New York City, September 14, 2015

★★★★★ Light reflected and refracted all through a flawless crystal morning. The breeze gathered strength as it came up Broadway. Sweaters were out, and sport coats. Instead of last week’s hot exhalations, the subway stairs breathed in cool air. A police officer was out below the Flatiron directing traffic contrary to the signals, and then came more police and police cars, and a surveying tripod right out in Fifth Avenue, and a barrier drape, parallel to the lane markings, that did not conceal the red of a pool of blood. A block beyond, the gorgeous day went about its business. Blinding white flared into the office off the shades and blinds half-lowered on the windows of other offices, across the street. The wind flipped the cover of a paperback of Six Centuries of Great Poetry lying on the pavement by an overflowing trash can. The breeze was cool but warm, some inverse of feverishness; the buildings separated themselves from the sky like thick lines of paint coming off the brush. Bunches of wheatgrass and jars of preserves glowed on the Greenmarket. Uptown, a man sat by the curb of Broadway with a canvas propped up, at work on a picture of a building that bore no obvious resemblance to any of the buildings in his view. The wind inflated the cloth cover over a parked motorcycle. The sunset sky was featureless but orange fires burned on distant shiny surfaces upriver and downriver, and nearer at hand they seemed once more to burn straight through the tower that would stand in the way.