The timing was perfect. Last Thursday’s full moon, backed by a strong wind, finally brought in a great low tide. It had been at least nine months since I’d witnessed one of such magnitude. Its significance also prompted me to head over to one of my favorite sand flats to dig up some steamer clams.

“I don’t know if I would have been a decent architect,” the film composer Carter Burwell recently mused, sitting in his private studio on the Atlantic Ocean, east of Amagansett. But his interests all come together in architecture.

Ric Burns’s fascinating new documentary opens in Sacks’s Greenwich Village apartment on Feb. 9, 2015, a month after he received a diagnosis of terminal cancer and not quite eight months before his death at 82.