ON 3 August 1946 the Chief Engineer on an American cargo boat wrote a charming letter to Einstein in America telling of an incident on board. The Boatswain and the Carpenter had found a half-starved kitten ashore in Germany, taken it on board, adopted it, and fed it rich food in abundance so that it filled out and flourished and became much attached to its foster parents. But it scratched a seaman who tried to play with it, and he cried out that the cat was crazy. The Boatswain defended the reputation of the kitten saying it was crazy like Einstein, who had had the good sense to leave Germany for the United States. As a result, the kitten was formally given the name “Professor Albert Einstein” by sailors who could not distinguish “relativity” from “kinship.”
On 10 August 1946, Einstein replied in English as follows:
Thank you very much for your kind and interesting information. I am sending my heartiest greetings to my namesake, and also from our own tomcat who was very interested in the story and even a little jealous. The reason is that his own name “Tiger” does not express, as in your case, the close kinship to the Einstein family.
With kind greetings to you, to my namesake’s foster parents, and to my namesake himself,…
__________
Here are two letters that Einstein sent from Princeton to Gertrud Warschauer in England. She was the widow of a Berlin rabbi, and the letters thank her for Christmas presents that she had sent him on two successive years. A word as to the Englishman, Michael Faraday, mentioned in the second letter: He was a self-taught genius and a lovable man, and one of the greatest experimental physicists of all time. His discoveries and revolutionary ideas in the field of electromagnetism were crucial to the development of relativity. The first letter is dated 2 January 1952:
Dear Gertrud,
The cute ruler that you sent me lies before me. Up to now it was left to intuition to decide whether something that I produced was straight or crooked, parallel, or oblique. I see, however, that, if possible, you would rather avoid being in the hands of the gods (that’s how I interpret the ruler).
The second letter was dated 27 December 1952:
You have given me great joy with the little book about Faraday. This man loved mysterious Nature as a lover loves his distant beloved. In his day there did not yet exist the dull specialization that stares with self-conceit through hornrimmed glasses and destroys poetry. …
__________
Here is a translation of a quatrain that was found among Einstein’s papers. There is no indication of the date or the occasion. It does not seem to have been published before:
That little word “WE” I mistrust, and here’s why:
No man of another can say “He is I.”
Behind all agreement lies something amiss.
All seeming accord cloaks a lurking abyss.
__________
In reading the following, it is well to bear two things in mind. One is that when Titian was painting a portrait of the Emperor Charles V he dropped a paint brush, which the Emperor graciously picked up for him, saying that Titian deserved to be served by an Emperor. The other is that St. Florian was often depicted as carrying a vessel from which he poured flames, and that his protection was often invoked against fire. However, the phrase used by Einstein in his postscript is a German catch phrase that is applied to a wide assortment of calamities.
A famous German author had been sketching portraits of famous people for ultimate publication in a book. He had just received a cable from an American magazine asking him to make a portrait of Einstein, which, after it appeared in the magazine, he planned to include in his book. Accordingly, on 12 November 1931 he wrote a persuasive letter to Einstein in Berlin asking him if he would consent to pose for his portrait. He said that when he approached politicians they always consented because they needed the publicity, but he well realized that Einstein would be reluctant. He added that even the Emperor Charles V had posed a few times for Titian, and he promised that, in view of the different ratios of greatness on both sides, he would not require Einstein to pick up his paint brush.
On 17 November 1931 Einstein replied as follows:
Do you really believe that the Emperor Charles V would have been so enthusiastic if Titian had painted a picture postcard of him that every Tom, Dick, and Harry could obtain for 10 Pfennig? I believe that he would have picked up the brush for Titian no less cheerfully, but would surely have asked Titian to spare him such publicity—at least during his lifetime.
So please do not be angry with me if I, too, feel that way. Besides, I have to leave for California in a few days, and my hands are full. …
P.S. O St. Florian, spare my house. Burn some other fellow’s down!
__________
A scientific conference was planned for 1955 in Bern to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the special theory of relativity, which Einstein had conceived while working in the patent office there. His friend Max von Laue wrote inviting him to attend as the guest of honor. But Einstein was now in his mid-seventies, with death about to claim him. He answered von Laue in February 1955 with these words:
Old age and ill health make it impossible for me to take part in such occasions, and also I must confess that this divine dispensation is somewhat liberating for me. For everything that has anything to do with the cult of personality has always been painful to me.
The following is taken from a letter to an artist friend written on 27 December 1949:
It is really a puzzle what drives one to take one’s work so devilishly seriously. For whom? For oneself?—one soon leaves, after all. For one’s contemporaries? For posterity? No, it remains a puzzle.
