December 19. We try out a new restaurant at Amsterdam and Eighty-first. The woman who serves us acts like she owns it. We are thrilled with the food and she asks us to tell all our friends. Only problem: we don’t have any friends. A review we could do.

December 18. Ballet always leaves me somewhere between fascinated and disturbed. This time rather disturbed. These movements that go beyond what the human body is normally capable of – transhuman, in other words. But the moment a machine would execute them, they would be worthless. (cf. distrust of virtuosity) I don’t want to measure something by whether it represents a special achievement for a human being, but by what it means, regardless of what kind of being performs it.

December 17. Nutcracker on Long Island. Snowflake ballet on Titan.

December 16. Got vaxxed yesterday, a few hours of elevated temperature today, numb. All gone in the evening.

December 15. Touched a violin for the first time. It was J’s. She put it in my hand and showed me how to hold it. First the bow, actually. I then stroked the bow across the open strings, trying to hit individual strings, keeping the bow at the same angle to the strings as much as possible, which requires a coordinated movement of shoulder, elbow, hand and fingers. Then played pizzicato Alle meine Entchen, which amazed me greatly because I don’t actually consider myself able to hear intervals properly.

December 14. These hilarious discussions about whether you can learn an instrument late in life, and by late they mean nineteen or twenty-three. My predominant memory of what I tried to do with music as a child is that it hurt and didn’t work out. I still didn’t want to quit and kept looking for new ways into it, none of them much more successful. Except for compliments about my piano-playing that started when I was eighteen or twenty and amounted to saying that I didn’t have any of the necessary skills but somehow played quite amazingly. – Somewhere in there lies a key to how I function. Everything I do feels, in actuality, impossible to me.

December 13. Of course I know why, but I do find it amazing that when night falls – when we turn away from the sun – the temperature doesn’t fall without bottom.

December 12. I could write the longest entry I’ve ever written about this day, but I write: Didn’t do much. Read essays by Joan Didion. In a piano piece, put the right and left hand together note by note until, in slow steps, like a puzzle, the piece becomes recognizable. Watched two episodes of Sex Education with J.

December 11. Now we get warnings that you should take your selfies off the net so they can’t be used by AIs in deep fakes. And how long should you keep your looks to yourself now? Twenty, a hundred, a thousand years?

December 10. Posted the English translation of the communication essay. Thought long and hard about the title. I would have called it, as if I was Susan Sontag, “On Communication” or “Regarding Communication”, but then I thought that was pretentious. The essay doesn’t make it to that level. “Some Recent Characteristics of Communication” it is.