Day 1,356

From my window I can just see the trains passing behind the trees. At night when I cannot sleep — which is often; I am insomniac, I fear — it is a small pleasure to lie there in the dark and know the ceiling is low overhead and that the trains will soon be passing. Their whistles, so long and so mournful, the bleating of a lost industry… they soothe me. Though I do not sleep, though my forehead is no less dry and crackling, I find some rest there, some munificence.

In the daytime they do not seem so real as at night. That they are large and dangerous I do not doubt; from my window I have seen two men shattered by the juggernauts, seen the red ruin of their bodies taken away in the slow white vans. But even the mystery of death is small compared to what shape bulks behind the whistles and the track-clatter in the dark.

Other nights I sit beside my window and look across the city, my eyes unfocused, my mind vague. Across the bay shines a red light that I like to watch, though by daylight I have never found the lamp.

Day 1

Today have I forsaken all human company. I have enough money; there is no work I must pursue to keep body and soul together. In isolation therefore I have resolved to spend my time, in quiet contemplation of the world, in study of myself, in noisy solitude.

I say noisy, for I have taken these rooms in the city, high in one of the many towers, with windows that look over the seven hills that rise and fall, to the oceans, to the forests, to the mountains, to the plains, and far below me lies all the hustle and bustle of the city. With my windows open I hear the thrum and hum of business, and of human life; by night the rushing of the cars upon the highways, the yelling clamour of the bars and the night life. Music rises to my hermitage nearly constantly, both metrical and metaphorical, for my neighbourhood is a favorite for buskers and street artists both talented and talentless.

The air here is so very clear, so high above the haze. I can see unto the very ends of the earth it seems, and even beyond, into that uncertain land where humanity cannot go. I have spent the last several hours watching the weather move across the city, the clouds and the winds and the sudden, short autumn squalls. I have seen how the clouds dim the sun and make leaden the surface of the water, how the waves roll in upon the shore, how the tides rise and fall. In all this there is much novelty, forever new, though thousands have seen it before, though generations have wasted away upon these shores, and seen the tides change, and the stars turn, and watched the sky for shifts in the weather, and prayed, or cursed, as may be.