Nine days, alone: no company, and no itinerary. I was not in this trade yet — I simply walked a city from one end to the other. A good many of Sojourn’s rules came home with me from those nine days.
On the ninth afternoon I saw no sights at all. The whole afternoon went to a bench on the plaza: a Shake Shack chocolate shake, an order of crinkle-cut fries, a cheeseburger. Across the way a film crew was coiling cable, winding each length and laying it in the case. An old gentleman in an impeccable coat came up the street, his heels striking the stone one deliberate note at a time. People passed; not one of them had come for me, and nothing required me to hurry. Nine days later, the most New York thing about New York was that unplanned afternoon.
I went into the Metropolitan Museum as it opened. One and a half million works spanning five thousand years — finishing is a fantasy. That day I did one thing: sat by the pool in front of the Temple of Dendur. A small temple raised beside the Nile around 15 BC, re-erected here in 1978; behind it a whole sloping glass wall opens onto Central Park, the glass stippled so that the light falls the way it falls in Egypt. I sat a long while and remembered not one wall label — only the light.
Trinity Church stands at the end of Wall Street. A Gothic spire finished in 1846, two hundred and eighty-one feet, the tallest building in New York until 1890; now, ringed by glass towers, it has become the low one. Hamilton lies in the yard. At noon, men in suits eat sandwiches on benches among the headstones, saying nothing, then rise and go back to work. At one end of the street is the clamour of the exchange; at the other, this quiet grass — two minutes on foot. The deepest impression of a day tends to come from those two minutes of difference.
A Thursday evening in Chelsea. Between Tenth and Eleventh Avenue, more than a hundred galleries are packed into a few blocks. Thursday is when shows open: push the door, no appointment asked, a glass of white wine on the table. Most of it went over my head, but in every room someone was explaining it in earnest. Overhead runs the High Line — a 1930s freight railway, abandoned for thirty years, turned in 2009 into a mile and a half of garden in the air. I walked until dark and never bought a ticket.
Looking back, not one of those nine days could be called efficient. But after nine days I knew this much: a city does not open to you because of how many places you have been. It gives a little of itself away only when you are willing to sit down in it.