In literature, things were ready to fall apart on their own, so any excuse to do so — especially one as revered as a theoretical restructuring of the universe--was embraced. In 1919 relativity exploded upon science. In 1922 T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land had a similar effect on literature. Yet when Eliot wrote, "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," people took up the fragments but ignored the shoring.

The key, though, in Eliot and other 20th century poets and novelists, lay in the prominence of the pronoun I — the center of relativistic thought. Thus spake the confessional poetry of the 1960s, the memoirs in the 1980s and 1990s, the prominence of the narrator in all of modern fiction. A commonplace paradox that was soon to characterize fiction was that the antihero, who was beset and disempowered by modern bureaucracies and machines, was simultaneously exalted by his diminished status.

Relativism brought the underground man into his own — in Europe, with Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Aichinger, Sartre, Mann and Pirandello; in America with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Ellison, Capote and Salinger. The antihero, too, searched for unified meaning, but the narrative that held him was all about divisions, schisms and self-inspection. He sought to be by himself, like a god. In Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Richard Wright's The Outsider, protagonists become serial killers out of the desire to be alone.

All this has nothing to do with relativity, but it had much to do with Einstein's contemplation of relativity. Einstein became the emblem not only of the desire to know the truth but also of the capacity to know the truth. In his 1993 novel, Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman writes, "In this world time is a visible dimension. Just as one may look off in the distance and see houses, trees, mountain peaks that are landmarks in space, so one may look out in another direction and see births, marriages, deaths that are signposts in time, stretching off dimly into the far future." It does not take much of another stretch to attach godhead to such a vision, though that was hardly Einstein's own feeling.

However interesting this view made art, what it did for politics was pure destruction. Paul Johnson connects relativism to the extreme nationalism of 20th century political movements in his generally persuasive view of Modern Times. The relationship he cites is sometimes elliptical. What one can say is that the destruction of absolutes — monarchies no less than Newtonian physics — created a vacuum, and in certain key places that vacuum was filled by maniacs and murderers.

There is a connection, though, between European Romanticism, which came into being at the tail end of the 18th century, and the totalitarian credos that bloomed like sudden deadly plants in the first third of the 20th. Einstein did not promote the image of man at the center of the cosmos, controlling the stars by thought. But, quite by accident, he was that image. Merely by being, he corroborated the Romantic view that people were 10 feet tall, capable of knowing heaven, and, in the Byronic mode, of speaking directly to God. The logical consequence of such "thinking" was that some people were more able to speak to God than were others, and that God, in turn, spoke to a selected few. Throw in social Darwinism, and by the time the 20th century was under way, Romanticism led directly to Dachau, Auschwitz, the Gulags, the hills of skulls in Cambodia and most recently the fields of graves in Bosnia.

To read Einstein's essays in Out of My Later Years is to see that he held none of the artistic or political ideas that were extrapolated from his work. Whatever revisions he made of Newton, he continued to side with his predecessor on the issue of causality. He abhorred chaos and revolution for its own sake. He was devoted to constancy as much as to relativity, and to the illogical and the senses. In the end, his most useful gift may be not that he pulled the world apart but that once that was done, he strove to put it back together.

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