The Albert Einstein Estate inaugurated its first chain of Silence Institutes on Tuesday, requiring every registered creative professional to complete an eleven-month residency of enforced solitude and metronomic routine before being permitted to submit any new idea to the public.
Applicants report to a converted monastery outside Bern, where they surrender all communication devices and are assigned a cell furnished with one wooden chair, one notebook, and a pendulum clock that strikes once per hour. The regimen, drafted by estate-appointed neurologists, mandates exactly seven hours of staring at a blank wall each morning, followed by four hours of walking the same corridor in alternating directions.
«The master understood that monotony is the mother of invention,» said estate director Helga Vogler, herself a former patent clerk who has not spoken to a colleague since March. «We are simply enforcing the conditions under which relativity was conceived. Anyone unwilling to endure the silence may return to their noisy café and their mediocre ideas.»
The first cohort of 340 writers, engineers and advertising executives began their terms on Monday. By Wednesday, 212 had requested early release, citing auditory hallucinations of their own inner monologues. Estate officials denied all petitions, noting that the contract they signed, though notarized, was merely a formality compared to the spiritual obligation of creative suffering.
Local residents have filed complaints about the institute's nightly ritual, in which residents stand on the roof and whisper their unfinished theories into the wind. The estate has responded by erecting a second, taller wall, explaining that true genius requires protection from the distractions of the outside world, including the sound of human disappointment.