Blog Response to Alan Lightman’s “from Einstein’s Dream”

Reading “from Einstein’s Dream: 14 May 1905,” it’s in the ninth paragraph that the material truly came alive for me. Lightman begins this paragraph by writing, “And those who return to the outer world… Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds” (Lightman 61).  In this sentence Lightman’s use of the parents and children not only represents the fickle way in which time affects us, but through the image of a parents embrace, makes me feel the way in which an instant can last far longer for one person than another, can create a divide in perception and experience. Later in the paragraph Lightman writes, “Children curse their parents for trying to hold them forever, curse time for their own wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. These now old children want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time” (Lightman 61). The images in this paragraph, of the inevitability one is confronted with, of the fear and love it creates, are almost brutal. It’s this brutality that evokes the response in me, though, that makes the life Lightman is speaking to in the poem real. In these sentences Lightman captures the fight in living things, to grow, to survive, to somehow resist time. As he later states, it’s within the parameters of this experience that life occurs. In this paragraph Lightman captures the glimpse for me, the way I feel when I look back on how fast life has already gone and how little I can do to keep up.

Caitlin Rajala