A cold-spell in September seemed to him a final flurry of the winter. From mid Autumn the season had had a distinct character, a time of long walks, eyes wide open to the streetscape as if it were being newly discovered, and regular evenings when he dawdled reflectively in the teahouse. Certain recurrent actions becoming habits so that each instance no longer had a singular character but seemed only to belong in a sequence of indefinite extension which was itself a single event, but in a mysteriously thick time. Such was the performance of slipping on his short navy-blue coat with a notebook dropped into the torn left pocket and a camera bulging in the right, and walking out into the dark. Down the carpeted corridor to the door to L. street then, most of the time, south towards E. street, along a footpath he'd traced myriad times, but seemed never to have looked at as sharply. Forming the horizon to this activity, and indistinct, were the many different chapters of life to which this piece of landscape had contributed a part. He might have played with the conceit of the facades or the trees or the tramlines watching him come and go and gradually transform into new versions of himself, but it was not this sort of personification that struck him as much as how it would look if the time were collapsed into a brief interval. The motion of everything would be revealed, not only the trees and skies but the facades and tramlines as well, and most of all this froth of humanity, the delirious kaleidoscope of inner lives, his own, almost lost among them, but bravely spangling and sputtering its murky and occasionally bright tones. This picture was a necessary counterpart to the sharp sense of presence he felt each time he walked out, the salt edge of breathing life he poured into the abyss of place.