Willard Espy, 1975
I can’t say I have ever understood what the theory of relativity is all about, but I do know that time, or our perception of it, is elastic. That concept is most apparent to me in the matter of getting a good night’s sleep. Some nights, I’m asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow and I don’t regain consciousness until the alarm goes off. Those nights seem way too short. And then there are the tossing and turning nights that are interminable.
Last night was one of those seemingly endless ones. I was thinking about this relativity issue and, at the same time, trying to make use of the wakeful hours by working out some problems I’m facing with my current writing project. The subjects on my mind concern my Uncle Willard and so it didn’t require much of a stretch to consider Willard’s personal relationship with Einstein and his theory of relativity. Willard, himself, told the back-story in his 1975 An Almanac of Words at Play:
In my sixteen years a Reader’s Digest, a continuing assignment was to prepare the cover essay – a brief article, approved and signed by some person of note, which by coincidence always wound up with a kind word for the Digest. (When I sent Groucho Marx his essay with the agreed-upon payment, he replied “I hope your check is better than your copy.”)
My usual procedure was to visit the prospective signatory, come to an agreement on the thrust of the article, study his speech mannerisms, and then try to make the piece sound the way he sounded to me.
I particularly enjoyed this assignment, because it gave me a chance to talk on an unusually personal basis with celebrities ranging from popes to Presidents and from poets to polar explorers – people whom I would never have met at all. (Albert Einstein was my favorite; first because he was a saint, and second because he wore no socks.)
Because of time constraints and scheduling difficulties, Willard’s interview with Einstein was conducted while sailing on the latter’s little boat at Princeton. “He almost ran us into a sandbank, until I grabbed the tiller. I always feel I saved the Unified Field Theory,” Willard often remarked after that interview.
I once looked up Unified Field Theory and found that it is “a term coined by Einstein who attempted to unify the general theory of relativity with electromagnetism, hoping to recover an approximation for quantum theory.” I was pondering all that… and the next thing I knew it was morning.
All too often I wake and can’t get back to sleep. I purposely try NOT to think about things that are preying on my mind because I know that it will be time to go to work and I won’t have slept. I generally take Valerian, but contemplating the theory of relativity would probably do it, too! Awesome picture of your Uncle Willard. He certainly had an amazing life!