It was a perfect summer's day in Cambridge MA today - as someone said to me in a store: we should bottle it up and release it again in February. I didn't have the heart to say that February in LA can be quite clement (anyway, everyone all day reacted to me as if I were a British tourist, so that would just have confused things). A week working in libraries? This is a wonderful treat ... I can barely remember Harvard from previous visits - I know I didn't go onto the main campus the last time I was here, and the time before that ... I think it was 1981 or 2, and two things came back to me the minute I walked through the gateway off Harvard Square: first, that Cambridge here reminded me of Cambridge, England - it even smells the same, and I'd forgotten that - and second, that when I was here on that occasion, I performed an extraordinary act of heroism by removing the world's biggest cockroach from the bathroom of the friends whose apartment I was staying in - neither of them would go near it. Place, indeed, uncovers some odd things in the memory.
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