10/27 Rain drops on the wooden table in front of the house. So much that could be improved about this sentence, so many details I could add. So many half-truths to be corrected. For example, it’s not just the rain drops. It’s that the rain has created a continuous, watery surface on top of the table, and as new rain drops hit this watery surface, I can see the disturbances – waves – that these drops cause across the surface, only a flicker each. I see these disturbances because the water reflects a yellow street light from above right towards my position inside the house, a little higher than the table as I walk down the staircase on this otherwise grey morning that has barely started at about 6.30am.

I could then add that the table does not really have a single, wooden surface. It consists, in fact, of parallel wooden planks with a significant space of about a finger’s width between them. The table, and the four chairs around it, sits in this somewhat awkward space in front of the house, a street corner in fact, separated from the street by a hedge and some vertical, wooden panels – not really a pleasant or logical place to sit, there are many much more pleasant places to sit in this house and its backyard, and I cannot, in fact, imagine anyone having ever sat at that table.

10/26 And so we flew to Sweden.

My son gets a VR headset for his birthday, and so does J – she had to fight really hard not to open hers before we got here so she could try it together with him. I tried it on, too, and for the first time I saw windows positioned in the space around me, which I could manipulate with my laser hands. Also a keyboard I could type on with these lasers.

I censored myself when I wrote about the funeral earlier. What I deleted was: I have always wondered whether people who weep at funerals have spent sufficient time thinking about death. I understand if it’s a sudden, untimely death. But old age? (Nobody wept at this funeral.)

10/25 My biggest concern with AI is, at this point, that it may ruin friendships. I’ve seen it happen with Covid, I don’t want to see it happen again.

10/24 Back in Newburgh after a day that started with breakfast with Max at our hotel in Degerloch, then the funeral at 10. Into the city at 11.30, train to Frankfurt at 12.30, rented a room in the airport hotel for the minimum of three hours, even though I had only about one and a half. Didn’t actually sleep. Flight to JFK left at 5.15pm. Landed 7.30pm local time. Drove to Manhattan to pick something up from the apartment, then to Newburgh, arriving at about 11.

The funeral – I felt a deep sadness during the service. Not so much about this particular person being gone – yes, melancholy about that, also given the many beautiful details about his life that were recounted in the speech – but rather: that I can’t see how anyone like that is possible today.

As we stood in line waiting to pay our last respects at the grave, I had a vague idea of what I was going to think, to say to him, to myself when it was my turn. When I stood there, I couldn’t think anything at all but was overcome by a huge wave of emotion, something like – that sounds more technical than it should – a vortex out of, or beyond, or underneath reality.

10/23 Unexpectedly moved by the funeral. Trying to understand what I felt.

10/22 Night flight to Frankfurt, four hours of sleep in a hotel in the international section of the airport. Max picked me up and then drove us to Stuttgart. It would have been worth it just for the small bits and pieces from lectures that Max remembers. He does because, although he was the sysadmin and not even a student, he recorded entire lectures on tape.

For example, in one of the first software engineering lectures, he showed a picture of a fossil: “What do you see here? An ancient animal? No, there’s probably not a single atom of that animal left. What you see is the structure of an animal. Structure is more durable than matter.”

10/21 After 300 stamps, there was one postcard left for which I had no stamp. We must have written one of the postcards twice. I went to the post office in Manhattan today to buy this last stamp. Then walked a few blocks and dropped the 301 cards into various mailboxes on various corners.

10/20 I wrote my last 25 postcards, and am now putting stamps on all 300 of them. The stamps came in rolls of a hundred each, and they feature a series of five autumn leaves: Maple, Sweetgum, Aspen, Sassafras, Oak. The very fact that somebody issued a series of postcard stamps featuring leaves of five different species of trees, an act of care and scientific accuracy, feels strangely as if not from this time.

10/19 For the first time since the injury six weeks ago, I was able to swim and not feel the pinch during the crawl, when I haul my arm forward from all the way back. Only the slightest hint of it remains, just enough to make me marvel at the complexity of the movement and how miraculous it is that I’m able to do that – just a moment of awareness before it recedes into the subconscious, joining the things my body does all the time and which I simply expect to work. I swam the full distance today, and at a pretty decent speed.

10/18 Bright blue autumn sky and bright foliage colors, enhanced as if each leaf was not just a color, but also a crystal with edges of nothing but light.