This evening I sat in the omphalos, the navel of the cosmos. Sculptor Dimitri Hadzi was commissioned to create a piece for the island of land that juts out into the middle of the breakneck traffic of Harvard Square, and he responded with this wondrous thing:

It may look a little too abstract in the abstract, but in its context, amidst the swirling honking traffic and myriad jaywalking students, professors, street musicians, gawking tourists, and homeless lost souls, it works. It's an eye of calm in the hurricane of thought that is Harvard. I sat here before once, before I knew where I was sitting, way back in 1997 - the same summer I was in Vermont with my advisor hiking up and down and all around Stratton Mountain, another kind of omphalos. I had come back down to the flatlands of Boston for a weekend to return some library books and touch base with some friends and had found myself in Harvard Square that Saturday night. I had just seen "Contact", the sci-fi movie with Jodie Foster based on the book with the same name by Carl Sagan, and after a half a summer of doing nothing but reading Greek in the morning and bushwhacking through the Green Mountain National Forest in my spare time I was feeling pretty out there in the wake of the film. So I sat to gather my thoughts and was approached by an extremely attractive young lady about my own age who seemed unusually interested in a fellow such as myself. I was right to be suspicious - the girl turned out to be a evangelical Christian, and had no interest in me whatsoever, except insofar as my immortal soul was concerned. But this fisherperson for Christ had hooked a much bigger catch than she'd baited her hook for, as the last work I'd been reading in Greek up on the mountain was the Gospel According to John, and I was more ready to talk about the Bible than she was. At first she was impressed with my knowledge of Scripture, especially when I busted out a relevant passage in the original Greek; but it wasn't too long after that that she realized that she didn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of converting me, and was probably doing irreparable harm to her own soul by spending more time with my apostate self than was absolutely necessary. So she left me to the omphalos, where I sat and enjoyed a breezy, starry midsummer's evening.