Take Central Park — as handmade as any place in the city, but one in which I still feel like I’m in nature. I love drifting there, being alone in crowds, not knowing how I came to sit where I’m sitting, on the grass, beside what seems to me a primordial outcropping, under a tree, near a path. Here I’m inside myself, but feeling the rhythms of the city. Instinct kicks in, some other life takes over, something outside of time, made up of the present, the past, memory, unknown sensations. A me I know and don’t know. In this psychic space, an hour becomes much more than an hour. In these spaces, I’m within this enclosing volume where space and self merge and become a vessel. I feel my inner book being written and rewritten.
Jerry Saltz, “The Problem of Public Art,” 2015
