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| This book is incredible |
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| I used to design book markers as art projects. I would leave them in coffee shops for people to take freely. This one, pictured above, seems so relevant today. I keep thinking: |
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Thoughts to build on... "Charles Darwin imagined a small, warm pool, where the inanimate matter would arrange itself into the evolutionary matter, aided by chemical compounds and sufficient sources of energy" this initial act, the proverbial lighting-bolt kickstarting life on Earth, influencing the chain reaction of life as we know it today. 1954 was the beginning of a whole new era, that "moment in time" when the Holocene Epoch ended and the Anthropocene Epoch began. It was these three events of 1954 - The Worlds First Nuclear Power Plant (Russia), Castle Bravo (US Military), and CERN (Europe) - that set the stage for 1954 becoming Ground Zero, that moment in time, providing the "sufficient sources of energy" that will, without a doubt, influence the evolution of life on Earth from here on out... |
Princeton, 3. 1. 1954
Dear Mr Gutkind,
Inspired by Brouwer's repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me. What struck me was this: with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element. This unites us as having an "unAmerican attitude."
Still, without Brouwer's suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything "chosen" about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual "props" and "rationalization" in Freud's language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours,
A. Einstein
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| When Woman is Boss An interview with Nikola Tesla |
