THE LIAR´S CLUB (MARY KARR) AND THE IMAGE OF EINSTEIN AS SCIENCE´S PAULO COELHO

She liked to repeat a story about seeing Einstein lecture at Bell Labs (where she’d done some mechanical drawing in the war years—a detail it took us years to unearth). She swore that during the question period afterward, Einstein had to have some engineer in the auditorium explain an elementary law of mechanics to him. When the guy was shocked that the great physicist didn’t know such a simple thing, Einstein said, “I never bother to remember anything I can look up.” She loved that idea—a genius who couldn’t open a can of tuna fish but could order the entire universe in the caverns of his own skull. She also said that he bowed his head between questions like he was praying, then raised it up to give answers like those mechanical swamis wearing turbans that guessed your future for a quarter at Coney Island. At the crowded reception after the lecture, she claimed that nobody even tried to talk to him. He sat in a straight chair in the corner by himself looking like somebody’s daffy uncle.

Why are there so may anecdotes about Einstein as absent-minded, always looking like ‘somebody´s daffy uncle’? Will he be known in future as the apocryphal author of cheap help-self aphorisms, Facebook wall style? Was this mystic and oriental wiseman image something he deliberately cultivated? Does the fact that he didn´t like combs influence this image?

JANE EYRE (CHARLOTTE BRONTË) AND ARITHMETIC AS A METHOD TO IMPRESS AN ENGLISH BACHELORETTE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

‘What age were you when you went to Lowood?’

‘About ten.’

‘And you stayed there eight years: you are now, then, eighteen?’

I assented.

‘Arithmetic, you see, is useful; without its aid, I should hardly have been able to guess your age. It is a point difficult to fix where the features and countenance are so much at variance as in your case

There he goes! Nothing in his pockets, nothing up his sleeves...and he determines her age. Nowadays, Mr Rochester would be accused of doing mansplaining, but I recognize his merit of setting out nimbly the ecuation 10+8=18.

I wonder whether this skill will help him to manage to flirt with her. I´ll find out when I finish the book.