Written after reading Kieran Fox’s I Am a Part of Infinity: The Spiritual Journey of Albert Einstein (2025)
I chanced into a chamber of light,
where the clocks were dissolved in the breath of meteors,
and there he stood—
his hair, a wild corona,
his eyes lit with the same silence
that keeps the Pleiades from falling.
It was as if a leaf from Gitanjali
had surpassed its songs,
whose phonemes flowered into equations—
As I listened to the numbers in harmony.
He spoke of the bending of spacetime,
as Tagore of God’s smile in a child’s eyes;
And of gravity’s embrace like a lover,
whose arms were the bending of worlds;
While the air was thick with that white fire,
which Yeats saw in Byzantium’s dome,
where hammered gold becomes a hymn,
and hope is reborn as an undying bird.
The constellations leaned nearer,
As I saw my veins measure the pulse of infinity—
a joining, an unbecoming, a return
to the music before the earliest sound.
Einstein rose before me,
not in the dust-grained photographs,
but as one who had forayed
out of the tremors between light and shadow.
His eyes—two galaxies
unmoored from their charts—
looked upon me as if I were
a juvenile tracing the alphabet on sand,
before the sea left bare their soul.
His voice carried the quiet awe
of a man who has stood in the fields at daybreak,
watching the sun spill molten diamonds
into the furrows, without asking who lit the fire.
And when he turned to go,
the silence was not nothingness,
but a measureless chasm between symphonies.
And now, the infinite walks these roads,
in the guise of a mystical passerby,
who sometimes
stops to speak of the radiance before all life …
Or the deep river-song; or atoms humming like bees;
As God and number and velocity, whisper to each other,
“You too are a part of infinity,”
As if to a stalk, through which
The operas of creation sigh.
Arup K. Chatterjee 