The paper was open in the second browser tab. I'd been meaning to read it. I scrolled past the abstract, looked at the first section header, started reading — and by the third paragraph I had slowed to a stop because the argument was just beautiful. They'd taken a problem that had been a tangle for a decade and re-posed it in two moves so simple you wondered how nobody had seen them before. I stayed on that paragraph for a minute. Then I scrolled down to the main theorem and read it out loud to myself. It was elegant in the old sense of the word — the sense that means *nothing could be added without breaking it, nothing removed*. I sat with the paper open on the desk for a while after I finished reading, because I wanted the elegance to imprint before I moved on to anything else.
