Michael Paterniti - Interview

Interview, July, 2000 by Diane Baroni

MP: Yeah. I had this feeling that to touch his brain would be to touch the universe. You'd be touching the black holes and the white dwarfs. You'd literally be touching the mind of a god. So when Harvey had one off somewhere and Evelyn Einstein and I were in the car and realized that he'd left the brain on the back seat, at first we didn't anything. But then I reached for the Tupperware and started peeling off the lid. The first thing that hit us was the formaldehyde--sort of the scent of ages smacking you. But then whatever was abhorrent and horrifying about the moment slipped away because we were in the presence of Einstein's brain, touching it and holding it.

Diane Baroni is a novelist and journalist living in New York.