Nineteen eighty-four.

What was at one time a distant dream, the darkness of a book, an election year, a future, became the present. We didn't have to do anything; we didn't lift a finger, but gradually the date overtook us and passed us by, leaving us stationary at the roadside, the dusty wind of its passage playing and tugging at our hair and our clothes, the sun baking the asphalt underfoot and burning our faces to leather.

It was a year that should have been Orwellian, but was instead ordinary: an actor became President, blustering words were thrown back and forth across a curtain that only humans could see; north, south, east and west were afflicted by one form of violence or another, instigated by one form of tyranny or another, fed by one brand of empire or another; the fruit trees ripened in the fall and a harvest was gathered in; something was shot into space and something returned; and the moon spun round and round and round this little planet, like a child with a vague yet accurate sense that her mother is ailing, but completely, almost eternally, out of reach.

It was the year I first met the City. I think it not far different from visiting the Pyramids, their awesome scale, but these pyramids were made by millions for millions, and were humming with life and purpose, their purpose being continuity, perhaps continuity alone, or to be bigger than most experiences of life, and that alone.

I walked out of the subway that had brought me in from Hoboken, across the river, walked up and out of the intestinal halls underground, and stood in the noise and the shadow and the incessant movement of 5th Avenue.

Remarkable to stand in the bottom of a valley, looking up. You are small, a child at the bottom of a well, or a man at the bottom of the crater. And every sound is magnified, echoes the shape of its making, from the mirrors of the windows and the mirrors of the walls, the mirrors of the faces and the mirroring voices:

— jeezus what you doin' walking against the light…
— …he told me to meet him here but I figured after 45 minutes enough's enough; if he thinks he's got a second chance he's…
— the sound of horns, like the sound of the brigade's charge, as the light changes to green and the frontrunning cars do not immediately move off their mark
— …oh, I loved that play; I loved it: if you can get tickets you have to go… front row, cheap seats, doesn't matter…
–…muh-fuckah took the bread and split…
–… ahhhh! so good to see you Martin! Was your flight in all…

The sounds of living like those of the bird cage, the bird cage with dozens of warblers or parakeets, their voices all going at once, and seemingly – probably – speaking their own few words over and over again, without waiting for reply, without hearing one another.

The light changes and the horns blare. The friends pass right-to-left with opinions lifting from their tongues like moths; the colleagues pass left-to-right with old analyses and new plans spilling over the sidewalk and pouring over their lunch tables; the unemployed urbanites with a dog or two on a leash, or a cat, or a child, or a partner; the panhandlers watching it all without seeing a speck of it, having the lash of hunger in their eyes; the cars travelling slower and more impatiently than pedestrians; the pedestrians rubbing shoulders and thighs and hands and eyes while in their crush becoming numb to the sensation of density or contact; the curb; the walk; the cement and steel walls of the Valley; the City.

I had been walking several hours around the lower east and west sides of Manhattan, seeing too much and filled to overflowing with all of this living. I had not been prepared to come to the City, was not protected, so my semi-rural senses were deafened, blinded, sparked then dulled by the endless waves of being.

I passed a cathedral with a round cupola. I turned and my eyes fell to the grain of massive doors with their iron hardware; on a whim, or by some invitation which, though nonetheless offered, had not become conscious, I went inside.

The space inside seemed larger that it had appeared without, as though the density of the exterior, the lower sloping walls, were illusion, and this heavy, rooted space was reality. I stepped in and the doors swung silently toward each other; the light dimmed as out there was muted then cut out; the solid oak doors met each other in the middle and closed with an almost inaudible "tomb".

But the space was not dead: simply silent. It was not a tomb, but uninhabited by the raucous sounds of the cage outside. I walked halfway down the central aisle, even my soft shoes making what seemed an inordinate amount of noise. I stopped.

Silence.

I sat in a pew and felt my breath, felt my chest rise and gently fall, while the rest of the millions moved from one place to another in the middle of their day.

It was an impossible sanctuary, a bubble of air at the bottom of the sea, a broken wire in the cage's wall.

Years later, as my daughter struggles to understand what demons are hers to fight, and which are the world's, I think back to those few hours of a summer afternoon, I see that church, and I tell her:

"There is a sanctuary just like that Manhattan cathedral, you stand before its doors every minute of every day. All you need do is open the door and walk inside."

Then she and I spend a half and hour practicing meditation.