, I kept my
eyes fixed on the carpet. A rising murmur of puzzled speculation as to who I was followed us. Einstein
paid no attention to it. Resolutely, he led me up some stairs to the
floor above. He opened the door into a book-lined messy study, drew me in, and shut the door.
“Now,”
he said with a small, troubled smile. “You will tell me, please, how long you
have felt this way about music?”
“All my life,” I
said, “The fact that I don’t enjoy music isn’t important. I wish you would go
back
downstairs, and enjoy the music.”
He shook his
head and scowled.
“Tell me, is there any kind of music that you do like?”
“Well, I like
songs that have words and the kind of music where I can follow the tune.”
Einstein smiled
and nodded. “You can give me an example perhaps?”
“Well, almost
anything by Bing Crosby or Ray Charles.”
He nodded
briskly.
“Good!” He went to a corner of the room, opened the cover of a
phonograph and
started pulling out records from a cabinet. Soon he beamed.
“Ah! Bing Crosby’s, White Christmas,” He put Bing’s record on the phonograph, lowered the needle arm
onto the edge of the record. In a moment his study was filled with the relaxed lilting strains of
White Christmas. He grinned at me, as he kept time with the stem of his pipe. After four or five stanzas, he
stopped the phonograph.
“Now will you
tell me, please, what you have just heard?” The simplest answer seemed to be too
just sing the lines. I began quietly, but desperately trying to
stay in tune.
“I’m dreaming of
a White Christmas just like the ones I used to know. Where the tree tops
glisten andchildren listen to hear sleigh bells in the snow.”
The expression
on Einstein’s face was like a beautiful morning sunrise. “You see! You do have
an
ear,” he cried with delight.
I mumbled
something about this being one of my favorite songs; I had heard it hundreds of
times, so it didn’t think it really prove anything.
“Nonsense! It
proves everything. Do you remember your first arithmetic lesson in first grade?
Suppose, at your
very first contact with numbers your teacher had ordered you to work out a
problem in, say, long division. Could you have done so?”
“No, of course
not.”
“Precisely!”
Einstein made a triumphant wave with his pipe stem. “It would have been
impossible and you would have reacted in panic. You would have closed your
mind to long division. As a result, because of that one small mistake by your teacher, it is possible
that for your whole life you would be denied the beauty of long division, or maybe the rhythm of time in the
universe. Who knows what would become of you at that impressionable age?" The pipe stem went
up and out in another wave.
“But on your
first day no teacher would be so foolish. You would start with elementary
things. Then, when you had acquired skill with the simplest problems you
would be led up to long division. So it is with music.”
Einstein picked
up the Bing Crosby record,
“This simple charming song is like simple
addition or subtraction. You have mastered it.”
Next came Ray
Charles’s, “Born to Lose, I’ve lived my life in vain. Every dream has only
brought me pain. All my life I’ve always been so blue. Born to lose and
now I’m losing you.”
“Now we go on to
something more complicated.” He found another record and turned on the
phonograph once again. The golden voice of John McCormack
singing The Trumpeter filled the room. After a few lines he stopped the phonograph.
“So! You will
sing that back to me please?” I did with a good deal of self-consciousness but
for me a surprising degree of accuracy. Einstein stared at me with a
look on his face that I had seen only once before in my life. That was on the face of my father when I
graduated from college.
“Excellent!
Wonderful! Now this Caruso.”
I managed to reproduce an approximation of
the sounds of that famous tenor, and a few more
followed. I couldn't shake a feeling of amazement, of being
here. He was completely occupied by what we were doing. Recordings of music without words came next
which I was instructed to follow by humming. When I reached for a high note his mouth opened and
his head went back as if to help me attain what seemed unattainable. Evidently I came close
enough in my humming, for he turned off the phonograph.
“Now young
man," he said, putting his arm through mine pipe in his mouth, “We are ready for
Ravel.”
As we returned to
our seats in the drawing room, the musicians were tuning up for the final
selection.
Einstein smiled and gave me a reassuring pat
on the knee.
“Just allow
yourself to listen. That is all.”
For me, it wasn’t really all. Without the
effort he had just poured out for a total stranger, I would
never have heard as I did that night for the first time in
my life, Ravel’s “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I have heard it many times since. I don’t think I shall ever tire
of it, because I never listen to it alone. I sit beside a small man with a shock of untidy white hair, a pipe
clamped between his teeth, and yes, all that’s contained in those blue eyes in their extraordinary warmth,
beaming through the wonder of the universe. I had been given a passport to the universe of
music.
When the concert was finished I added my
genuine applause to that of the other patrons. My feeling that this was going to be an Armageddon had disappeared. I
seldom again felt lost in the rhythm of universal music.
Suddenly with an icy glare at me our hostess
confronted us. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Einstein, that you
missed so much of the performance tonight."
Hastily Einstein
came to his feet.
“Don’t be sorry,
my young friend here and I were engaged in one of the greatest activities man
is
capable of.”
She
looked puzzled. “Really? And what is that?’
-6-
Einstein smiled and
put his arm across my shoulders and said, what for me at least became an
endless debt.
“We were opening
up yet another fragment of the universal frontier of the original rhythm of
beautiful music in the universe."
"Oh,
please forgive me,” Then turning to the person on his right he said,
"Let me
introduce you to Robert Ravel."
DR. KARL WALLACE D.D.S.
