Don't squint.  
                                                                                                            In descending order: 
                                                                                                            The Delectable Dollies by Gary Chapman
                                                                                                            Love in a Dark Time, Colm Toibin
                                                                                                            Hide-andSeek with Angels, A Life of J.M. Barrie, Lisa Chaney
                                                                                                            The Night of the Gun by David Carr
                                                                                                            Burke's Peerage 1949
                                                                                                            Waddesdon Manor, text by Michael Hall
                                                                                                            Vogue's Houses, Gardens, People, Photographed by Horst
                                                                                                            Annie Liebovitz: A Photographic Life 1990-2005

So I had decided yesterday driving to work that I was done with 1904.  I had proved my point.  I had exhausted the subject.  Running into an acquaintance who inquired in a bored and disinterested fashion whether I was still "doing that blog" had pretty much settled the matter.  "Oh, you know," I replied obliquely, and quickly changed the subject.  But really, wasn't I done? 

Then over lunch I took a cursory glance at the day's New York Times.  And what caught my eye was a piece on a pending decision of the Landmarks Preservation Commission. [Streetscapes]  The John Peirce house at 11 East 51st Street may receive landmark status.  As the Times puts it, the house

"was designed by John Duncan in 1904 for Mr. Peirce, a builder. It shows Mr. Duncan’s endearing ungainly handling of the Classic style — the rustication of the stone rises three stories, whereas the accepted convention is to confine it to the first floor, and the severe, planar fourth and fifth floors seem out of balance with the lower three. The austere granite came from quarries Mr. Peirce owned in Maine." [bold and italics added]

And as you can imagine, I felt suddenly quite convinced that here was my answer, if any answer were needed and considering I hadn't quite phrased a question, although actually I had in a manner of speaking, unspokenly, in my head, in my thoughts while driving that morning.  Why go on in my endearing ungainly handling of the classic epistolary style to you, my Gentle Reader?  Why continue to blather away about the trivial and the tragic, the momentous and the momentary, the personal and the prophetic?  Why indeed?  Have I not told you, explained to you --

["I told you, Christina; I warned you, didn't I?"]

-- have I not already devoted enough time and space to explicating and underscoring the significance of 1904?  Have I not gone against convention and extended rustication to new heights, have I not failed to confine myself and even at times threatened to lose my balance in these severe and planar upper stories of the past and the present?  Have I not also imported a certain austere granite tone from my hard cold midwestern upbringing?  Have I not constructed something that could so easily be swept away by the cruel wrecking ball of fickle taste and personal doubt?  When you consider how many others have lost their original ground floors, selling out to advertisers and delis and liquor stores, metaphorically speaking.  And here, just when I was about to give up, just at the point when I said to myself, 'enough'  -- here was another sign from the universe that there is more than Brechtian meaning to going on when you can't go on. 

The truth is, it doesn't take much, does it?   A notice in the paper.  A kind word, a thoughtful gesture.  The way the light at different times of the day hits a few bits of brightly colored plastic.