So here we are in “the very world, which is the world / Of all of us,—the place where, in the end, / We find our happiness, or not at all!” I thought something like this at the Chinese restaurant two weeks ago, while I waited for my takeout. Staring at the sad live fish just lying around the tank, not doing anything, not really enjoying themselves, I thought, Listen, fishies, this is it. It’s not going to get better. Make the most of it.

Wordsworth said it better, if in a slightly different context.

Our own fish, Tyler, has left us. Well, he hasn’t left us, left us. He’s still lying under some rocks at the bottom of his bowl. But he’s dead. I’m feeling squeamish about the actual flushing. I want David around for this.

We saw a fantastic movie the other night. I don’t know if you’ll ever see it, since it is French and obscure and was only on TCM for a Louis Malle festival they had a few weeks ago. It's called Place de la République and in it Malle took a small crew to the place and asked people questions and filmed them. You could look at the film as an argument that every day everyone, by which I mean me and possibly you, should go out and film a stranger. The people he talks to are so happy to be noticed, to be captured, to be made monumental. And shouldn’t they be noticed? Shouldn’t they be made to feel even as they loiter, buy lottery tickets, worry about their illnesses and mourn the people they have lost, that they are important? Sorry, I’m back to Wordsworth again, to the idea, which Malle is working with also—at the end, over footage of a woman who has lost her mind, he runs a quotation, not Wordsworth, about enjoying the life that can be taken from us at any point—that existence is valuable in itself, and that a radical purposelessness, a failure to make of things more than what they are, is in fact a great success.