Reading List: Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

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If you have not yet read Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams, I encourage you to do so at your earliest convenience. Not only a masterpiece of prose, bending simple words in the most fantastic of ways, it acts as a beginner's guide to metaphysics. Lightman explores time and the ideas of its passage (or rather its cyclical recurrence, or rather that it's sporadic, or rather that...)

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Lightman does not write for us about the world, instead his words create the world. When he points to darkened desktop or crumpled passersby - it is not that these subjects become lit up for the reader's regard of them, but more - it is as if at that very moment of Lightman's description the subject is born into being. As a consumer of Lightman's prose I am left to ponder that perhaps reality is not fixed, that it exists only in the moment of my recognition and the moment of my understanding of what is around me; that as a photographer it is not that I am capturing images, as much as I am discovering them; as an artist it is I who create (rather than react to) those personal truisms, as they are in fact built in my studio in the relationships I create between disparate objects and in the way that I place them in proximity to one another.

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Lightman's novel Einstein's Dreams does much to encourage the individual to consider their experience, consider their perspective, and to take control of the life they lead. For it is, in fact "I" who is in control, whether I be acting upon with force or lackluster disinterest.

(Sharon Core)

As a visual artist I am drawn to anything which can create an image for the audience, no matter the faculties it calls upon. Through this observation of the ways in which others choose to create an image, I am always looking for ways in which they may manipulate the image, and in turn, how these tools and techniques may be used to manipulate the audience.

(Joseph Cornell)

Einstein's Dreams for me brings to mind a warm turkey sandwich, heavy cream and melted cheese, eaten in a darkened bar tucked away down an abandoned alley on an undesirable day. I do not hear the birds, nor the trees. There is no traffic but I can see - and what is I am envisioning are so many antiquated Baroque paintings, and abstract dioramas, like those of Joseph Cornell's 4th dimension.

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Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams - I really do recommend it.