Two Einsteins are on a beach, one is scribbling formulas,
the other is playing violin-
the paradoxes of science and art,
reason and intuition,
numbers and notes,
measurement and judgment,
physics and mysticism,
time and death.
Would it be too far-fetched to invoke
the Einstein universe,
a cosmos neither measurable
nor infinite, but curving back upon itself,
curving back and becoming itself again-
a universe once self-contained
yet endless in variety, like the eight notes of a scale?
and the beach, like Einstein,
less a symbol than a kind of effigy-
suggesting finally not a world of paradox
but of the meeting of polarities.
-author unknown, Einstein on the Beach