Last Christmas, I worked in that old reception and found Abbie’s blog. Abbie, the wonderful, architecture loving girl from Minneapolis who could talk about Tolstoy with me at Duckworth Farm in Sebastopol, California. She had written a little bit about me on the blog, and I so clearly remember this afternoon, by the pond:
Katja just got in the water, and, breast-stroking to the other side, she giggled. I asked why. She replied, “I was thinking about intelligence, and how I could have been an engineer, as I’m still quite good at math. But then I remembered, as the philosophy student that I used to be, that we don’t really have free choice. You could have had the chocolate cake instead of a peach. But you didn’t. It’s not relevant. And that made me laugh.” Nothing I could possibly say in reply would have been nearly as good.
And I think that sometimes, you need the clear sight of a stranger to see your own occasional brilliance. What could I have done differently? Nothing, really. I’m here.
Katja Malmborg 