‘You were asking why I called the shop The Absent Answer,’ said Mumford.
Mieke looked up from her drawing. ‘Was I?’
‘It’s because the questions that don’t have answers are the most important. And the most beautiful.’
Mieke started drawing again.
Mumford picked up a book. ‘Listen to this. It’s from an essay by Albert Einstein.’
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.
Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.
It was the experience of mystery—even if mixed with fear—that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death…
I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
Mieke showed no sign of having heard.
‘That’s why,’ said Mumford.
REFERENCE: The World as I See It is a book by Albert Einstein translated from the German by A. Harris and published in 1935 by John Lane The Bodley Head (London). The original German book is Mein Weltbild by Albert Einstein, first published in 1934 by Rudolf Kayser.
Available today in many editions.
Essay: “The World As I See It”, originally published in Forum and Century, Vol. 84, in 1931 and available on Farnham Street blog
IMAGE: Clarice Beckett(1931) Across the Yarra, National Gallery of Victoria
Cover of The World As I See It edition of 2018 by The General Press via Booktopia.
The Absent Answer 