Last night, I headed off to hear the New York Philharmonic play. It was my first chance to do so this season, as, though I’d held tickets for a number of earlier concerts, I’d always been out of town and had to pass them off to friends. The girl I was meeting was (per usual) rather late, which gave me a chance to stand in front of the fountain in the middle of Lincoln Center, perhaps my favorite place in New York (at least at night during the winter). The opera, the orchestra and the ballet all had performances that evening, and so the three glass-faced buildings that surround the fountain were lit up and teaming with couples and families and students and whomever else, dressed up and wearing mittens and overcoats and jostling for entrance.

Standing there, I was hit by a wave of homesickness – not homesickness for somewhere else, but homesickness for that very place, at the thought that I would almost doubtless eventually end up living somewhere that wasn’t as beautiful and crystalline and quintessentially New York as the fountain in Lincoln Center at that very moment.