Under the threat of this crisis, in a handful of rooms that keep feeling smaller, I’m confronting my presence here in a way wholly different from the usual packed pace of city life, which occasionally revs into the disorienting but always seems to find a strangely steady rhythm. The dimensions, space and time, have also begun to blur. Each draft seems as rapidly dated as the last, in this place where the coronavirus has compressed time in the same way the city compresses distance, each a different version of myself with his back to the water, trying vainly to see what he can’t of the successively breaking waves to come.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve already rewritten this letter, to and from a city for which I share a complicated affection.
