Historia nostri temporis

Manhattan 1609-2010.

Photographer Thierry Cohen makes portraits of the night sky free from manmade light and matches them with contemporary city skylines to remind us of what we're missing.

This is what the Lenape who greeted Hudson fell asleep to.

[Illustration by Doug McLean for The Atlantic]

Inspired by the runner-novelist Haruki Murakami, novelist Mohsin Hamid took up walking:

America, 1950-2010.

America, 2012.

Dutch citizens express their right to vote by placing their ballots in giant blue recycling bins.

(Very curious to see how big election today turns out. Will the Netherlands' subjects continue to see themselves as austerity's winners or will they recognize that they aren't really so different from the inhabitants of the countries to the south where they go for a holiday?)

The first page of the score for J. S. Bach's "Chaconne," from the Partita for Violin No. 2.

There are many versions of the piece out there, but two by Nathan Milstein (1903-1992) stand out.

The first comes from a TV performance in Paris, 1968. The second was his last public performance, in Stockholm, 1986.

In the first, the audience is primarily young people -- for whom mortality is surely still an abstraction.  In the second, Milstein is 83 years old, and his vital performance belies his own obvious age.  Yet we know he would die six years later, and surely he and his audience knew, too, that he was approaching his own end.

Indeed, Bach published the piece in the year that his wife died, and it is suffused with the melancholy of memory and grief.