#11: Einstein's letters on religion and happiness

Atheism, fame, and Tokyo bellhops

Aug 18, 2023

Have y’all seen Oppenheimer? I haven’t - yet. I still want to Barbenheimer it up, but despite living in a vast and mysterious universe, I got bills, and two tickies in one day just hasn’t taken the front seat in my clown car of priorities.

Don’t get me wrong. The ripple effects of Barbenheimer have rocked me already. You can’t step into the internet without drowning in memes breaking down gender or (to a lesser extent) the bomb. I saw one recently that had taken some scene from Oppenheimer where the titular character and Einstein were talking all serious outside, Ken wedged between them in the middle.

Maybe I’m a weirdo - do you feel like this? - but I sometimes get awkward watching representations of recently-alive people on film. When we have pictures and video and all this data cementing exactly what someone once looked like, biopics usually careen towards the uncanny valley for me.

So (like it usually does) a picture of the actor-as-Einstein from Oppenheimer got me thinking about the real Einstein as a person. How would he feel about a movie where he makes a cameo? How would he feel about it being all tied up with a movie about Barbie, a toy that wasn’t invented til four years after his death?

I like to think he would’ve found it funny. His letters hint at a sense of humor and a touch of gentleness. And thankfully, Einstein left one hell of a paper trail for us to dissect. The dude was a prolific letter writer. We have inside access to his thoughts about roughly a zillion different things.

But somehow, we tend to fall back on referencing his big letters, like the one urging Roosevelt to research nuclear weaponry (something he regretted for the rest of his life), or his often-mistranslated "God" letter. When someone achieves larger-than-human status, we forget that they were a person, too. Einstein was brilliant, obviously, but also a regular-ass guy. He cheated on both his wives numerous times, hated socks (and never wore them1), and was a snail mailer just like us. In short, just another dude about town2.

I think that’s why, out of the thousands of letters Einstein sent and received in his life, these two notes stuck out to me the most.

Letter 1: Einstein’s “Theory of Happiness”

The story goes something like this:

It was 1922. Einstein had just learned he’d won the Nobel Prize in physics while in Tokyo for a worldwide lecture tour. People went bananas, and suddenly, he was a major celeb on the street. His first Tokyo lecture had thousands of attendees, all trying to sneak a peek. Apparently, most of his day had gone like that - a litany of photos and press and people elated to be in his orbit.

It was exhausting. He returned to the hotel he was staying at, and not long after, a bellhop came and delivered a package. The reason he didn’t tip the guy is hazy - was the tip refused? Did he have no change? - but Einstein did something else: aware of this flare of fame, he jotted two notes on hotel stationery and handed them to the bellhop, saying they’d be worth something one day3. One of them became known as Einstein’s Theory of Happiness.

*Einstein’s theory of happiness, dished in German on some fucking gorge hotel stationery.*

For those of y’all (like me) who don’t read German, here’s the nugget of wisdom he delivered:

A calm and modest life brings more happiness than the pursuit of success combined with constant restlessness.

Woof. I don’t know about you, but that’s something I struggle with hard. I’m always looking ahead to the next thing. Story published? I’m immediately mulling over another story of mine that hasn’t yet found a home. Painted something new? I’m busy scrutinizing the mistakes, desperate to avoid them next time. For me, stillness is a foreign mistress, but maybe I’ll channel Einstein and learn to speak her language in this lifetime.

In any event, I love this story. Guy wins Nobel Prize, guy is overwhelmed by wild fame, guy recognizes that he can give this bellhop something more lucrative than moolah via his own dang handwriting. It’s a fun anecdote that feels like it’s peeled from a movie. And Einstein was right about it being worth something4. In 2017, that scrap of hotel stationery sold for $1.58 million dollars.

Imagine how many Barbenheimer seats that could buy!

Letter 2: A concrete dismissal of religion

I think that one of my favorite things about Einstein is how much mail he sent and received. Love letters, fan mail, urgent political missives, musings about birds and bees - he wrote a shit ton - and most of it is stashed in a free and searchable online archive. Gotta love a historical figure with a snail-mail personality - it makes life easy for everyone as nosy as me.

This letter is actually two: a diptych of correspondence from 1945 between Einstein and Guy Raner, Jr., a Navy ensign. Raner had heard some juicy gossip from a Jesuit priest, disagreed with it wildly, and had to check for himself. Here’s what Raner had to say:

*From the archives courtesy of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.*

For everyone who doesn’t want to zoom, here’s the condensed version with the good bits:

"I had quite a discussion last night with a Jesuit-educated Catholic officer … [in] which he made certain statements regarding you which I tend to doubt. To clear my mind on the subject I would appreciate it a great deal if you would comment on the following points:
"He said that you were once an atheist. Then, said he, you talked with a Jesuit priest who gave you three syllogisms which you were unable to disprove; as a result of that you became a believer in a supreme intellect which governs the universe. The syllogisms were: A design demands a designer; The universe is a design; therefore, there must have been a designer. On that point I questioned the universe being a design…Anyway, he said that was enough to convince you of the existence of a supreme governor of the universe. Point two was: 'Laws' of nature…exist; if you have a law you must have a law-giver; the law-giver was God. Sounds like an exercise in semantics to me…
"He could not remember the third syllogism; however if the story is accurate you probably do…I would greatly appreciate a short letter clarifying the situation."

TL;DR: Raner talked to a Jesuit priest who swore another priest he knew had, in one convo alone, convinced Albert Einstein that there was a God.

Understandably, Einstein was not thrilled to be misrepresented in his thoughts on religion - especially since he’d never met a Jesuit priest:

What I love about this letter is that despite being justifiably upset that someone’s making up a story about him, he manages to deliver a striking final line that drives home the marvel of our universe without the need to cushion it in religion:

We have to admire in humility the beautiful harmony of the structure of this world - as far as we can grasp it. And that is all.

Many things Einstein has said about religion have been mistranslated, but this one cuts to something simple and direct: the harmony and structure of this wild-ass universe is something to admire all on its own, and that beauty is so staggering, our ability to grasp it all is limited. There’s this solid New Yorker article that dives into the ways his other, more famous letter on God was misconstrued in translation, but I particularly love that it touches on the majesty Einstein might’ve felt about the universe as an atheist:

“Einstein had what might be called a night-sky theology, a sense of the awesomeness of the universe that even atheists and materialists feel when they gaze up at the Milky Way…A scientist from a generation before Einstein, William James, thought that…there might indeed be something like God out there; we just can’t pick it up with the radar we’ve got. In James’s lovely metaphor, ‘We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.’“

At the risk of diving back into Einstein’s dreams, that quote from James is a beautiful one to chew on alongside Einstein’s rejection of religion.

My own writing updates

I’m no Einstein, but it has been a busy month in my writing world.

I picked up my novel after a several-month hiatus, and I’m devastated to announce that taking a break between drafts helps. A fuckload. I’ve always bucked against the advice to take a break, but damn, y’all. For literal years now, I’ve struggled with one character’s arc/motive. This week, thanks to my ~2.5 month break, I figured out a solution.
I mailed off that dossier of redacted files I wrote! I know I’ve talked about them a lot, but it’s one of my favorite projects I’ve done in a long-ass time. I’m cooking up a way to sell them to folks as a kind of pick-apart zine, or at least giving new subscribers the option to receive this ever-growing dossier in lieu of the visual art I send out monthly/quarterly/annually. I love this fiction baby and want it in more people’s mailboxes!
I’m elbows-deep in draft two of my screenplay. I’ve been keeping both novel and screenplay in one binder so I can hop around when the mood strikes me (am I chaos embodied? Sure.). Right now I’m following Chris Amick’s advice on the script, going through each scene and identifying what I need to add, while also making notes on character dialogue along the way.
Rhody and I are writing a new song! We stumbled upon it last week after Rhody threw together some heart-bending chords. I started in with some improvised lyrics and we struck something beautiful. I find singing without writing anything down first generally yields some of my most vulnerable written art. It probably helps to have a talented musician by my side every day!

Questions for y’all

Obvi - have you seen Oppenheimer? How has it impacted how you interact with the world? I hear folks talking about Barbie a lot more, so I’m curious about this one.
If you were suddenly famous and jotted a note for a bellhop to sell someday, what would be your single-sentence nugget of wisdom?

Snail Mail Sweethearts

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