I have never prayed the Rosary before with only one other person who is a stranger. It was quite an unusual experience, though not difficult in any way. We alternated each decade, with one of us praying aloud the first half of each bead, and then the other praying aloud the second half, before we switched that order when we reached the following mystery. We did all this without exchanging a word or a glance.

Today I missed morning Mass, so I walked at midday to a church in my neighborhood, having checked online to see that it did in fact offer a midday service. However, when I got there I saw that the front gates were chained, and that I could not get in. So I went around back, and entered through the parking lot, where finally I found a door to a side chapel that was unlocked. Inside a solitary Asian woman was praying the Rosary, so I sat in a chair a little bit away from her, though not so far as to seem distant, and took my beads out of my pocket and began praying with her.

I will leave my description there, in case later I can return to it.

I’d tell you what’s presently happening in it, but the idea of doing so bores me, even if the novel itself doesn’t, because it moves so slowly and does not change much in its scope, or pattern. At the moment, Don Quixote and his companion, Sancho Panza, are wandering in the mountains, trying to locate a young gentleman of so-called ‘high birth’ who has gone mad because of a romance that did not turn out the way he’d imagined it would. Earlier the two travelers had come across his saddlebags and his accoutrements, one of which was a journal in which he’d scribbled many poetic verses about his heartbreak. Quixote, admiring their sentiments, and pondering their tragic aspect, or character, had decided he must find this kindred spirit, and offer to be of service to him.

To wit: I have reached Chapter XXV of Part One of the novel. There are two Parts. More precisely, I have reached p. 238 of a total of 1,050 pages.

I need to give you an update of where I am in my reading of Don Quixote, because if I don’t I will feel as though I’m failing in one of the fundamental tasks that these entries imposed on themselves, or assigned to themselves, in the very early going of the writing of them, meaning back in October, when I began them. Of course, I don’t need to do anything in these entries, because I can do whatever I please. But returning to certain topics now and then, or having touchstones that I circle back to whenever I feel that I’ve neglected them too long, will give the entries themselves, I hope, a rhythm and purpose that otherwise they might not have.

I called my parents last night while A. and I were sitting on the couch in our apartment, watching a football game on TV. Specifically I was returning a call from my dad that earlier in the day I’d missed, but after talking to me for a few minutes he handed the phone to my mother, and then I talked to her. A. could also hear the conversation and participate, because I was using the speaker function on my phone, so really all four of us were present for the call. Mainly they’d wanted to just say hello, but also they wanted to know when they could visit A. and I at the house out in Wyoming. I told them I wasn’t sure yet but that maybe in February, when both A. and I are intending to drive out there with the cats and stay out there a while, though I myself am also planning to fly out there alone, beforehand, for a shorter period of time, later this month.

I have a t-shirt with a still frame from one of Tarkovsky’s movies, Mirror, printed very large on the front. It from a scene that occurs toward the beginning of the movie, wherein a woman is seen, by the camera, from behind, as she sits on a wooden fence in the afternoon light in the Russian countryside, smoking a cigarette. There is nothing all that remarkable about the image, I suppose, except that I like its composition and the way the actress is framed by the camera and the way she is wearing her hair, though I also like the scene from which the image is taken. There is a photo of me wearing that t-shirt as I stand on a sidewalk outside a restaurant in Midtown a year or two ago, smiling because I’m happy to be there. I’m also wearing a flannel that has been unbuttoned, so you can’t see the t-shirt in its entirety, because some of it is covered by the flaps of the flannel itself, though you can see enough of it to recognize the image on it, if you happen to have seen that image before and know where it’s from. The restaurant I’m standing in front of, in the photo, is a French restaurant called Le Relais, which is A.’s and my favorite restaurant here in the city. A. took the photo of me that I’m describing. It may have been on my birthday.

One thing you can say about America is that she has produced some of the greatest directors of all time. Even now, she still is. Terrence Malick, Martin Scorsese, Joel and Ethan Coen, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Francis Ford Coppola, and his daughter, Sophia Coppola, are a handful that come to mind. And these are ones who are still living and working. The Europeans had the painters of the Renaissance, but America has had the filmmakers of modernity and postmodernity. Even if my two personal favorites happen not to be American at all, but were Polish and Russian, respectively. I’m thinking of Krzysztof Kieślowski and Andrei Tarkvosky.

There must be a Billy Wilder kick going on, on one of the movie channels on TV, because last night A. and I came across Double Indemnity, and watched it, having watched the rest of Sunset Boulevard, one of the other movies Wilder directed, a night or two before. I say watched ‘the rest’ of it because I’d happened to record that one, using the DVR function on our TV, as I’d always wanted to watch it but hadn’t known, at the moment I’d seen it was airing, whether I’d wanted to do so right away, as opposed to at some later time. And so at first I’d watched only part of it, as I mentioned in an earlier entry. I don’t know much about Billy Wilder except that he made quite a few movies in the 1940s and 50s. Now that I’ve seen at least two of his movies I can say that I do like him. Or anyway like his work.

After that I let the binoculars pan out over the face of the building in a general, undirected way, but didn’t focus them on anything for long. Then I lowered them and looked out at the view without the aid of their magnification. I could see so many squares and rectangles of light, but I could also see the outlines of the buildings in the dark, and could see where traffic was moving through neighborhoods in the near distance, as well as farther out, where the city blocks or the grid of the streets appeared smaller and denser due to the height and the perspective from which I was regarding them. There were so many things to look at that you could not really choose a particular one of them, but instead wanted to take in the whole scene. Though by ‘take in’ I don’t mean internalize so much as observe without judgment or understanding. As if what you were looking at was not much more than a well-lit geometric pattern. Which, in a sense, at that time of night, it wasn’t.

In that same unit, where the young couple was, I saw a cat moving around too, and at one point I saw the young man follow the cat from the kitchen into the living area and place a bowl or a dish on the floor for the cat to attend to at its leisure.

In the interior of one unit I saw a young woman and young man who appeared to be Asian moving around in the kitchen and living area of their unit, doing whatever it was they were doing, I couldn’t tell exactly what, because even though I could see them up close at times, I couldn’t hear what they might have been saying to each other, and couldn’t keep them always in my view, but lost track of them whenever one of them or both of them happened to turn away, or step out of the frame that the angle of my observation permitted me, so that the experience of watching them was, I imagined, somewhat like watching a movie without sound, though a movie without a plot, because of how ordinary the scene was, as well as how illogical seeming it was, in the sense that I was glimpsing it after it had already begun, and was not privy to all of its details, nor to the entirety of their dwelling space, or their quarters, but was instead confined to a very small area of square footage, which I could not hold completely steady anyway, through the glasses, or lenses, even if I could keep it somewhat steady, or steady enough to get an idea of what I was watching.

There is a balcony in our apartment that you can go out on, right where the windows are, and look out at the high-rises, and at the adjacent rail yard, and at the feeder roads coming on and off the bridge, and at the farther parts of the borough, but I stayed inside just then, because it was windy and cold outside, and I was wearing only pajama pants and a t-shirt, with bare feet. And also because I figured I’d be less conspicuous, I suppose, if I looked through the binoculars from where I was, behind the windows, inside, rather than out on the balcony, where I might be more noticeable, even if I shouldn’t have minded if anyone saw me, as I had no ill intentions, and was motivated by curiosity alone, as opposed to, say, prurience.

Last night, because I am a busybody, and also because it is a fun and interesting thing to do, I used the binoculars that A.’s sister gave us for Christmas a couple years ago to look out through the windows of our apartment and into a building across the roadway.

All of which is a weird train of thought, I suppose. But a train of thought nonetheless. Which is all I can ask for on days like today, when I don’t know what to write about.

After the Last Supper, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus turns to Philip, who has asked Jesus, in a sort of childlike way, to “show us the Father,” and answers him, in all seriousness, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Which is one of the things I think of now, as I try to fathom what it might mean for God to have a face. And for us to look upon that face.

Because we do often speak about the face of God, which I believe has a reality, even if only in the Second Person of the Trinity, which is to say in Jesus. And if we can’t say that Jesus ever smiled, or ever had reason to be happy, then what else can we say about him? Because surely he wasn’t walking through the towns and fields of Galilee, and Judea, neutral-faced, or scowling.

Although, because God is simple, and is perfect in his simplicity, I like to imagine him smiling at something that I understand would give him reason to smile; in other words, to be happy.

Of course, when I say God is made ‘happy’ by something I could do, I mean it in the least literal sense possible. Because God has no need of us, who are his creatures, but is perfect, and cannot be added to. Not even in such a category as happiness.