The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 13.1482  Monday, 3 June 2002

From:           Clifford Stetner <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Saturday, 1 Jun 2002 15:56:05 -0400
Subject: 13.1447 Keats, Reading Shakespeare
Comment:        Re: SHK 13.1447 Keats, Reading Shakespeare

If it's permissible within the new stricter protocols, I'd like to point
out apropos of the recent Truths thread that the same issue of Kenyon
Review reprints an August 2001 NY Times article in which Einstein and
the Bengali Nobel laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore debate the question
of absolute truth:

"Their first conversation dealt with truth and the nature of reality,
with Einstein wondering if truth and beauty existed independently of
man. "If there would be no human beings any more," Einstein offered as a
hypothesis, "the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful." When
Tagore objected to that premise, Einstein said that he agreed with it in
terms of Beauty, but not Truth. Tagore said that Truth was realized
through man: "If there be some Truth which has no sensuous or rational
relation to the human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we
remain human beings." To which Einstein responded, "Then I am more
religious than you are!"

Marianoff published an abbreviated report of the meeting in The New York
Times Magazine in 1930 under the headline "Einstein and Tagore Plumb the
Truth." Now, a longer version of that conversation and a second
dialogue, based on notes taken by Marianoff and another guest, has been
printed in a special issue of The Kenyon Review, which was jointly
published with the British literary periodical Stand."

Clifford Stetner

[Editor's Note: Pointing out the connection is acceptable; having a
conversation about the nature of Truth would probably not be.  -Hardy]

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