An Evening of Distinction

Some years ago, Claude Levi Strauss, Albert Einstein, and Groucho Marx gathered at a country house for dinner to discuss the issues of the day. Herewith, some recently unearthed excerpts of the Salon des Refusés to be Quiet:

Groucho: What time is it?

Einstein: Assuming that the equivalence principle holds, gravity influences the passage of time. Light sent down into a gravity well is blueshifted, whereas light sent in the opposite direction (i.e., climbing out of the gravity well) is redshifted; collectively, these two effects are known as the gravitational frequency shift. More generally, processes close to a massive body run more slowly when compared with processes taking place farther away; this effect is known as gravitational time dilation.

Groucho: Is that your final answer?

Levi Strauss: The wise man doesn't give the right answers, he poses the right questions.

Groucho: Let's try a new subject. If you're so smart, can you figure out how to get the salt out of this shaker?

Einstein: It's not that I'm so smart , it's just that I stay with problems longer.

Groucho: Well, how long have you been working on the salt problem? My steak is getting cold. Can you do something about it, already?

Einstein: Nothing that I can do will change the structure of the universe. But maybe, by raising my voice, I can help in the greatest of all causes -- goodwill among men and peace on earth.

Groucho: At the moment, goodwill among men doesn't seem so pressing a problem. After all, it's just the three of us here; we're all alone, and...

Levi Strauss: Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.

Groucho: Huh? A child of five would understand this. Einstein, would you run out and fetch a five-year old child? I can't make heads or tails of Levi-Strauss.

Einstein: Your lack of understanding is a matter of perception. When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of the globe, he doesn't realize that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.

Groucho: Yes. But not lucky enough to notice that the roast is burning. Gentlemen, have we no respect for supper?

Levi-Strauss: The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space.

Einstein: Did you say "space?"

Groucho: Oh no! I beg of you!

Einstein: A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Groucho: Say, there's a knock at the door. I'll just see who it is...

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Why, look, everyone! It's Marcel Marceau! Say "hello," Marcel.


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Einstein: He doesn't use language?

Levi-Strauss: Language is a form of human reason, which has its internal logic of which man knows nothing.

Einstein: It seems Marcel Marceau is trapped in some kind of invisible box where time has slowed down. This brings to mind a paradox - for how can both the passenger on a moving train and another, his twin on the platform, both see each other's watches slow down? By using my general theory of relativity, which applies to non uniform motions like that of the train, one can demonstrate that the twin on the train has actually aged less. I discuss this in my book.

Groucho: From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Einstein: I have no particular talent. I am merely inquisitive.

Groucho: Speaking of which, shall we have a little music?

Levi-Strauss: Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind, although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

Groucho: Naturally. Well, gentlemen, I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it. Marceau, you can have this plate.