In one of his diaries, Kafka warned, ‘You don’t need to leave your room. Stay sitting at your desks and listen. You don’t even need to listen; just wait. You don’t need to wait; just stay still, silent, alone. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.’ The two diaries that we have published in this edition are by the photographer Daniel Blaufuks and the visual artist Mariana Silva. They are about the lockdown that has been imposed on us by the Covid-19 pandemic. They are based on two places on lockdown in a world held prisoner by the virus and fear: near Lisbon for him; New York for her. In these two ‘Books of Hours’, Blaufuks and Silva look at the world through a window that looks from outside in. But this window was not presented to them on a platter. They were the ones that opened it with a look that thinks, sees, speaks. Was it not also Kafka who said, ‘Man does not grow upwards, but from inside out.’?