Maira Kalman

Watching them is a kind of solace.

I call this the murder andmanship portion of the day.

We have a problem, we solve the problem.

People seem briefly upset by the murders, so many in every episode, but there is no time to brood because they have to film the next episode.

And they all seem to say, get on with it.

And the idea of prevailing over evil is my lullaby, and I sleep.

But what of the day that lies ahead?

Every one of us invents the day.

Every single day is invented.

The actual first day was 13.8 billion years ago, more or less.

And maybe, with the information from the Webb telescope, we can actually see the beginning of time, which is an incomprehensible idea, of course.

But what does that perspective afford us when contemplating which tutu to wear, or which insult to respond to,

or what book to write.

Sometimes, the day is too long, excruciatingly long, and I get out of bed, I look longingly at the bed, and I say to the bed, I will be back soon.

And in between, there are things to know and things to not know.

Here is a map of the United States, made from memory by my mother, Sarah.

Sarah was the dean of American history at Harvard.

Actually, not.

Her family fled the pogroms of Belarus for Palestine in the 1930s, and in 1954, our family moved to New York City.

Her acute sense of the absurd permeated everything in our life in the best way possible.