A moveable feast

MIT

The years have come and gone. You find yourself now at an intersection and you are told it is time for you to commence your life and jump into the unknown. Tonight you think of all that has passed.

What was this place in which you spent these years? When your eyes glaze over with the years and shine in the memory of a moment you cannot retell, what do you see? And what will you forget?

A bit less than 4 years ago I came to MIT. After a period away, I recently came back to wear a piece of black cloth and walk through the door. As I arrived I walked in the hours between midnight and dawn, the madrugada, that interval where a city’s darkness opens it to the eye. When the streets of Cambridge are almost silent but for the skid of bike wheels against asphalt, when a sudden noise might mean danger and the possibility of two strangers truly staring at each other. And so it is at night that I remember you, Boston, and Cambridge.

I felt nostalgia at streets I had biked across in every hour of darkness, running in the rain at midnight, throwing ice onto the frozen river at 1 and watching it ripple out like an array of stars, staring up from an old quantum mechanics textbook at 2, walking to Harvard at 3, chatting across the yard at 4, sending in the problem set at 5, and finally seeing the sun rise on the Charles through the bleary eyes of a kid trying to surpass himself at 6, and finding himself awed at the world by 7. To traverse MIT at night is to feel small against structures of concrete, steam pipes, silent gases floating across the light of empty buildings rumbling with machinery, and then to share a moment of quiet complicity with a bleary-eyed man across the hallway.

If you are lucky enough to have lived at MIT as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for MIT is a moveable feast.

I put my whole heart into it when I lived here. It was not whole-heartedly happy, but full of intense lows and highs. I left home at 17 and struggled to deal with the distance from my family. I made many of my best friendships, and entered my first relationship. I sacrificed sleep and health to surpass myself in math and physics because it was fascinating, because I had something to prove. I started to become a scientist, to get a sense for what to understand, how to understand, with who. I moved into a coop and learned to cook. I made food for 40 people, I caulked a bathroom, I set up new servers. I climbed a building and put a stupid british flag up on it. I got into actual climbing. I threw writing events, parties, talked to my friends on various roofs. I tried to create experiences where people could open up their dreams.

I listened to your music and shivered looking at you play with the chords, I ate your food from all around the world and thanked you for it, the filo, the sticky rice, the same barbecue tofu we cooked every week. You told me about operators shifting in alien spaces I only started to imagine, about how the physicist can see the solution before he computes it. In a beautiful cave you let me taste the eggs of ants, the escamoles and you moved my body with your DJ sets. I watched the way you dressed up, how you cared about the work you did, how your eyes lit up when you told me about modular robots in space, salmon-counting, international nuclear policy, running large-scale development surveys in India, imputation in statistics, marxism and then ML systems design and then AI agents, buildings made of mud, the movies you liked oh how they moved your heart, and then mine, and why, why did they, how is it possible that my neck can shiver like this, how can Kiarostami to talk to me with more than words and reach so far into my spine? I watched you bring people together and make them jump into ice cold water because you felt that man ought to be made to feel something, ought to be taken out of his complacent slumber and remember what it is to be in a body. I felt scared when you raced against those cars with me in the back just because you thought it was funny. You told me about mountains across the world you wanted to jump off of. About a pain you rarely spoke of. A pain that used to tear your skin, that cut out an opening I could still look through, look into its darkness and try to understand how you could be so complicated and so beautiful, how maybe one day we could understand each other. Over and over. You looked out to the river under the moon. You said you would never forget your love, there was no point to pretend. You cut through to me and laid me bare, cored me, and I did not forget. We made food at night and you got worse at it because I was looking at you, and you read next to me, and I saw your face react to every stroke of the painting as it softly terrorized you with your body’s passion. A passion to stop my words. How your face lit up at the things I would brush past, and how you got me to look a bit longer. I heard about the books you read and then I read them, and I was amazed at how you were able to fit so much life in so little time.

I do not fear death because you’ve given me enough to be thankful for. I fear death because after me no one will remember, and these words are already too few and too thin.

We are made by the places in which we live, and we can only ask that we look back at them without regret. I do. MIT seems like the best place I could ever have hoped to live for those years. A place to learn one’s values through their exemplars. A place to be quirky, to be different, with less fear. To be passionate without restraint, to go to insane lengths for your dreams, small as they sometimes seem. To have agency for the sake of beauty, community, play, understanding.

I walk forward now unto a new range of colors and begin to paint the sky in them. I dab red onto a cloud, I give it a new shape, and sometimes, not always, as I see into the vastness, it stares back at me, and I pull at its edges, I separate out the hues, and suddenly I recognize the color we began to see together, back then, a deeper shade now. A fragment of our moveable feast.