8/31 Rented a car and drove back to Newburgh to take care of Link. It is the first day I spend all alone in J’s home.

8/30 A large gathering around the bed, and the patient’s alive as ever. The same usual family talk. When we come to say something to death, we just say what we always say. Not that I disregard that. It’s the utmost we are capable of.

8/29 The health of J’s mom has declined rapidly, so we made the decision last night to drive the four hours to Vermont. When death calls, everybody comes.

8/28 How bad does it have to get before everyone realizes this was a wrong turn, and an entire country repents and becomes a good citizen of the earth again? How laughable is it to believe this has ever actually happened, anywhere?

8/27 Hard to grasp how life does not come to a complete halt. You’d think all the scientists would stop working, since their funding has been cut, all the companies close, since their reputation is ruined, all the teachers stop teaching, since what they teach has been destroyed. None of this happens of course. Life goes on as normal. I have my driving test next Saturday. The company reports earnings and the stock makes a big jump. Children learn violin from J and something bigger enters their lives. We do all these things, except with the cold smoke of a candle that’s been blown out inside.

8/26 It’s exactly like when I started college forty years ago. There are those who throw paper airplanes during lectures and have no idea why they are here, and those who breathe cosmopolitan dedication with such perfection that it’s hard to believe they were raised on the same planet.

8/25 It’s the week before classes start at Columbia, and judging from what’s going on in my building, nothing is wrong with the world. It’s all full with Asian students who come here to get something that must be shining far to lure them, something they cannot get at home, or so their parents believe.

8/24 Bolton says that the verdict of history about Trump will be devastating. That assumes that in history, in the long run, the accidents of humanity are no more than that: accidents. But what if history itself is contaminated? If it not only fails in the long run, but if there is not even an ideal, true standard against which it can be compared – relative to which its failure can be understood?

8/23 Mysteriously tired. I could sleep all day. Chatting with Claude whether that might be caused by a brain hemorrhage – it could, in the brain stem, for example, but I’m too tired to find that particularly plausible.

8/22 Seeing J, on the map, come up the I-95, while I look out the window into the evening sky over Jersey, the usual liquid beads of planes sinking towards Newark and La Guardia, and realizing out there is exactly where she is.