Einstein and the Woodpile

Just finished "Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman. Haunting book. Short chapters, each exploring different theories of time. In one, we follow an old woman growing younger as time flows backwards. In another, a man pursues a lover while simultaneously (and divergently) choosing not to pursue her. Time fractures into infinite possibilities. In others time stops sporadically, or literally flits about as nightingales: catch them and time stops, but the moment goes stale. The birds die. In one, time is perceived faster or slower by different people, in another time varies with location, so that one city runs faster or slower than a neighbor. But the book is all about the human implications. People grow isolated by their perceptions of the past. People grow listless with their sense of inevitability of the future. Parents long for their grown children to come home, grandparents want to seize some inconsequential moment with their grandchild and make it last.

Myself, I tried to freeze time today by stacking wood. Didn't work. My head has been a snake eating its tail ever since I got home from the Boston Folk Festival two weeks ago. That was the end of a long run, a weekend in PA followed by a week in OR and a brief time at home followed by a long, treacherously stupid weekend of driving back to PA, bouncing off the Boston Folk Festival like a rock off a windshield on my way back to Maine.

I've repeated this bit of Robert Frost to myself on and off since high school. It's the last stanza from "Two Tramps in Mud Time:"

"But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes."

I always took this to mean that I should try to make music (my avocation) into my job (vocation.) But in the last two years, when my job has been more closely tied to my own original music than it ever has been in the past, my life has started to feel more fragmented that ever. My good friends on the road are strangers to my family. I drop out of my life in Maine on a Friday morning like the White Rabbit down the hole. And when I get back on Sunday, I'm the same anxious, hurried bunny. Always late for a very important date. I wonder how Einstein would explain that flow of time?