Quartz Crystals
Springtime’s For Us
At a recent conversation with students at the Harvard Advocate, Martha Tedeschi, director of the Harvard Art Museums, asked whether we felt it is important for the museum to actively make itself a place for the wider Cambridge community, as opposed to a primarily educational museum for Harvard. The question initially struck me as the deceptively open-ended kind that has one correct answer—how could we say that we did not want the museum to open itself up to the community?—but also made me realize that I had never conceptualized the Harvard Art Museums as a place “for us.”
Tedeschi spoke in a room around which flowers had been scattered to welcome the warm weather, with the windows overlooking an afternoon distinctly colored with spring—the asphalt roads warm gray, the sky flushed generously blue, passersby walking without wintertime’s wind-defying shoulder-clench. The strange surprise that came with her question, the reconsideration of a space I frequent, felt inextricably associated with the season.
Night Run
Last summer, I got into the habit of running along the Charles at night without my contacts on. One piece I began writing would have described the unique freedom of rushing forward with only my feet and the periodic, depthless glare of headlights to guide me. It would have drawn the parallel between running without contact lenses and the need to occasionally relax our myopic focuses and trust ourselves, trust the ground beneath our feet, trust the night.
In recent weeks, however, I have been reminded yet again that there is a tremendous inconsistency in the world—or maybe just a horrifying consistency—that at one point I ran alone, at night, essentially blind, not only without dire consequence but with a sense of exhilaration, while for others even the ground is a constant source of existential terror.
Space Cadets
I spent this past spring break with the Phillips Brook House Association, volunteering as a teacher’s assistant in a high school in D.C. High school classrooms have never been enclaves of Puritan discipline, but the school’s policy of providing every student with a personal laptop added an extra layer of chaos. Students surfed the internet, quickly clicking to assignments when they sensed me approach. Some kept one earplug in as the teacher spoke. It was even more unnerving, however, to stand at the front of the classroom and make eye contact with nobody. There were just twenty glowing pupils, fixed somewhere and in some other time.
I can’t blame the students. I never used a laptop in school until I came to Harvard, but the habit is easily acquired, and I’m typing this during a lecture. I can’t imagine what it would have been like, and how I would be different, if I had grown up with a screen in all my classrooms. Beyond the (deservedly researched and debated) sub-question of whether we learn better in digital or analog is the question of how screens have eroded our crucial relationship to the spatial and temporal world. The ability to devote sustained attention to the place and moment at hand is not only valuable to our pursuits, but also key to having autonomy in and enjoying life. It is also something that all of us are increasingly relinquishing.
Hopper Square
For someone lonely on a weekend night, Harvard Square is nothing but windows. Walk down Mass. Ave, take the left onto JFK, loop back around to Mt. Auburn, and you’ll pass the Kong, Tatte, J.P. Licks, Clover, Starbucks, Felipe’s, Tealuxe, Tasty Burger, El Jefe’s. Even the 1 bus is just one long, shifting pane of glass.
We sight-dependent humans love to describe things in terms of vision, and windows—that enchanting marriage of visual transparency and physical impenetrability—occupy a special place in our imaginations and metaphorical landscapes. One of the most recognizable American paintings is Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks,” which depicts a late-night view into a diner. The streets sulk browns and turquoises, but the diner’s walls radiate pale yellow, and the blond bartender is dressed in white. A couple sits side-by-side at the bar with faces toward the viewer, hands resting close to each other on the counter; the third customer, another sharply-dressed man, sits a few stools down.
Taming of the Dimetrodon
A Dimetrodon milleri lurks in the Harvard Museum of Natural History’s Romer Hall, the museum’s vertebrate paleontology room. About six feet long from tail tip to snout, the dimetrodon resembles a large lizard with a flared ridge “sail” down its spine and an obstinate blunt snout, like a cross between a dog’s and a crocodile’s. The Dimetrodon display’s interactive screen presents a trivia question: To which is the dimetrodon most closely related—dinosaur, chicken, lizard, or human?
The HMNH features bright hallways of animals taxidermied and fossilized, extant and extinct. Hummingbirds float in neatly pinned columns. South American armadillos rear twelve feet into the air. Crustaceans glow in the buttery distortion of preservative jars. Soft-bodied sea creatures, impossible to naturally preserve, attain immortality as glass recreations by the Blaschkas, the father-son duo also responsible for the museum’s acclaimed glass flower collection. In a room dedicated to geology, white shelves offset the glittering fractal palettes of rock specimens.