Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein died at Princeton Hospital on April 18, 1955. He was seventy-six. Born in Ulm on March 14, 1879, he did the 1905 papers in Bern, fled Germany, and in 1940 became a U.S. citizen. Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study was the long American workplace, a walk from Mercer Street, where he refused to become a museum while he was still using the sidewalk. He warned Roosevelt about nuclear fission, then spent the postwar years arguing for arms control and for a world government that the century was not going to build. He played the violin badly enough to enjoy it, sailed poorly, and answered children's letters. He asked that his house not become a shrine. The pathologists did not honor every wish about the body; the town, mostly, honored the one about the house. This memorial names Princeton, the American town he chose. He was cremated in Trenton. The ashes were scattered. There is no public grave to dress with flowers. The chalkboard problems remain easier to photograph than to finish. He walked to the Institute in a coat the town still thinks it remembers. Mercer Street honored the request about the house better than the hospital honored the request about the brain. Princeton is the American ending. There is nowhere to leave a stone, which is what he wanted. He refused a presidency of Israel and accepted, instead, a sidewalk in New Jersey. The Institute let him think without assigning him a war. Trenton was only a crematory. Princeton was the choice.