This is my favorite window view at work. It is right by the coffee machine in the little kitchenette on the 6th floor of the Broad, where I work. When I am waiting for my coffee I like to stand by this window. The view is of a corner of the Broad Institute and one side of the Whitehead Institute. Every square in this large grid is a part of a lab; each little window contains miniature people like me whose days are spent in the lab and in front of the computer—in my view, just a two-dimensional glass square and sometimes the publications that ultimately flow out of it; to them, everything, and if they looked out their window they’d see me waiting for my coffee and I would be small.
This is my favorite window view at home. We live in Peabody, which is not quite a suburb, more a small town in its own right but without the usual trappings of a small town, and far too far away to be an extension of Boston like Cambridge is. As I write this it’s raining, and foggy, and dark—the start of spring. Cars bring up rain from the street and their headlights illuminate it and the lights and the chimneys and the treetops are outlined in the bright night sky, and you can just see the lights on our fence. I grew up in a neighborhood without fences, low to the ground; now I live and I work exclusively in tall places, surrounded always by the little lights of other people’s lives.
In 2020, right before the start of the pandemic, I bought myself tickets to see Carmen at the Boston Ballet as a late birthday present. Carmen was postponed to August, then canceled, and now in 2022 I have transferred my tickets finally to see a ballet set to the Rolling Stones as a late birthday present.
Ballet has a magical effect. The last time I went to the ballet I saw Robbins. I was just about to start my PhD. On the way home on the train platform waiting for the Red Line, looking over the tracks at the other platform, everything seemed magical, timed. For a few hours I saw intention in everyone’s movements and postures and I felt a beautiful connection to the train schedule and to the city and everywhere I looked I saw mathematics and art. I felt myself a part of a giant clock, ticking and ticking and me so small in it. And tonight looking out at the windows and the fog I feel a part of a giant clock, ticking and ticking and me so small in it.
Tick tick tick.
L. A. K. 