A Solstice of the Soul
For an instant of cosmic time you are the center of the universe, wondering where everybody is going and why, as trillions of galaxies, smudges of light and possibility, recede. You trust that the steady rise and fall of stars heralds order, only to be ambushed by surprise and confusion.
For the last quarter-century, I have been privileged to ride on a vertiginous wave of awe and terror. Armed with the coolest business card in journalism, identifying me as the “cosmic affairs correspondent” of The New York Times, I descended into the bowels of the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, froze on stormy mountaintops in Mexico and drank in glittery star fields on peaks in Chile and Hawaii. I lectured about Albert Einstein in Hong Kong and Berlin and despaired as I wandered the muddy rubble of the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.
Now, I am retiring from The Times and must relinquish that business card, although not the mission behind it. I will continue to appear in these pages from time to time and work on a book trying to marry the personal and the cosmic.
