Eternity as Cosmopolitan
So I can't decide whether or not to leave Cambridge, Massachusetts later this year and strike out for greener pastures. I think this is because I can no longer remember if there really are greener pastures anymore. If I like only one thing about this place (and currently it is only this one thing that I can think of) it is undoubtedly that people here read interesting books on the bus. Living between Harvard and MIT can convince anyone that our cultures are not all skeetering towards the edge of the abyss, and that there is reason to hope.
Look, it's a better system than giving up reading newspapers.
Being a foreigner in Cambridge, which is actually a very real hub of international culture, permits a certain inconspicuousness. Lots of clever people around here and most people aren't dull-minded enough to expect that clever people have to wear uncomfortable suits or drive certain prestige cars. That's its own quiet luxury right there.
Some people start traveling and become strangers. Then they cease altogether to remember how not to be a stranger. It's much less lonely, somehow, being a stranger because without the requirement that people be the same as you, you accept them as they are.
And such people have left an ordinary world forever and departed into the extraordinary.
