But Mr. Mekas put the disruption in perspective. His life has been nomadic since the 1940s, including years in Nazi labor camps and United Nations camps for displaced persons. Moving to a smaller place somewhere in Brooklyn was a hiccup.

“It’s a necessity and it’s realistic and I need to do it and you do it,” he said. “It’s nothing. This is just another stop, and there will be another stop.”

Mr. Mekas also published a book of anecdotes and autobiographical images this year, “A Dance With Fred Astaire,” named for a Yoko Ono and John Lennon movie in which Mr. Mekas and Mr. Astaire both make dancing cameos. Another five or six books were almost ready, and a couple of films still needed finishing. After that, he said, “I’d like to travel.”

For now, he said, “I’m thinking about resistance. What does it mean, resistance? What kind of resistance do we need today? Technology is now being used, much of it, for negative purposes. So to resist all what is happening negatively in humanity or technology is to develop the — O.K., this banal word, spiritual aspect.”

He remained sanguine, despite some reservations about current world leaders. Totalitarianism, in his experience, did not endure, whereas art, nature and the teachings of the saints all were as powerful as ever — they were what composed his life. He did not use the word optimistic, but he felt that solutions were more durable than problems.

“To go back and introduce into all the schools art, to cut down on sports but bring arts, philosophy back into all educational systems,” he said. “And that’s what’s being cut everywhere. And I think that’s one of the sad and tragic parts of where we are. Education is the resistance to everything that is bad today.”

So ends another year for four members of New York’s oldest old: not with a whimper, but with small joys to ease their aches. Each lost a little and moved a year closer to death, as we all did. But each welcomed another morning, the start of another year to come. All had beaten the odds just to get this far.

As Ms. Willig said, “You think we’ll make another year, you and me?”