Musings, Meanderings, & Loops · Essay
August 20, 2026
I have been drafting an imagined conversation between Albert Einstein and Paramahansa Yogananda, and I want to write about why I stopped, because the reason turned out to be more interesting than the project.
The premise is good. Yogananda arrived in America in 1920 and had built his headquarters at Mount Washington in Los Angeles by 1925. Einstein spent the winter of 1931 at Caltech, consulting with Hubble, in the same weeks he was being forced to abandon his cosmological constant because the universe had turned out to be expanding. Fifteen miles apart. One of them intellectually reeling, the other in the business of explaining the infinite to Americans. They never met. Somebody should write the afternoon where they did.
Then I read my own draft back and noticed that one of the two men was not in it.
The Yogananda in my pages holds Yogananda's actual positions. The Einstein does not. He arrives troubled, gets gently corrected, and by the end has conceded — writing something like matter is spirit materialized on the back of a postcard and feeling relieved about it.
That is not a portrait. It is a costume.
Because Einstein was specific, repeatedly, and in writing. He believed in Spinoza's God — revealed in the lawful harmony of the world, and emphatically not one who concerns himself with the fates and doings of human beings. In 1954 he wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind that God was, for him, the expression and product of human weakness, and organized religion something close to organized superstition.
And on the specific charge my draft was quietly bringing against him, he was blunt: "I am not a mystic." Working out the laws of nature, he said, had nothing to do with mysticism, however humble the structure of the universe made him feel.
He also knew exactly what was being done to him. He complained about people quoting him in support of conclusions he rejected — being conscripted was the thing that made him angry. There is a Vedanta Society page today titled "Albert Einstein — The Mystic." He would have written a letter.
There is a real tradition here, and it has rules I was breaking.
Walter Savage Landor spent decades on his Imaginary Conversations, putting Diogenes with Plato and Milton with Marvell. Steve Allen built Meeting of Minds for television, seating Darwin next to Attila the Hun. Michael Frayn wrote Copenhagen, about the 1941 meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg. Cormac McCarthy wrote The Sunset Limited, which involves no historical figures at all and is the purest example of the form — two men, one room, ninety minutes, everything at stake.
Look at what the good ones have in common.
Nobody wins. Copenhagen runs the same evening three separate times and never settles what Heisenberg came to say, or why. Frayn makes the uncertainty principle the shape of the play rather than its subject: you cannot fix both the position and the momentum of a human motive. In The Sunset Limited, the believer talks for an hour and a half and the atheist walks out unconverted, and McCarthy hands him the better closing speech.
I had been told that what made my project special was that I was chasing convergence rather than conflict — that Einstein's unified field and Yogananda's cosmic vibration were never really at war, and the piece could be two musicians discovering they had been playing the same song.
That advice is exactly backwards, and taking it is what emptied Einstein out of my own draft.
Convergence is not a dramatic structure. It is an ending in search of a middle. If two people are going to agree, the only live question is how long it takes, and an audience works that out in five minutes and then waits. Everything that makes the form worth using — the pressure, the listening, the moment a man decides whether to concede — requires that agreement be genuinely unavailable.
There is a second cost, and it is the one that actually made me put the draft down.
Writing a real person as someone who agrees with you is a small theft. Einstein cannot object. He has been unable to object since 1955, which is exactly what makes him useful to anybody who would like a genius nodding along in the background. The conversion scene I wrote was not an argument I had won. It was an argument I had staged, with one participant unable to attend.
And I notice the appeal, which is the tell. It is enormously satisfying to have the smartest man of the century arrive at your conclusion by the end of the third act.
I wrote a few days ago about Lennon — how he built "I Am the Walrus" out of deliberate nonsense to spite a schoolteacher, borrowed a villain from Lewis Carroll without noticing, and spent thirteen years not knowing what he had confessed to. The point was that a maker does not get jurisdiction over what he made. Meaning arrives without permission.
Einstein is the same problem inverted. He said what he meant, clearly, in letters, for fifty years — and has spent the seventy since being told what he really meant by people who found his actual position insufficiently useful.
Lennon could not control the meaning of his work. Einstein could not control the meaning of his statements, which is worse, because his were not ambiguous.
Between them: you do not own what you make, and you do not own what you said either. Both get handed over. The difference is that Lennon's was taken by readers doing honest work, and Einstein's was taken by people who wanted a witness.
And there is a third case, which is worse, because he is still here.
Paul McCartney put a song called "Early Days" on New, his 2013 album, and it is more or less entirely a complaint about this. People who were not in the room keep explaining to him what happened in it. He was there. He is the surviving half of the Lennon-McCartney partnership, the only person left who was inside that particular collaboration, and he has spent decades being corrected about his own life by people working from books.
Which tells you the problem was never death. Lennon and Einstein cannot object. McCartney objects continually, on the record, in song, and it changes nothing. Authority does not stay with the person who was present. It moves to whoever is telling the story now.
The play is still there. It is just a different one.
Two men stand at the edge of the Pacific in 1931. Both are genuinely staggered by the order of things. Both have given their lives to it. One concludes there is a lawful harmony with no one behind it who knows your name. The other concludes that the harmony is a Person, and can be met. Neither is a fool. Neither converts. They part with real affection and nothing settled, and the audience goes home unable to decide — which is the correct condition to be in about this.
That version is harder, and I am not certain I can write it. But it has the advantage of containing two people. The one I was working on only ever had one.