Dear Albert,
You sit among the hills and dells of Munich, not far from where the river Isar twists and twines among the thrushes. You cannot see it now, but you imagine its rush and its roar, the summer sky caught in its mirrored depths. The noon light flows down in slow honeyed tendrils, and the sun is a gold-armored warlord star. You do not yet ponder its gravity, the dark mystery of the Earth's dance around its shining waist; its glimmer makes you blink your eyes. Your hands are folded dove-like, your jacket stiff. Already, your eyes seek the sky.
In this golden light, the pull of gravity fades. Your face is calm. There is no mathematical shrewdness to your mouth, no visionary gleam in your eyes hypnotized by summertime. Newton will whisper, Leibniz conjecture, science toll like a church bell in your ear, but they must fight their way past childhood and contentment, smooth cheek and unwrinkled brow. No calculator lies, heavy as an egg, in your palm. But still your eyes seek the sky.
Dear Albert, you will dethrone Newton. You will walk with Leibniz awhile, along the shining trails of the celestial realms where fact and metaphor blur, and you will pass him with a smile. The heavens will open before you like an etherized heart; you will reach in and drawn out the red vein of relativity. You will glimpse the mind of God, for just one bright second studded with a galaxy of equations, but you will refuse to name Him quantum or cosmological, dark matter or quark. You will wear the gilded laurel leaves, walk through the world with genius haloing your every gesture. Wings of pulsing electron clouds will bear you across the seas of science from calm to flood. And still your eyes will seek the sky.
But Albert, the war machines are coming — the blitzkrieg will roll through Poland soon. When the Third Reich rises like a blooded sun, make haste across the heaving oceans, or you will bear Hitler's yellow star, a scar on your stiff coat. You must flee the banks of the Munich, the babble of the river you know so well, or your genius will smother in the hellish ovens, and the laurel leaves will tumble in blood and sorrow from your brow. Albert, beware the ticking bombs, counting one-two-three-four (funf-sechs-sieben-acht) to Hiroshima's ashes. In your hands you hold the seed of doom, a blood-ruby kernel that will flower in smoke and strangling vines. But still your eyes will strain past the mushroom clouds, seeking the sky.
Dear Albert, be warned. Your future teems with numbers, with prophecies, a wild heaven-blue spin. The name of Einstein will be a white giant, burning and brightening the eyes of young thinkers, children who would follow you when you take wing. In the black belly of night, in the dank darkness of uncertainty, the people will whisper it as a charm against ignorance.
When old age claims your prophet's sight, and even the fingers of summertime feel cool on your skin, still the laurel leaves will flutter on your brow, and still your eyes will seek the sky.
Lucia Tang is a student from Cedar Park, Texas.