THERE IS NO FUTURE IN EINSTEIN’S DREAMING: Sorry, just wanted to sneak in a Rotten reference there. Actually, Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams is a fun little book–takes about an evening to read if you curl up in a chair with some food and go all the way through–it’s got approximately the same relationship to philosophy that a bag of trail mix has to a steak dinner, but that’s kind of the point. Sometimes you want a diversion, not a brain-batterer. The book offers a series of three-page meditations on the nature of time; the narrative skeleton is that Albert Einstein, while working on one of his theories of relativity (I can’t be bothered to find out which), has recurring dreams of worlds in which the nature of time differs from time in our own world. For example, in one world time moves more slowly at higher elevations. Most people cluster on the peaks of mountains and build their houses on stilts, hoping to keep their youth as long as possible. In another world, everyone knows that they have only a short time left before some unexplained apocalypse destroys all life.

Two thoughts prompted by this confection:

1) The book sheds some light on the nature of promises. Promises have interested me since I read Maggie Gallagher’s Abolition of Marriage (an excellent book), and they figure prominently in this thing I wrote about Nietzsche and eros. Obviously, promising requires a future, and knowledge of that future’s existence. (Thus the dream in which there is a future, but no one can comprehend the concept of “future,” is a dream of a world without promises.) But promising is not about stasis. It’s not an attempt to pin down time like a butterfly. In one of Lightman’s worlds, there’s a location at which time stops. Some mothers take their children there, and essentially freeze themselves in a loving embrace of their darlings–who will never grow up, never scream, “I hate you!”, never marry, never move away. Some lovers freeze themselves locked in a motionless kiss. And this too is a world without promises. Promise-making is about an ongoing and active commitment. The people who travel to the time-freezing location fear promise-making and try to substitute a kind of death for the difficult, sometimes heroic life that promises require.

2) In many of Lightman’s dreams, people are sharply divided by personality: If you have personality type X, you will respond to bizarre distortion of time Y in way Z; if you have personality type Q, you will respond in way R. This is obviously how much of the world works much of the time. Lightman is generalizing and striving for a fable-like voice, and so he sounds a bit mechanistic about this–as if the world could be neatly divided into personality packages–but the basic outline is true. People with sunny personalities do make different choices, believe different things, respond startlingly differently to crises or everyday situations, from people with melancholic dispositions. But ever since I read James Joyce’s comment on the Catholic Church–“Here comes everybody!”–I’ve been struck by the way in which Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular really does accommodate, attract, and inspire every personality type on earth. The saints are great examples of this–I find it hard to imagine St. Jerome and St. Francis even talking to one another; I can picture Mother Theresa having sharp words for St. Thomas More; there are joyful saints, sorrowful saints, weird saints, city saints, country saints, witty saints, dull saints, cautious saints and saints who careened wildly from one project to the next. Some find their natural optimism about human nature corrected by the doctrine of the Fall; some find their natural misanthropy corrected by the commandments to love our neighbor and our enemy. (Uh, I fall more in the latter camp, in case you wondered.) Some must be reminded that there is, after all, value in intellectual study; others are tempted to disregard contemplation; still others are tempted to retreat and disparage all contact with the world; and the Church rebukes and guides each one, and connects their pursuits. There is simply no personality type that is unrepresented among the converts to the Church. (So this doesn’t just happen because so many people are raised Christian.) This is one reason that simplistic anti-Christian explanations of “why people become Christian” tend to fail–such explanations typically work for only a few personality types, if any.

It also highlights the way in which recognition of particular people as canonized saints helps knit the Christian community together. Some Protestants criticize canonization, saying, “Everyone who believes in Christ is a saint!” Well, all those in Heaven are considered saints by Catholics, including the innumerable unknowns who will never be canonized. But the fact that we have some canonized saints helps us to focus on the diversity of the men and women who have exemplified love of God throughout the centuries. Is my neighbor a jerk? I can wonder what it might have been like to live near Jerome, and I remember that the “jerk” may spend eternity in Heaven, a more glorious being than any I can imagine. Is my neighbor a thief, or a killer, or a prostitute, or a social climber? Dismas, Bernard of Corleone, Afra and Theodota and Mary of Egypt (not to mention Rahab…), Augustine–before their conversions. People I would not ordinarily notice, people I might dislike, people I might want to avoid–saints. People who might not like me much!–saints. Personality, in the Church, is never the point.

Random thoughts, occasioned by a light and savory book.