The magician’s last day.

Einstein's last equation on his notepad beside his death bed. He would still keep working on his unified field theory.

Reading Walter Issacson’s biography on Einstein this week has made look in wonder at the nature of our universe. It has also made me think about us as mortal human beings.

Einstein's Theory of relativity, both Special and General opens the veil on the universe and make it seem so new and strange.

It has left me pondering on what more secrets there are in the universe that I take for granted. I might as well be walking with several blind spots.
Magical things happening, unbeknownst to me and all around me.

This made me think about how little time I have to ponder this in relation to the vastness of all this universe has to offer.

Whatever my lifespan is, I wonder if I will live long enough to really discover the deeper secrets of this universe.
There is more to it, it’s about facing my death with realization that no matter what I do, I may virtually end up still having a lot of things undone.
This is an uncomfortable conversation that I have with myself, and it’s an existential one and reading biographies has brought that out to the surface.

In the past three months reading Issacson’s works on Steve Jobs, Leonardo Da Vinci and Albert Einstein I am filled with admiration and awe at the greatness of what these people have achieved and at the same time as I keep reading I know what comes in the end.

How did these guys face their death, did they feel at the end that they have done all that they could? All that they needed to discover.

It’s poignant that even till the very end, Einstien worked on the elusive Unified field theory with his equations, Leonardo Da Vinci was figuring out the geometry of traingles in his notebooks, Steve Jobs was looking into the gas mask on his face in the hospital and considering different design options for it.

These people were till the very end still consumed by the passion that they had.
In a novel by Stephen King, called “Finders Keepers” the first chapter opens with an old writer waking up in the middle of the night and keep writing on a novel that he does not intend to publish.
The writer has been doing this for so long now that it seems to be no longer in his control and he keeps creating.

perhaps that’s what will happen to the likes of us, those crazy few people so obsessed with our craft, being a magician who realizing not being the one using magic, instead it was magic using the magician all along.
Even till the magician’s last days.