April 11. The whole day was strangely lightless, a completely uniform white from all directions without any structure. Also, light rain, incessantly. – Everything about these two sentences is a simplification. They don’t mention, for example, the varying degrees of fog over the hours, sometimes enveloping the more distant buildings from above, sometimes retreating in an undefined way. And the rain was by no means continuous. You could walk or ride several blocks without getting seriously wet, but it wasn’t like that all day. And in the evening on the Hudson, I had surprising headwinds upriver, with confusing wave patterns on the water. I just have to ban rhetorical simplifications like the one above. They are cheap effects.

My kids want to know what I love most about them. I say there’s nothing. That is what is called love. That I love everything about them indiscriminately. But they still want some example. So I say I love the thoughts my son thinks. How he points out to me that you can’t think nothing at all because you’re always already thinking something. And to my daughter, that I love when you see her soaking up information. When she hears something she hasn’t thought of before, and how you can see her absorb that into her thoughts, never to forget it.