We haven’t seen sunlight for quite a while. It was most welcome this morning.

I am alone in the apartment; Kathleen is at her office, where, she reports, things seem pretty normal. I’m afraid that things don’t seem normal at all to me, but that’s probably because I picked up Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise when I was done with the Times. “Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to ignore risks that threaten their livelihood, as though this will make them go away,” he writes, in the early pages of his account of the housing bubble/CDO catastrophe. Maybe what’s disturbing me is the sense   that Silver’s realism is the new normal, and it’s hard to live with.

The other book that arrived yesterday — we had mail, and we had packages — is disturbing, too, if in a very different way. Moments of Being is a collection of Virginia Woolf’s unpublished “autobiographical” writings. Among many remarkable claims for her mother, Woolf wrote this: “She kept herself marvellously alive to all the changes that went on round her, as though she heard perpetually the ticking of a vast clock and could never forget that some day it would cease for all of us.”  

***

The sun didn’t last for long, and I remained alone in the apartment all day. Astor, the coon cat whom Megan has cherished for many years (fourteen or so), seems to be dying, and Megan and Ryan are reluctant to leave him alone in the cold apartment.

Whether from nerves or something more microbial, I passed an uncomfortable afternoon, deeply grateful that the plumbing was in good order, running-water-wise. Even though we got off lightly — perhaps for that very reason — I’m a bit of a wreck now that the storm is really and truly past. (I was not gladdened by reading, in Nate Silver’s book, that the probability of a 6.75 magnitude earthquake’s wreaking havoc on New York City is one in 12,000 years. I should much prefer a number with six figures.) Fossil Darling, who’s working from home, feels under the weather as well. “Our nerves are completely shot,” he said.

On my way to the elevator from collecting the mail, I passed two EMS workers guiding a gurney with an apparently unconscious older man aboard. Not at all surprising on this melancholy day.