1/24 It has been more than ten years since I last looked up Nossack’s Jahrgang 1901, and back then I’d found it somewhere on an obscure website. These days I need it again, and my heart sank when I couldn’t find it. Is all of this really gone, wiped from memory, and are we left dumb, stranded, cut off from what our minds could have been? I finally found it in the Internet Archive and at Anna’s, the entire paperback, carefully scanned, in a quality that lets even the PDF viewer grab the text from it. I know nothing like this in America. I should go ahead and translate it. I should translate hundreds of books, spend the rest of my life translating on a daily basis, and realize if I really stick to it, I can do maybe one book a year. The fact that, not being a native speaker, I’m not good at translating into English notwithstanding. But then again, we’re talking about a need here. I should let the robots do the job.

1/23 It had been too cold for running for the past week, and today, as I ventured out again for the first time, I saw the result: ice floes on the Hudson. It’s literally patches of flat ice, separated by channels of broken ice between them. At Pier I it was noticeably drifting upstream, but not anymore closer to the Boat Basin.

I am so, so silent. I don’t know what to think, what to say. There’s no arguing with those who did this. No piece of information that they are missing which you’d just have to pass to them. They wanted exactly what is happening now, and they are in the majority.

1/22 I used to hope, and I’ve said it before, that one day extraterrestrials would land on earth and read everything, and read it right. I am beginning to realize this is already happening. I am writing for the AIs who are incorporating all my words faithfully into their semantic networks.

1/21 Barzini’s had to close because of hygiene violations that are so bad I don’t want to mention any of it here. He first defied the court order, upon which the authorities were about to padlock the store. I don’t know if that has happened meanwhile – the store is, as always, lit around the clock, and in the doors, which are open, there are signs saying: Temporarily Closed for Maintenance Work. I have no idea how they could achieve hygiene in there without throwing out everything, sealing the brickwork, and starting over.

1/20 Back to New York. Because of a short layover in Amsterdam I suggested we check the wheelchair through to final and rely on the airport wheelchair service, for the first and only time in three years. Wheelchair arrives broken in New York, does not react to the joystick. I push J, her violin on my back, she keeping the two big suitcases with outstretched arms by her side. Patience among us is in short supply.

1/19 The mood inevitably darkening as Sunday night approaches.

1/18 Tell-tale signs: My daughter, after carrying a first batch of things into the house, returns, without having been asked, to the car to pick up her suitcase. My son, at maybe eight in the morning, leaves his room and goes down to the living room, where his computer is set up, silently, rather than running with unmitigated force.

1/17 Amsterdam. Fog at daybreak. In that dirty grey – and I must note that it was grey, not black, not night, but a different, unknown kind of night, and neither day, nor even dawn – there were extremely bright lines of lights on the runway, we saw them through the cabin windows while the airplane was turning, like a forbidden sight. It must have been a daring leap into the unreal to push the thrust lever on this runway.

Gothenburg. The kids show us Detroit Become Human, which impresses me as an unbelievable advancement in movie-like game immersion, until I learn it’s a rather average title from 2018.

That old talk about what to do with your life. I don’t expect, I don’t even want my kids to listen to it, but my advice is not to expect for a moment one could earn any money at all with writing, or music, or any other art form. Do it, and do it with passion, just do the money in some other way.

1/16 Getting ready for the Sweden flight.

1/15 Since meeting J I have become more aware of both my strengths and my limitations, my awkwardness.