October 4. It is warm, above eighty degrees. Everything still feels like summer, except that it gets dark unusually early.

I fire terabytes into the cloud and measure how they spread from east coast to west coast.

October 3. I’m still so dependent on paper that I’ve now bought a writing tablet. I don’t want to steal paper out of printers anymore, or pick from a stack of paper that I keep in my closet for that. And then not be able to find a pen. If, in critical moments, I don’t have paper and pen, I simply can’t work at all. The ideas stay pupated, I can’t make any progress. I then need those sheets of paper with my notes for a few hours to days, I never know exactly, but after that they can be trashed. Except that it often takes weeks before they bother me so much that I actually throw them away.

So now a writing tablet. I immediately wrote J a letter on it, just the way I last wrote to someone twenty-five years ago, in a slowness that seemed unexpectedly familiar. During the time with the client today, I needlessly scribbled away on the tablet, but lingered to see if an idea would be required for which I would actually need the tablet. And indeed! And the idea came, and I was able to develop it on two pages and figure it out. I am happy like a child at how fundamentally my life might have changed once again. 

The tablet – a reMarkable 2 – is considered the one that feels closest to pen and paper. I can also erase, circle things and move them around on the page, and draw live in a video conference. I don’t have to throw anything away, it all stays there, but doesn’t bother anyone.

October 2. While swimming this morning, at a quarter to eight, the sun shone into the hall at such a low angle that a stretch of the pool floor lay in bright light. The wave structure of the surface turned into the pulsating honeycombs of light that everyone knows, but which delighted me and filled me with endless wonder. Who would have thought that waves would become sharply defined webs, with chromatic aberration at the edges, and that their patterns of movement, furiously fast, would not seem like sine functions at all, but like sine functions running against each other and sloshing up briefly. During my eighty laps, the bright stretch grew narrower and narrower as the sun rose higher and higher, and finally disappeared altogether. I often miscounted my laps.

October 1. Took the car and drove half an hour into the countryside. Glistening day, beginning coloring of the leaves. At the turnaround point we find a geocache and send pictures of it to the kids.

For the first time in years, I make up a piece. First I have four bars, then eight. I first have to learn to play it myself. My structural resources seem tremendously limited. Question-answer. Open-close. What else can I do? I feel lost and am magnetically attracted by obviousness.

September 30. Slept ten hours, I guess it was necessary. Happy with two new smart thermostats, which I bought and installed. The temperature situation in this household, an ongoing source of debate between us, will be so much more transparent this winter.

September 29. Looking forward to a weekend where I don’t have to look at performance graphs after a long time.

Went swimming the second day in a row. Body confused and rebuilds itself for it.

I learn about digital court filings in Germany. It sounds as if Germany cements its lag in digitization by advancing digitization.

“I don’t need a smartwatch, a vacuum cleaner robot, or AI.” This “I don’t need” is unknown in America.

It rains all day. New York City floods, which I only see on the news. Here in Newburgh, the rain is unusual, but bearable.

September 28. Let’s put it this way: There are simply all kinds of different screens. Those that light up and those that don’t, those you write on and those you tap on. What you do with which of them is fluid. That there are “e-readers” today which are specifically intended for reading “books” is a transitory phenomenon.

September 27. J pragmatic: She reads on the Kindle because it has warm light. Otherwise she can’t sleep. And I have to admit: The Kindle regularly falls out of my hand in bed, the smartphone never has.

September 26. Kathrin writes that she doesn’t need an e-reader: “A separate device just so I can read books on a separate device to really feel like they’re books? Pfft.” – That’s a good point, and I seriously wonder why I read on an e-reader. Because it’s easier on the eyes? That can’t be, really, because every day I read much more on all sorts of other screens than on the e-reader. Is it because there are no distractions on the e-reader? I’ve always felt I was above that. If you can’t handle distractions, or try to keep them away by means of a special device, you don’t seem to be particularly well adapted to the twenty-first century yet. If you’re distracted, what you’re reading is obviously not good enough. Then you’d better read something else. It’s possible that the e-reader is the last relic of my idolatry of books, when what really matters is the text, the content, the writing, the thinking.

September 25. Return flight. Boundless Exhaustion. Nerves wrecked. We balance reasonably successfully all the way back to the Upper West Side. We’re used to all of this – even when things go wrong, we catch ourselves again after a moment’s uncertainty. We arrive at four in the afternoon and try not to fall asleep immediately.