On: Trump says Iran deal signed but details remain unclear

The news arrived this morning like a scrap of paper caught in the garden gate - blown there by some distant wind, bearing marks I could not quite decipher. A signature, they say, has been made - not with ink but with those invisible currents that now carry our words across oceans and back again. (I think of the old treaties, the vellum pages weighted with wax seals, how the physical act of pressing signet into molten wax made the agreement feel irrevocable, like a scar upon the earth.)

Now it is done in silence, in the space between servers. The Swiss ceremony will come later, with its handshakes and photographs - but the real act has already occurred somewhere in the ether, where no one can see the hesitation of the pen, the tremor in the wrist.

And yet - what does it mean, this signing? The details are obscured, as though seen through the thick glass of my study window on a rainy afternoon. One can make out shapes, movements, but not the substance. The light plays tricks. (I remember how Leonard would pace the room when some political uncertainty weighed on him, his shadow lengthening and shrinking across the floorboards as he passed the lamp.)

They will call it peace, no doubt. But peace is not a signature; peace is the room where the ink dries undisturbed. Peace is the luxury of forgetting - and who among us can afford that now? The garden outside my window hums with bees, oblivious. The real agreements are always made elsewhere, in the quiet places where power does not need to show its face.