The crow lay in the gutter, dying. Discovering it startled me to the point of almost falling off my bike. I stopped and looked at the bird; it was clearly petrified of both what was happening to it, and now also my threatening presence. It was desperately flapping one of its wings (perhaps the other one was broken), for the first time in its life having no say in where it was now or where it was heading next.
My days began around 5 am. I would drag myself out of my bed into the darkness, coldness, painfulness. Waking up so early usually requires a pact with the other end of the day, but I refused to sign one, rarely going to bed before midnight. Every night, every morning, every midday fighting with my eyes closing, I was failing to learn a lesson.
Out of the twenty final projects for all doctorate candidates, this one was by far the most remote, and the staff feared no one would want to take it. I worried about that too, nervously joking that it took even E.T. less time to get home.
My days began around 5:30 am, when I stepped outside into the chilly winter night. It would take a 20-minute bike ride to get to the train station. When I couldn’t muster up enough energy or will, or whenever it was really cold, a bike ride would get an upgrade to a bus ride. Or maybe a downgrade. Biking always had an interesting property of actually both warming me up and reenergizing me, but I had to have some initial supply of both to get started; that wasn’t sometimes the case that early in the day.
I always felt I personally owned the small city of Eindhoven during the ride through it. It was dark, it was quiet, it was desolate — as if I was there after some terrible catastrophe, a lonely survivor on his rusting bike, yielding humanity’s last portable CD player, with the only remaining book in the only remaining backpack.
My days began around 6 am. The Amsterdam-bound train I hopped on coincided with another one, departing at exactly the same time, but headed towards the Hague. Every day I found myself sitting there, in silence punctuated only by the delicate, intimate soundtrack to The house of sand and fog; still in that half-awake state when the world seems a better place and all the dreams a tiny bit more real. My train and its companion were going hand in hand, bravely facing snow storms, passing all the little stations not important enough for express trains to grace them with even as much as a slight decrease in speed. We were all watching the world wake up.
I read many books during those eight months of crisscrossing the Dutch landscapes. One that took the most time was Richard Rhodes’s magnum opus The making of the atomic bomb. I spent weeks carrying its heavy tome in my backpack, but neither those weeks nor a single one of the eight hundred pages prepared me for the horror of its ending.
Shortly after I discovered the bird, I rushed back home and called the first veterinarian I could find in the phone book. She was angry at me for waking her up, and in broken English tried to explain how it was just nature taking care of herself, and that I shouldn’t intervene. So I didn’t. I never saw the bird again.
After ten minutes of the parallel journey, the other train would go above us on a viaduct, emerge on the opposite side for a brief second as if it wanted to say good-bye, and then leave us on our way North. We were alone the rest of the way.
My days began around 7:30 am, with me alighting at the Amsterdam’s satellite town of Duivendrecht, switching to the light rail train among now many more people.
Years later, I helped Rhodes during his talk at the Google campus, designing slides which depicted what would happen if a nuclear bomb were to explode directly above our heads. He argued that decades after the Cold War ended, the threat was stronger than ever. Things that were supposed to be permanent disappearing; things ostensibly temporary staying with us forever.
My days began around 7:50 am, when I stepped out of the tram, took a deep breath, and started walking towards an old, dilapidated, creaky building of the Faculty of Sciences.
I was falling in love with someone back then, but I didn’t know yet I never would. Next to all the things that could and should have been undone, this was the only one that volunteered to do so.
My days began around 8 am, when I arrived at the university, sat down to my desk, and continued writing my thesis. Maybe everything before that was just a dream.
— San Francisco, March 2011.