In the small post office just off the square is a solitary clerk of indeterminate age—young?—no longer young?—from whom I sometimes purchase stamps; this individual is heavyset, with a melancholy/peevish face, straggling hair to his shoulders, in T-shirts stamped with obscure logos (Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath) that strain against his fatty-muscled torso. Often I am the only customer in the post office. Our transactions are civil but terse, unyielding—(I take care to avoid “eye contact” with this morose individual for fear that he might misunderstand)—as brief as possible. Inevitably I feel a tinge of something like sympathy for the post office clerk, if not pity. Yet also—No. It will not be you.

As I leave, clutching a small sheet of stamps—(for why should I buy more than six stamps at a time?—I may not live to use them all)—the morose clerk sighs unconsciously, as a mound of sand might sigh if it could.

A block away is the public library, housed in an old stone fortress of the Revolutionary War era to which plate glass windows have been added, somewhat incongruously; inside, unflattering fluorescent lights that make even robust library patrons look ghostly. The chief librarian, Ms. Laporte, is a stylish woman in her early fifties with a particular smile of recognition for me—“Hello, Mr. N__!”—for she’d known immediately who I am, or once was; on my second visit to the library she led me in triumph to a shelf of my books, which she’d arranged in the bookcase labeled LOCAL AUTHORS, and invited me to sign, and which I did sign, with some reluctance, having extracted from the earnest woman a pledge that she would protect my privacy in the future and refrain from pointing me out to anyone when/if I ever returned. “But of course, Mr. N__! We are just so honored”—spoken with an air of apology and not a trace of irony. With a small bequest to the library given by a generous/anonymous patron, Ms. Laporte has been able to subscribe to literary publications like Paris Review, Poetry, Conjunctions, Boulevard, McSweeney’s, TLS, and NYRB.

Sometimes on wintry afternoons I drop by the library, perusing these publications as hailstones pelt against the windows. Thinking how snug we are in here, like survivors in a cataclysm, unable to (yet) know the dimensions of the cataclysm.

Elsewhere in the library, high school students sprawl rudely at tables, clicking through laptops, as oblivious to their book-lined surroundings as two-dimensional figures in video games.

Though the library is one of my places of refuge, in recent months I have been avoiding it. I am not sure why. Sometimes such impulses grip me—instincts for which there are no name, though possibly they are, like most instincts, related to self-preservation.