One of the great aspects of having Ely and Lea in highschool (Ely, Grant HS class of 96; Lea, Grant HS class of 97) is that I got a hold of their reading lists, got to read and often edit their papers, and got to eavesdrop in on their teachers lesson plans, comments, and wisdom. I missed a lot in my own high school years–part of that “school being wasted on the young,” which I don’t believe for a moment but youth and age access information and entertainment and art and culture and everything from such different vantages that we may as well be different species. Alan Lightman’s “Einstein’s Dreams” in one of the works Lea’s sophmore(?) English teacher introduced me to when I went in to talk to her about thesis sentences? Vico? something?
It is in fact a treatise on the many guises of time. Time, herein, is delineated in its multi-faceted physical, if ephemeral, but concrete nature as revealed since Einstein made his famous early 20th century jumps. While, simultaneously, Lightman–wonderful name for a physicist turned novelist–overlays washes of human time: e.g. a mother, who’s child has grown up and moved away, perceives it. Time intermingled with love assumes meta-metaphor status in this gentle delight.
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