Like So Many Humanists

Like so many humanists, Einstein's relationships to those people closest to him were often less than humane. I just finished reading the insightful EINSTEIN IN LOVE by Dennis Overbye. He writes: From a distance, the trajectory of Einstein’s life looks mythic. The one-time humble patent clerk, with his corona of white hair and the haunted eyes, who overturned the universe and gave us the formula for God’s fire, who was chased by war and promethean guilt to wander sockless like a holy fool through the streets of Princeton, making oracular pronouncements about God and nature, has become an icon not just of science but of humanity in the face of the unknown. His visage, peering beneficently out at us from coffee mugs, posters, calendars, and T-shirts, is familiar in every corner of the world. Behind the iconic face, however, was a human being, one capable – as all human beings are- of behaving in distinctly un-iconic ways.