A former student of Einstein once told the prose poem that Einstein often carried a baseball bat. After that, the prose poem would be driving late at night, and suddenly Einstein would be in the car sitting next to him holding a bat.

“No, I never played baseball,” said Einstein. “Baseball has never enjoyed a great popularity in Europe, but there was a small sports equipment store on my walk to work at the Patent Office, and I went in a bought one once.

I had no intention of threatening my fellow employees at the office. I merely like the heft the bat now and then and think about the nature of time. At that point in my thinking, I believed that time was controlled somehow by the motion of electrons around atoms. I had this notion that if I swung the bat around my office I could knock plenty of electrons off their atoms and disrupt the flow of time.

During the lunch break, when everyone went out, I often set cheap clocks along the edge of my desk and smashed them one at a time with the baseball bats. You see, prose poem, I hated those clocks and their slow motion forward toward everyone’s death. We were trapped by the clock absolute notion of time and no one could escape it.

I wanted to escape death, so I had to come up with some other notion of time, and I did that. No doubt you’ve read my book on relativity, but I did not devise a definition of time that actually gave us any freedom. That’s the trouble with science. It often inexorably leads you to conclusions that you don’t want. We are not only in the noose of time, but we are surrounded and squeezed by space-time, which is actually one thing.

Our only hope is to get out of the universe, perhaps through a passageway deep in a dark hole, into an entirely different universe that works by different laws of physics.

That’s why I always chose to make my appearance and ride with you, prose poem. Mathematics has reached its end. It has become obsessed with trivialities.

I am counting on your flights of fancy to lead us toward an answer.