Afterlives of the Rich and Famous (29 page)

His mother finally retrieved him and brought him to the Other Side.
He was
relieved to find himself here after a lifetime of being weighed down with the needless threat of hell, and he was also exhilarated to be rid of a body that had caused him more pain in his last years on earth than he admitted to anyone.
He had a difficult time at the Scanning Machine watching the pain his personal emotional conflicts caused those around him.

He was proud of his work as an actor except, he says, when he “caught himself at it,” but he regrets that he didn’t excel at the most important role he was ever given, the role of father.
To make amends, his frequent visits to your dimension are devoted to special-needs children, who see him and enjoy talking to him, and he loves making them laugh.

He spends most of his time here with his soul mate, Katharine.
He was one of the first to meet her when she returned Home, and they promptly returned to their secluded house on the shore, where they enjoy writing plays together for themselves and their actor friends to perform.
Spencer also writes historical novels with Ernest Hemingway, a friend from several past lives.

He joyfully greeted his son when John came Home not long ago, and the two of them are very much at peace and love building and sailing boats together. Neither Spencer, John, nor Katharine has plans to incarnate again.

Albert Einstein

O
ne of the great minds of the twentieth century and winner of the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921, Albert Einstein was born in
Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, on March
14, 1879
. His father, Her
mann, after a brief career as a featherbed salesman, went on to operate an electrochemical factory, while his mother, Pauline, took care of the middle-class Jewish household. Shortly after Albert’s birth the family moved to Munich, where his sister, Maja, was born two years later.

Einstein’s uniquely inquisitive mind was evident in what he recalled as the two “wonders” that fascinated him as a child. The first was the compass he came across when he was five and the “invisible forces” that moved the needle. The second, when he was twelve, was his introduction to what he came to call his “sacred little geometry book.”

Hermann Einstein moved his wife and daughter to Milan, Italy, in 1894, leaving Albert in a Munich boarding house to finish his education. Six months later, partly because he was miserable and partly because he was facing the prospect of being drafted into the military when he turned sixteen, he ran away and managed to make his way alone to his parents’ new home in another country.

He gained admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, where he enjoyed what he remembered as some of the happiest years of his life and met Mileva Maric, his future wife. He graduated in 1900, and Albert and Mileva were married on January 6, 1903. A daughter, Lieserl, was born to the couple in 1902, before their marriage, and seemingly vanished a year later. Albert is thought never to have seen her, and nothing was written or said about her after 1903. Two sons followed Albert and Mileva’s marriage—Hans in 1904 and Eduard in 1910. By then Albert was working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office, a job at which he was so capable that he had plenty of spare time to invest in his ongoing passion for physics.

In 1905, which scholars refer to as his “miracle year,” he published four papers in
Annalen der Physik,
one of the world’s most respected physics journals. Among his accomplishments in these papers, Albert assembled various pieces of the theory of special relativity developed by other scientists into one whole theory and recognized that it was a universal law of nature. The papers, credited with changing the course of modern physics, captured the attention of the most influential physicist of the time, Max Planck, who developed the quantum theory, and thanks to that attention, Albert became a popular lecturer at international conferences and was offered a series of prestigious jobs in the academic world. He ultimately accepted the position of director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.

Unfortunately, Albert’s growing worldwide renown and immersion in his work had a fatal impact on his marriage. He and Mileva were divorced in
1919
, and he later married a distant cousin, Elsa Lowenthal.

An intense backlash against Albert by the growing Nazi movement finally compelled him to leave Germany, and in 1932 he moved to the United States and relocated his work to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, prompting physicists from around the world to flock there to study with him. His brilliant successes were counterbalanced by a series of personal tragedies in the 1930s—his son Eduard was diagnosed with schizophrenia and was institutionalized for the rest of his life; his close friend Paul Ehrenfest committed suicide; and in 1936 his wife, Elsa, passed away from a combination of heart and liver problems.

It’s no surprise that a genius so fascinated with “invisible forces” put a great deal of thought into his own religious beliefs, and his writings expressed his faith in a God of harmony and beauty, an “old one” who was the ultimate lawmaker, but not a God who intervened in each of our personal human affairs. He’s quoted as saying: “I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. . . . The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

The impact of Albert Einstein’s work is impossible to calculate; his celebrated theory of relativity barely scratches the surface of his accomplishments. He spent his later years in solitude, relying on music for relaxation, and on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, he died of an aneurysm. More than half a century later the results of his genius are still as inspiring, compelling, and motivating as they were during his extraordinary lifetime.

From Francine

The look of blissful awe on Albert’s face when he emerged from the tunnel reminded all who saw it of that “little child” he referred to when he described his belief in God.
He wept with joy as he rushed first into his
mother’s open arms and then into the arms of his beloved friend Paul Eh
renfest.
(Both his father and his second wife had reincarnated by the time Albert returned Home.)
His mentor, Isaac Newton, was there as well, to shake his hand and, with a smile filled with pride, ask Albert if he would please mentor him now, “until we’re back on a level playing field again”—Albert had far exceeded Isaac’s expectations during his lifetime.
Albert is said to have replied, “I simply stood on the shoulders of a giant,” a reference to a quotation of Isaac’s.
He then bowed deeply to the teacher and friend who was so influential in preparing him for this incarnation, which is his third and last. He remarked, “I do much better work here, without the weight of sadness.”

As often happens with physicists and other scientists, Albert was almost as mesmerized by the Scanning Machine itself as he was with the lifetime that played out inside it.
He continues to visit it regularly, taking full advantage of another of its uses: just as all of us here have unlimited access to the life charts in the Hall of Records, we can also review anyone’s lifetime we choose at the Scanning Machine, from the first pharaohs of Egypt or Jesus’s disciples to Mozart, Thomas Jefferson,
or the doomed residents of Atlantis.
For a mind like Albert’s, the “mechanics” of what you might think of as the ultimate time machine are irresistible, especially since one of his greatest passions here is to unlock the secrets of time travel for you on earth.
He believes that by the
2040
s in your years, time travel will be common through what he calls such global “flues” as the Bermuda Triangle, through the infused work of a team that includes Albert, Nikola Tesla, Galileo, and George Hale.
One of the recipients of these infusions, beginning in approximately
2018
, will be a young man at Duke University whose name is Bernard or Bernhard.

Albert was especially moved by the arrival of his son Eduard, whose exceptional mind was clouded by schizophrenia during his lifetime.
After being cocooned, Eduard rejoined his father as a coprofessor at physics and astrophysics seminars designed specifically for spirits who will be incarnating and have charted those sciences as their specialties—“our hands on earth,” as Albert calls them.
Albert and Eduard live in a Cape Cod cottage in what corresponds to your Provincetown, Massachusetts, and they’re avid sailors on their ship called
Yanqin,
an Aramaic word for “children.” Albert has also reunited with his friend Johann Brahms, whose music he adores, and the two of them enjoy performing Brahms’s compositions and other great classical works at small salons throughout the Other Side, with Johann on the harpsichord and Albert on his beloved violin.

Ray Charles

Brother Ray” Charles, the genius pianist, singer, composer, and bandleader who left an indelible imprint on music, was born Ray Charles Robinson on September 23, 1930
, in Albany, Georgia. His father, Bailey Robinson, pieced together what income he could as a railroad repairman, a mechanic, and a handyman, while his mother, Aretha Williams, worked at a local sawmill. Ray was still an infant when the family moved to Greenville, Florida.

The Robinsons were poor, even compared to other black families in the South during the Great Depression, and they were also given more than their share of tragedy early in Ray’s life. He was only five when he saw his four-year-old brother, George, drown in a washtub. And he was only seven when, possibly due to glaucoma or an untreated infection, his failing eyesight deteriorated to total blindness.

With Aretha’s support, he quickly learned to be capable and independent rather than disabled, and he was promptly enrolled in the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind in St. Augustine, which he attended from the age of seven until he was fifteen. It was there that his musical gifts were nourished. He was taught composing and reading in Braille. He learned to play the piano, the saxophone, and every other instrument the school had to offer. His young life revolved around studying, practicing, and exploring all the music that moved him, from jazz and the blues to country and gospel.

Ray’s mother died in 1945, when he was fifteen. He left school and moved to Jacksonville, where he played piano at the Ritz Theater for over a year before heading on to Orlando, then Tampa, and finally Seattle in 1947. In Seattle, in addition to meeting his lifelong friend and frequent collaborator Quincy Jones, he started recording for the Down Beat label, forming the Maxin Trio with guitarist G. D. McKee and bassist Milton Garrett, and in 1949 their “Confession Blues” reached number two on the R&B charts. Calling himself Ray Charles for the first time, he then joined Swing Time Records and recorded two more hits, which led to a contract with Atlantic Records. His first major hit singles were recorded for Atlantic, including 1954’s “I Got a Woman,” which he wrote with Renald Richard.

From 1955 until 1959 he had an amazing string of R&B hit singles and albums, with a girl group he recruited and named the Raelettes singing back-up on such classics as “A Fool for You,” “Drown in My Own Tears,” and “The Night Time (Is the Right Time).” In 1959 he achieved his first “crossover” hit when “What’d I Say” reached number one on the R&B charts, but soared into the top ten on the pop music charts as well. He continued his crossover success when he signed with ABC Records in 1960, releasing hit after hit with such legendary recordings as “Georgia on My Mind,” “Hit the Road, Jack,” and “Unchain My Heart.”

In 1962 Ray crossed over again and helped popularize country music among mainstream listeners with a two-album series called
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
. Its first single, a spectacular arrangement of Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” not only achieved the number-one spot on both the pop and R&B charts in America, but it also became the number-one record in England.

The “British Invasion,” as the 1964 arrival of the Beatles and a stream of other bands from England has come to be known, seriously disrupted the momentum of a lot of American recording artists for several years, and Ray was among them, with a long string of only moderately successful releases through the late 1960s and well into the 1970s. He recorded a breathtaking signature version of “America the Beautiful” in 1972, popularizing the beloved national standard when it was broadcast internationally at the 1980 Olympics. In 1979, Ray Charles’s recording of “Georgia on My Mind” was officially proclaimed the state song of Georgia. And in 1985 he was a featured part of an all-star chorus who performed the Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie song “We Are the World” for the USA for Africa charity. He performed at the inaugurations of Ronald Reagan in 1985 and Bill Clinton in 1993, kicking off more than a decade of television and worldwide appearances from Venezuela to France to Italy. And between the years of 1981 and 2004 he received, among other honors, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame; induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the Rhythm and Blues Foundation, and the Jazz Hall of Fame; the Kennedy Center Honor and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, all in addition to the seventeen Grammy Awards he won throughout his career, five of them presented posthumously.

Everyone he worked with would agree that perfectionism drove every note of every Ray Charles recording session, to the point where he literally let nothing stand in his way. Singer, songwriter, and producer Billy Vera tells the story of delivering the twenty-four-track tape of a $
10,000
instrumental session to Ray’s Los Angeles studio for Ray to add his vocals. Ray listened and liked what he heard for the most part, but he was sure the saxophone solo should happen eight bars later than it was recorded. While Billy watched in amazement, Ray threaded the tape and cued up the solo. And then, in Billy’s words, “I see this blind man take a razor blade to a $
10,000
recording, splice in the solo where he thinks it belongs, and sure enough, he was right, it was perfect. And believe me, we all knew Ray too well to try to stop him.”