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?
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