January 18, 2025

Good morning!

It’s Saturday. The plane landed and the passport was stamped and the suitcases retrieved. The car went zoom, the downstairs keypad went beep beep beep, the downstairs door went click, the stairs were tackled, the lock un-clunked, our door thunked, and here we are!

We’ve returned to my heart’s other home, Paris. It’s comforting to be in a place that has endured so much during its 2,000 years of large-scale human settlement, from conquests and collapses to occupations and revolutions, sieges, and surrenders.

I used to walk along this street to get to school. Thirty five years later, I’m looking out at it from my kitchen window, writing to you on a device, through a platform, and over a network that didn’t exist—even in one’s wildest imagination—back then.

“Time is a sort of river of passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be swept away.”

—Marcus Aurelius

Onwards we go,

Clara