By Stuart Mitchner

The Princeton Battle Monument was dedicated in 1922, the year Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics. Atop the massive sculpture, George Washington stares toward downtown Princeton. In his line of sight is a bronze bust of longtime Princeton resident Einstein apparently gazing in the same direction. Between these two Princeton legends, J. Seward Johnson’s bronze Everyman sits on a bench reading the New York Times. The continuum flowing through these three works of art evokes what Einstein once said to a visitor when he was seriously ill — “I feel so much a part of every living thing, that I am not in the least concerned with where the individual begins and ends.”

The Past Week

Every week I’m concerned with beginnings and endings. This one began on January 28 with the death of W.B. Yeats, followed by the births of Thomas Paine (January 29), Franz Schubert (January 31), James Joyce (February 2), Gertrude Stein (February 3), William Burroughs (February 5), and Christopher Marlowe (February 6).

What about the first day of this month? On Wikipedia’s list of “Notable Events,” February 1, 1893 marks, in effect, the birth of movies, being the day when Thomas Edison constructed the first motion picture studio, the Black Maria in West Orange. Also born in 1893 were Hollywood directors John Brahm, Roy Del Ruth, Alexander Korda, and William Dieterle, whose 1932 film Jewel Robbery is set in Vienna, where Schubert’s life began in 1797 and ended in November 1828.

Beginnings and endings on February 4? It’s the day in 1789 when George Washington was unanimously elected President of the United States by the Electoral College. And the “Notable Event” that occurred on January 30, 1815, was the rebuilding of the U.S. Library of Congress after its destruction during the War of 1812.

Edison on Paine

One of English-born Founding Father Thomas Paine’s numerous nation-making accomplishments was naming his adopted country, as Thomas Edison makes clear in his June 7, 1925 appreciation, from Diary and Sundry Observations (1948), when pointing out the “deplorable lack of understanding concerning the man who first proposed and first wrote those impressive words, ‘the United States of America.’” “But,” he adds, “it is hardly strange. Paine’s teachings have been debarred from schools everywhere and his views of life misrepresented until his memory is hidden in shadows, or he is looked upon as of unsound mind.” According to Edison, “We never had a sounder intelligence in this Republic. He was the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible. Where Washington performed, Paine devised and wrote.” Edison suggests that “although the present generation knows little of Paine’s writings, and although he has almost no influence upon contemporary thought, Americans of the future will justly appraise his work. I am certain of it. Truth is governed by natural laws and cannot be denied. Paine spoke truth with a peculiarly clear and forceful ring.”

Although I found Edison’s essay too late to quote from it for an article on Paine for the Spring 2026 issue of Princeton Magazine, I’m taking this opportunity to quote his spirited and eloquent defense of his fellow inventor, who Edison credits for conceiving and designing “the iron bridge and the hollow candle” and “the principle of the modern central draught burner.” Gifted with “a sort of universal genius,” Paine “was interested in a diversity of things; but his special creed, his first thought, was liberty.”

Frederick the Great?

Thanks to the archival immensity stored in my computer, I ran into a quote I meant to use in a 2016 article on the Battle of Princeton. Probably one reason I decided against it was my inability to track down a source, but who could make this up? According to the monarch of Prussia from 1740 until his death in August 1786, “The achievement of Washington and his little band of compatriots between the 25th of December and the 4th of January, was the most brilliant of any record in the annals of military achievements.”

Washington’s Theater

In George Washington’s Journey (Simon & Schuster 2016), in a chapter titled “Inventing a New Theater of Politics,” T.H. Breen suggests that Washington’s lifelong enthusiasm for the stage had “deep personal roots” involving “an almost excessive concern with appearances” and the conviction that he was “always an actor onstage,” which in turn made him “highly sensitive to the expectations of the different audiences that he encountered through his long career.” There are frequent references to the stage of human action throughout his correspondence, wherein he compares the drafting of the Constitution to an “unprecedented theatrical production,” writing to one friend “that a greater Drama is now acting on this Theater than has heretofore been brought on the American Stage, or any other in the World.” Comparing his political performances as commander in chief to “dramatic exhibitions,” John Adams saw him “crafting the role of president.” I wonder what he would say about the theatrics of politics in 2026.

Schubert’s Last Sonata

More than a week of heavy snow is still on the ground as I drive home from a store on Arena Drive in Hamilton. I’m listening to Schubert’s last piano sonata, not his song cycle Winterreisse (Winter Journey), which is in the CD set on the passenger seat. Why? It’s a lovely sunny day, for one thing. Keeping in mind the theme of the day, last week’s beginnings and endings, I’m also thinking of the magnificent closing paragraph of James Joyce’s The Dead, where the snow is “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” But the snow on this sunny day is white and hard on the ground, nothing about it comparable to the poetry of falling snow in Joyce’s prose. The singer Johann Michael Vogl, the first person after the composer himself to undertake the Winterreisse, called Schubert’s songs “the utterance of a musical clairvoyance.” Writing on the occasion of Joyce’s 49th birthday, Padraic Colum noted that Joyce was “very much influenced by correspondences which seem to disclose something significant in man’s life” and that “the whole of Ulysses is a vast system of correspondences.”

Schubert’s last piano sonata covers everything. The B-Flat was completed in 1828, two months before the composer’s death. Calling it “a work of vast dimensions and vertiginous depths,” the New Yorker’s Alex Ross suggests that the piece “has long struck listeners as a kind of premature communication from the beyond.” All I know is that the length of the work recorded by Alfred Brendel in November of 1971 exactly corresponded with the 35 minutes it took me to get from Hamilton to Princeton. Halfway into the sonata, during what one commentator called the “lightfooted and fanciful scherzo,” I turned on to Quaker Road, roughly along the same route taken in January 1777 by Washington and his troops. I was cheering them on, especially Thomas Paine, who was marching among them, his fresh-off-the-press pamphlet American Crisis having inspired the soldiers and their leader.

An Afterlife Dinner

While there’s no time for last week’s other celebrants, William Burroughs, Gertrude Stein, and Christopher Marlowe, maybe I’ll invite them to an afterlife dinner party like the ones regularly featured (but not this Sunday) in the New York Times Book Review’s Sunday feature “By the Book.”