Time folding in on itself

I find myself today looking over the umpteenth revised draft of a paper I started a year and a half ago in Geneva while working at the UN. I spent quite a few weekends working on it at UNIMAIL, the campus of the University of Geneva located two blocks from my apartment, itself adjacent to the lovely Carouge neighborhood. UNIMAIL was one of the few places I could get WIFI access on the weekends, other than the smoke-filled cafes down the Boulevard Carl Vogt. The building is a massive congeries of classrooms, lecture halls, and a large bookstore, arrayed on multiple levels under a glass ceiling with multiple colored panels and unified by a large lobby/central hallway. It looks like an architectural vision of the future as conceived in the late 70's/early 80's -- it recalls in me some youthful archetypal images of the future as experienced in built space, which undoubtedly derive most immediately from my visits to the original Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), itself perched in the forested expanses of NW Portland near the Portland Zoo and long since repurposed, as well as my first visits, at the age of 9-10, to the impressive new OMSI location in Portland's Central Eastside district. Me at 8, at 10, at 27, at nearly 29, or "it's 1963, it's 1964, it's 1957, it's 1962" -- Sonic Youth, "Hey Joni." Time recircles, redounds upon itself, but the joke is on me. Fortunately, so is the attendant whimsy.

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