Einstein’s Smile

 

During my undergraduate years, 1950–1954, at Princeton, I saw Albert Einstein twice, the first time during a lecture by Bertrand Russell. Russell had just been awarded the Nobel Prize, and the overcrowded lecture hall, McCosh 50, waited with excited antici­pation. I could find a seat only in an aisle, squeezing in among other students on the stepped floor. But my “aisle seat” bordered the row in the center of which sat Einstein. What a thrill it was for an unworldly, impressionable young man, a freshman in more than one sense, to catch a glimpse of that extraordinary genius, and while waiting to hear a lecture by yet another remarkable per­son! When Russell ascended to the podium amid much applause, he spotted, nodded to, and smiled at Einstein. My eyes and racing heart delighted in seeing Einstein smile back at Russell. Einstein’s face seemed to me familiar, like my grandfather’s face, thick mustache, big nose, bright eyes, under a halo of white hair, hair that seemed to have a mind of its own. His wild white hair made him look as if the energy he wrote about was emanating from his head at the speed of light. When he smiled, his face became all wrinkled, as if strange mathematical formulas were etched in it, a kind of hieroglyphics of gentleness, wisdom, and compassion.

In the post World War II years, Princeton found itself in a tran­sitional period. Although no one used the terms then, in retrospect it was the beginning on American campuses of what is now called diversity and multiculturalism. In the early fifties, Princeton was still entirely (or almost so) white and male. In my years there I saw only one black student, a member of the class ahead of me, and had only one female teacher, the highly capable and qualified wife of a popular Chemistry professor, permitted to conduct a small preceptorial in Comparative Literature but not to lecture. In those days, Princeton students were not only white and male but also predominantly Protestant and economically well-to-do, often from prestigious prep schools. It became the University’s policy in­creasingly to diversify this extremely homogeneous student body. Scholarships were given to poor, bright public school students, like myself. As a freshman thinking I wanted to be an engineer, I
was placed in advanced Math, Physics, and Chemistry classes. But, while I had been very well-prepared academically at Brook­lyn Technical High School, I was very ill-prepared for the finan­cial, social, emotional, and spiritual shock that Princeton was for students like me in the early fifties.

That culture shock perhaps can be suggested or symbolized by the undergraduate dress code, an unofficial uniform, consisting of white shirt, khaki pants, and white shoes, called white bucks in the slang of the time. (Since buck, a word that implies sexual prowess, also refers, often disparagingly, to “a male American Indian or Negro,” I’ve wondered whether “white bucks” were consciously or otherwise a racial and sexual code.) I could never bring myself to wear the unofficial uniform that virtually every other student wore. It was not primarily a financial consideration; though purchasing the uniform would have further strained my limited budget, I could have managed to buy the few necessary clothes. But I never could have worn them, for I had been cursed or blessed with a certain sense of self and endowed with a rich cultural heritage that I would in no way or fashion repudiate.

My name was changed when I was a small child from De Lalla to Clements. After my mother died and her family banished my roving, unfaithful father, my maternal grandparents, immigrants from Italy, legally adopted my sister and me. Because my grand­father and grandmother were respectively the oldest brother and sister of their siblings, their home, in which I grew up, was the gathering place, on holidays and special occasions, of our large, extended family, a tribe of closely connected, warm, loving, blood-related people. Inevitably, I learned about the kind of melting pot pressures and prejudices to which they were subjected and which motivated my grandfather as a newly-arrived young man in this country to change his name from Clemente to Clements. During World War II, I saw my Italian grandfather regularly raise the American flag up the pole planted in our front lawn, and I under­stood why he did so. I heard my Aunt Clara’s stories about being called dago and guinea, hurt by her childhood “friends.” I learned about national stereotypes by watching wartime movies of white-skinned, fair-haired German soldiers standing firm and doomed while a dark Italian surrendered in the Sahara to Humphrey Bogart, fixed the stalled American tank, and sang “Aida.”

But I also listened to that and other Italian operas on Sundays when my grandfather tuned in our radio and filled our house with
music. I admired the work of Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, and other great art of the Renaissance and of ancient Rome. I heard Dante read in his mellifluous native tongue, and I learned that a part of the speech of Dante’s Ulysses to his men was, in translation, these wise words: “Consider your nature / you were not meant to live like brutes / but to pursue virtue and under­standing.” So, even though my name had been changed to a name that had itself years previously been changed (a name that still means clemency, mercy, compassion) and even though (and per­haps especially because) I felt some of the same pressures and prejudices that my family had suffered, I had deep within me a clear sense of identity, of who I was and am. As a college student away from home, I was, rightly and stubbornly, not going to pre­tend otherwise, not going to try to disguise myself, so to speak, by putting on the fashionable costume of this time and of that place.

Although some students became my good friends (mostly out­siders, like myself: Jewish students, homely or shy young men, other poor, bright students on scholarships) and all were my schoolmates, many unsmilingly snubbed me, or worse. One par­ticularly telling example of the kind of snobbery and rejection that prevailed at Princeton occurred near the start of my Freshman year, around the same time that I first saw Einstein smile. Selling and solicitation were not allowed on campus by outside vendors. But through the Office of Financial Aid and with its approval, I got a job selling from dorm to dorm a large, coffee-table book, with pictures and captions reprinted from Life magazine. It would make a good holiday gift, one of the selling points I was instructed to emphasize. Though I did not dress or look like other under­graduates, I naturally presented myself as a fellow student work­ing my way through college. Some students purchased the book and some politely turned the offer down, but others curtly or ar­rogantly cut me off in the midst of my brief sales presentation, slamming the door in my face. Well, I thought, such are the chal­lenges and experiences of salesmen in general, and I was prepared to accept all that for the sake of helping to finance my education. What was unsettling, even shocking, was my being accosted by two Campus Security Officers, escorted to their headquarters and questioned, until they could establish that I was a legitimate, ap­proved student-salesman. Some students had phoned them to say a suspicious-looking character was pretending to be a student and doing something illegal and criminal, taking money under false
pretenses. Thus, early in my undergraduate career, I came to un­derstand how certain of my fellow Princetonians stereotypically regarded me. Other events over the next four years confirmed my judgment and indicated that such students embraced the still cur­rent, false notion that economic and social superiority implies moral, intellectual, even physical superiority.

I didn’t think then about it very consciously, but if I had I sup­pose I might have asked, “Why should I, who traced my origins to one of the great Mediterranean cultures at the center of Western Civilization and the Princeton education, want to look or be like the relatively upstart, wealthy, white, Anglo-Saxon boys whose origins lay in what were once considered the barbarian provinces but who through history’s twisted windings now dominated the Princeton campus?”

I paid for my non-conformity, of course, paid dearly for my sense of self and for being myself. This odd, poor public school boy from Brooklyn on full-tuition scholarship worked two and three jobs every semester, gardening, cleaning houses, hawking sandwiches or hot dogs and sodas in the dorms and at football games, night-watching the Princeton Chapel, doing research as­sistance for the Philosophy Department’s Chairman, and various other work, because my loving, immigrant family could afford me little financial support for my upkeep and other educational ex­penses. In my sophomore year I managed to be excused from eating in the University Dining Halls so I could save some money by eating spare meals of bread, beans, and coffee heated on a hot plate in my room. In my junior and senior years, I minimized ex­penses by joining Prospect Cooperative Club, one of the few social and eating clubs that would accept students like me. Imagine be­ing rejected by most Clubs simply because your father was not a millionaire or because you did not come from the “right” back­ground! Again, real confusion existed on campus as in the general society about the relation of financial and social standing to moral worth and acceptability. Even at the relatively liberal Prospect Club, one upperclassman tried to blackball me when I applied for admission because earlier in my sophomore year I had refused his ordering me to perform his managerial work at food concessions for no pay. How arrogant and un-Christian, I thought at the time, especially since the student was majoring in Religion and intend­ing to become a minister!

I felt peculair about my differences, my big, broken nose, my darker skin and thick black hair, the fact that one day while sitting in the front row of Professor Robert Scoon’s Philosophy class I looked at my outstretched feet and noticed holes in my socks as well as the tops of my worn, size 13, black shoes, my naked toes wriggling embarrassment at me. Where could I hide my big Ital­ian feet, not confined by white bucks? Unlike many students, I could not afford to import blonde, blue-eyed young women from sister colleges for football weekends. On other weekends, I watched limousines drive up to chauffeur some fellow students wherever they might wish to go while I wished for train fare to escape to Brooklyn to visit my family and the attractive young black woman I met and dated while working in May’s Depart­ment Store during the summer before leaving for Princeton. That time was well before the Civil Rights Movement, and we dated not out of any sense of civic duty but because we liked and came to love each other. We exchanged long letters when apart, but I knew of course that even had it been financially feasible it would have been considered totally outré to bring her to the Princeton campus. I never saw a black woman on campus in those days, and I’m sure that a number of students would have considered this woman I loved inferior and unacceptable.

Thin and ill-nourished, I felt lonely, isolated, depressed. The fi­nancial, social, emotional, and psychological costs of attending Princeton accumulated, snowballed. In the words of a favorite poet I first read at Princeton, “pitched past pitch of grief, more pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” A few weeks from graduation, I pressed a razor to my wrists, painfully, repeatedly slashing my flesh, bleeding a signature across my newly-completed senior thesis. When I gaze at my wrists today, I can still see the scars.

It was a cry for help, the psychiatrist opined. And I got help, from faculty members, from my outsider friends and from my family. I became well enough to return from home to campus in time to take my comprehensive exams and graduate with honors. With all else that Princeton taught me, I learned something about suffering and compassion.

In the years after Princeton, I have wondered why, just weeks from graduation, I fell into such despair  as to hurt myself as I did and to jeopardize getting my degree. Of course, the darkness may descend inexplicably upon us without our full awareness of its history of complicated causes and reasons, and currently it is the rage to speak of chemical imbalances in these instances. But one
reason I acted as I did resided ironically in the fact that I had been too well-bred by my self-sacrificing family in the ways of Old-World courtesy to behave impolitely, much less violently, toward others, so I turned years of frustration, humiliation, anger, and sorrow inward, against myself in an actual and symbolic violence. I had no effective, direct way of protesting both my and my fam­ily’s history, even though it had all been too much for me not to protest in some way. My private action foreshadowed, perhaps, the public demonstrations of the sixties that helped to bring about certain necessary changes in colleges and society in general. I be­lieve, also, that my depression and despair contained intellectual as well as emotional components. I had become enamored of the Humanities, had dropped Engineering after my freshman year and majored in Philosophy, specializing in the Philosophy of Re­ligion and of Art. A certain pessimistic rationalism developed in my thinking, not surprising considering the skepticism of the post-War, existential, God-is-dead times, of Philosophy studies in general, and of my own discoveries in researching and writing my independent senior thesis on the nature of truth, artistic truth in particular, “The Cognitive Content of Art” being the punning title of my thesis. In the final analysis, what in those painful years at Princeton had I, Art Clements, come to learn and know about Beauty and Truth? Very little, I thought, feeling that my senior thesis was as unworthy as some others had judged me to be.

In spite of and along side of my hardships, Princeton actually gave me wonderful educational opportunities: not only to be in the presence of Einstein and Russell, but also to attend poetry readings by Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas, to study creative writing with Randall Jarrell and Saul Bellow, to be a research as­sistant to the Philosophy Department’s Chairman, Ledger Wood (who graciously acknowledged my help in a later edition of his A History of Philosophy), and to Walter Kaufman (for whose children I also baby-sat), and to take courses with influential teachers like W. T. Stace, Northrop Frye, R. P. Blackmur, Thomas Riggs, and numerous other teachers important to my intellectual develop­ment. So deeply did my alma mater instill in me a love of wisdom and learning that, after my stint in the Army near the end of the Korean War, I went on to graduate work in English Literature and thereafter remained in academia as a teacher of Renaissance and Modern Literature and Creative Writing. As an undergraduate, I had read Pascal, “the heart has its reasons which the Reason
doesn’t know.” Over the years, I have more fully appreciated the heart’s wisdom, have come to know a little more about Truth and its relation to Beauty, and have learned that lovely, elusive Truth, will more readily yield her deepest secrets to the heart or creative imagination than to the head or rational intellect.

A few years ago, with my Native American wife, Susan Deer Cloud, who is also a writer, I revisited Princeton. We reveled in discovering a very different campus than the one I had told her about, a campus much more reflective of our larger society, with a heterogeneous student body, male and female, diverse and color­ful and unique in face and dress as well as in heart and soul. We were seeing fully displayed at last on this campus what, through my heritage and my studies, as well as through love and certain other life experiences, I had come to learn about each person’s es­sential Self, that mystery at the center of the universe. Each per­son’s core value resides not in looking superficially or abstractly just like everyone else, though every one is profoundly interre­lated, but rather in being a distinctive, unique, even divine, mani­festation of mystery. Einstein wrote of “the great Mystery into which we were born,” and he believed “the fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.” My wife tells me Indians (an in­spired etymology of which is “Indio,” from the Italian in dio, meaning “in God”) and other so-called “primitives” have always known all that. In any case, I believe the University is now a healthier and happier place, and Einstein, who knew about preju­dice and persecution and the need for world peace, would be more pleased with today’s campus.

The second time I saw Einstein at Princeton occurred on a warm, sunny day in my senior year. While I was walking back to campus from Prospect Club, Einstein, taking one of his regular walks, smiled at me! And I immediately returned his smile, so warm, genuine, and knowing that I have never forgotten it, that upturned mouth of this century’s genius-on-a-pedestal impressing itself on my mind as vividly, and intriguingly, as any smile painted by Da Vinci. My grandfather, who had been a father to me, had died two years earlier, and here was a man who looked like him and was smiling in a fatherly way at me. But it took me many years, after much reflection on my Princeton experience and further knowledge about Einstein, to come to some understanding of the deeper meaning of that special smile.

It was perhaps all my oddness of appearance and independ­ence of mind and heart that Einstein recognized and smiled at so readily and warmly. He noticed, if not a mirror image, perhaps a familiarly odd image. The rather unconventional man who wore no socks might well have been amused by the sight of an under­graduate whose toes poked through the worn-out tops of his black shoes, an undergraduate with a big, broken nose prominent on his smiling, homely face, under a thick shock of black hair, looking and dressing entirely unlike other students. That brilliant man no doubt took all of me in at a glance. I’ve wondered whether his clear-sighted perceptiveness might well have peered right into the heart of a kindred spirit who shared many of his values and had his approval and blessing. Well, at least I like to think so.

Actually, I could not have consciously known or even sus­pected so until years later after I wrote about Einstein in one of my books and when I started teaching him, along with other authors, in a course called “Literature, Religion, and Science.” At the be­ginning of the semester, I tell my students that I went to school with Einstein and then, after a relatively long pause, explain to their wonder-filled faces that he was at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study while I was merely an undergraduate. I tell them about Einstein’s smile and inform them that his conception of the “cosmic religious feeling” is one of the cornerstones of the course. Eventually, we discuss his views: that “it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it”; and that “our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”

Juxtaposed against Emerson’s conviction, “the mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common,” and Whitman’s vision, “in the faces of men and women I see God” and “all the things of the universe are perfect miracles,” we consider Einstein’s belief that there are two ways of regarding the universe, one as if noth­ing is a miracle and the other as if everything is a miracle.

So I find myself, that old self I refused to abandon and betray, smiling at the miraculous face of one or another student, a student with odd dress, or beaded earrings, or dark skin, or energetic hair shaking up the University and the universe like Einstein’s theo­ries, a miracle smiling back at me on a warm and sunny day.

 

Arthur L. Clements

SUNY Binghamton