What is the Point?

These things happen in a day:

1) The sky breaks bright but the neighbor's chimney steams, predicting the weather to come. You sit with the writing that wasn't working yesterday, and then you add one word to a once-stuck sentence and the passage tilts and the world opens, but just for a moment.

2) A crane flies just west and lands on the roof of the house that stands on the diagonal across the street. The house they've been building for two years now. The house that has yet to suggest welcome. Then the crane takes off again and you're at the window of your office, chasing it with your eye, wondering what it knows that you don't, and where it's going.

3) A friend reveals the things the friend has grown to envy; the list is almost precisely your own. Not wealth. Not things. But talent, yes, and sentences that come when you beckon. And also (not on the friend's list, but yours): Beauty unimpeached by regret.

4) You face a long list of things that must be done, and precisely because of that you read the latest New Yorker instead. The Daniel Zalewski article about Ian McEwan. The thousands of words. The penultimate paragraph. You have to read that far to get the matter you need, which on this day echoes the thoughts in your head, only with greater and more resolute precision, for this is McEwan, after all:

"You spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They've got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you're fiddling around with something that's already there. You see that by reversing a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be."