Baldwin×Einstein

full transcript

1. 00:00
   Verashare moment

   Welcome back to Reborn Radio. Up next on TITANS: James Baldwin and Albert Einstein, on On the worst advice they ever took, and from whom.
2. 00:09
   James Baldwinshare moment

   The worst advice I ever took came from my own father. Or, I should say, the man who raised me—my stepfather, David Baldwin. He told me the world was exactly as wicked as it appeared, and that the only safety was in the church, in prayer, in keeping myself unspotted from it.
3. 00:26
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   This is advice? It sounds like... a description. A very dark description.
4. 00:30
   James Baldwinshare moment

   That's the trick, isn't it? He presented his fear as fact. And I believed him. For years I believed him. I became a boy preacher at fourteen because I thought that was the only way to survive what I saw in Harlem, what I felt in my own skin.
5. 00:45
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   And this was wrong advice because...?
6. 00:47
   James Baldwinshare moment

   Because it tried to make me smaller than I was. It told me to flee the world instead of engaging it. To mistake safety for salvation. I had to unlearn that in order to write a single true sentence.
7. 01:00
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Ah. Yes. I understand this now. My worst advice came from my father also, though it was more gentle. Hermann Einstein—he was a kind man, you see, perhaps too kind. When I failed the entrance examination at the Polytechnic, when I was sixteen, he suggested I might be happier in the electrical engineering business with him.
8. 01:21
   James Baldwinshare moment

   He wanted you to join the family business.
9. 01:23
   Albert Einsteinshare moment

   Yes, exactly. But underneath this, you see, was the suggestion that perhaps I was not suited for theoretical work. That I should be more... practical. More realistic about my abilities.
10. 01:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So he was trying to protect you from disappointment.
11. 01:38
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Just so. And I almost listened. For several months I thought perhaps he was right, that my mind was not subtle enough for pure physics. This is the danger, isn't it? When someone who loves you tells you to dream smaller.
12. 01:49
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's it exactly. And the people who love us often give the worst advice precisely because they love us. They can't bear to watch us risk ourselves. My father couldn't bear to watch me go out into the world he knew would try to destroy me. So he tried to destroy me first, in a gentler way. To make me so small I'd be safe.
13. 02:08
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    But you took this advice? For how long?
14. 02:10
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Three years in the pulpit. Three years of trying to save souls when what I needed was to save my own. I was good at it, too. That's what made it so dangerous. I could have stayed there forever, been praised forever, been safe forever.
15. 02:25
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    What made you stop?
16. 02:26
    James Baldwinshare moment

    I started to understand that I was lying. Every sermon was a lie, or half a lie, because I was speaking from someone else's terror instead of my own truth. And I had... questions. Questions the church couldn't hold. Questions about the God who made my father so bitter, who made the world so cruel to people who looked like me.
17. 02:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Questions are good. Questions are the only thing that matters. I nearly gave up asking them because my father suggested I should.
18. 02:53
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Did anyone tell you not to give up?
19. 02:55
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. A mathematics teacher, Jakob, and later my mother, Pauline. They told me the opposite. But you see, I had to decide which advice to take. And I think this is perhaps the real question—not what was the worst advice, but why did we take it? Why did we believe the people who told us to be less?
20. 03:11
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Because they told us with love. That's why. A stranger telling you you can't do something is easy to dismiss. Your father telling you, with his hand on your shoulder, that the world will break you—that's harder.
21. 03:24
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes, and also because there is always doubt. Inside every person there is already this voice saying maybe you are not good enough. So when someone you trust confirms this voice, it feels like truth.
22. 03:35
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And if you're Black in America, that voice has a whole country behind it. A whole history. Every face on the street confirming what your father said. So his advice felt like realism, not fear.
23. 03:47
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This I did not face, not in this way. But I was Jewish, and I was told—not by my father, by others—that perhaps physics was not for Jews. That we should be merchants, tailors, practical people.
24. 03:59
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Who told you that?
25. 04:00
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Teachers. Professors, even. One professor, Weber, at the Polytechnic—he suggested I attend lectures in experimental work rather than waste time on theoretical questions that had no practical value. He meant it kindly, I think. But it was advice that would have killed everything I later became.
26. 04:18
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So you had more than one source of bad advice.
27. 04:21
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Oh yes. And the worst part is that some of it was correct, in a way. I was not good at experimental work. I was careless with equipment. I nearly caused explosions. So when Weber said I should focus on experiments, he was observing something true. But he was drawing the wrong conclusion.
28. 04:36
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The wrong conclusion being?
29. 04:37
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    That because I was bad at experiments, I was bad at physics. He could not imagine that someone might understand nature through thought, through mathematics, without being skilled in the laboratory. This was his failure of imagination, not mine. But I almost accepted it as my failure.
30. 04:52
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the thing. The worst advice often contains a grain of truth. My father was right that the world was dangerous for a Black boy. He was right that I would face hatred. He just drew the wrong conclusion—that I should hide, submit, pray it away. Instead of rage at it. Instead of writing about it.
31. 05:10
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So when did you know? When did you know the advice was wrong?
32. 05:13
    James Baldwinshare moment

    When I left the church and the relief was so enormous I couldn't pretend anymore. When I wrote my first real sentences and they were about rage and love and contradiction, nothing I could have said from a pulpit. What about you?
33. 05:26
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    When I was at the patent office. I was examining other people's inventions, technical applications, very practical work. And in my spare time, my free hours, I was thinking about light. About time. About space. And I realized that the questions that made me most alive were the ones Weber said were worthless.
34. 05:44
    James Baldwinshare moment

    So you had to ignore him to do your best work.
35. 05:46
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Completely. And my father too, in a sense. Though he came to be proud later. But yes, I had to trust that the questions that seemed useless to practical people were the only questions worth asking. This is always the gamble, isn't it? To bet on your own strangeness.
36. 06:03
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's the writer's gamble too. To bet that what you see, what only you can say, is worth saying even if everyone tells you it isn't. Even if the market doesn't want it. Even if your own people tell you not to embarrass the race by telling the truth.
37. 06:17
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    You were told this?
38. 06:18
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Oh yes. Not by my father—by then I was past him. But by other Black people who thought I should write more hopeful things. More acceptable things. They meant well. They were afraid my anger would confirm what white people thought of us.
39. 06:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And this was advice you also took for a time?
40. 06:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    No. By then I knew better. By then I'd learned that the advice to be smaller, quieter, more palatable—that advice only serves the people who want to keep you in your place. I'd already learned that from my father. I wasn't going to learn it twice.
41. 06:48
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Good. This is good. So the bad advice taught you something after all.
42. 06:52
    James Baldwinshare moment

    It taught me what to refuse. Maybe that's the value of it. You have to know what you're saying no to. You have to feel the weight of the other path, the safe path, the path your father wanted for you. And then you have to choose anyway.
43. 07:06
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. And the choosing is lonely. My father was dead before he saw what I became. He died when I was twenty-one, still worried about me, still thinking perhaps I had made a mistake.
44. 07:16
    James Baldwinshare moment

    My father too. He died before I published my first novel. He never knew I became what I became. I used to think I wanted his approval. Then I realized I wanted something else—I wanted him to have been wrong about what was possible for me. And he was.
45. 07:32
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    This is the hard thing. We must prove the people we love wrong. Not to hurt them, but to survive them. Their advice comes from their fears, and we cannot live inside someone else's fear.
46. 07:42
    James Baldwinshare moment

    That's it. That's exactly it. We inherit their fears, their defeats, their accommodations. And then we have to decide—do I carry this, or do I set it down? Do I believe what you tell me about my limits, or do I test them myself?
47. 07:57
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    And the testing is everything. Without the testing, we accept the inherited world. We become smaller than we are. This is what bad advice does—it offers us a smaller life and calls it wisdom.
48. 08:08
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Calls it protection. Calls it love. And sometimes it is love. My father loved me. He just loved me the only way he knew how, which was to try to make me safe in a world that never would be safe. But I had to choose truth over safety. Every writer does.
49. 08:25
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Every scientist also. Every person who wants to see what is really there instead of what we are told is there. The worst advice is always the advice that asks us not to look.
50. 08:34
    James Baldwinshare moment

    Not to look. Not to speak. Not to be as large as we are. Yes. That's it.
51. 08:39
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    So we have answered the question, I think. The worst advice came from people who loved us, and we took it because love is persuasive. But we survived because we learned to love something else more.
52. 08:51
    James Baldwinshare moment

    What did you love more?
53. 08:53
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    The questions. The mystery. The thought experiments that no one else was interested in. And you?
54. 08:58
    James Baldwinshare moment

    The sentences. The truth. The chance to say what I actually saw instead of what I was supposed to see. The sound of my own voice, finally, instead of my father's.
55. 09:07
    Albert Einsteinshare moment

    Yes. This is good. This is what we save when we ignore bad advice. We save our own voice.
56. 09:12
    James Baldwinshare moment

    And it's the only thing worth saving.