It’s an unusually quiet night here in Brooklyn. The air on the deck overlooking my little garden is cool, dewy, and oddly fragrant; it feels more like California than Gotham. There is a full moon above, high in the sky and shining brightly through thin clouds; tonight a pale and glowing halo surrounds it, at the compulsory radius of twenty-two degrees.
These are strange days. I’ve been blundering about this world now for 52 years, and although, like most people, I’ve been fast asleep most of the time, still, I can’t recall when there was such a curiously expectant tension in the air. Of course there are all the usual cataclysms and upheavals — and right now, even some pretty unusual ones — but I’m talking about something else, something more subtle and pervasive, like a faint rumble just below the threshold of hearing, or as if something enormous and unseen were passing close by. It seems fraught with both peril and promise. I wish I knew what it was.