New York City, December 12, 2012

★★★ Cold but not forbidding. There were still just enough clouds to the south to filter the sunlight. Shadows, distinct yet only half-dark, came and went behind pedestrians heading down Broadway. In the afternoon, a broad band of light, the color of bone, stretched east and west from the blurred disc of the sun. Beneath it, Lower Manhattan bleached and flattened into a single building, a megalomaniacal construction of multiple spires and masses.