Numerous anecdotes from childhood suggest that these feelings were partly a consequence of innate temperament. Einstein had a profound sense of otherness, even alienation. Throughout his life, he maintained a strong awareness that he did not fit in, intellectually, socially, spiritually. But his distance went far beyond any aesthetic concerns. And the great physicist was indeed an artist in his devotion to simplicity and mathematical beauty. With this passage one cannot help recalling a close contemporary of Einstein’s, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who famously advised another young poet to “love your solitude and bear with sweet-sounding lamentation the suffering it causes you.” Einstein’s isolation was surely in part the artist’s compulsion to create alone. I am truly a “lone traveler” and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude. My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. In an essay he published in 1931, at the age of fifty-two, the physicist wrote: Brilliant, supremely self-confident, brutally honest, witty, stubborn-Einstein was above all else a loner.

Yet the doubling of each sentence, once for himself and once for everyone else, may also have been an early sign of the deep inner world that Einstein inhabited. His parents consulted a doctor, and the family housekeeper called the boy “stupid.” Decades later, Einstein’s sister Maja recorded this odd childhood habit and attributed it to her brother’s thoroughness in thinking. This laborious method of speaking gave the impression that he needed to say everything twice. Until the age of seven or eight, whenever the young Albert Einstein was asked a question, he would slowly formulate an answer, mutter it tentatively to himself, and finally repeat aloud his considered response.

Albrecht fölsing