Moon Palace

  I woke up feeling as though I had slept in a boxcar¹. It was just past dawn, and my entire body ached, my muscles had turned into knots. I extricated myself gingerly² from the bush, cursing and groaning as I moved, and then took stock of my surroundings. I had spent the night at the edge of a softball field, sprawled out³ in the shrubbery⁴ behind home plate. The field was situated in a shallow dip of land, and at that early hour a speckle of thin gray fog was hanging over the grass. Absolutely no one was in sight. A few sparrows⁵ swooped and chittered in the area around second base, a blue jay rasped in the trees overhead. This was New York, but it had nothing to do with the New York I had always known. It was devoid of associations, a place that could have been anywhere [...] I had made it through the first night, and if I had done it once, there was no reason to think I couldn't do it again.
  I slept in the park every night after that. It became a sanctuary for me, a refuge of inwardness against the grinding⁶ demands of the streets. There were eight hundred and forty acres to roam⁷ in, and unlike the massive gridwork of buildings and towers that loomed⁸ outside the perimeter, the park offered me the possibility of solitude, of separating myself from the rest of the world. In the streets, everything is bodies and commotion, and like it or not, you cannot enter them without adhering to a rigid protocol of behavior. To walk among the crowd means never going faster than anyone else, never lagging behind your neighbor, never doing anything to disrupt the flow of human traffic. If you play by the rules of this game, people will tend to ignore you.
  There is a particular glaze⁹ that comes over the eyes of New Yorkers when they walk through the streets, a natural and perhaps necessary form of indifference to others. It doesn't matter how you look, for example. Outrageous costumes, bizarre hairdos, T-shirts with obscene slogans printed across them – no one pays attention to such things. On the other hand, the way you act inside your clothes is of the utmost¹⁰ importance. Odd gestures of any kind are automatically taken as a threat. Talking out loud to yourself, scratching your body, looking someone directly in the eye: these deviations can trigger off hostile and sometimes violent reactions from those around you.
  You must not stagger¹¹ or swoon¹², you must not clutch the walls, you must not sing, for all forms of spontaneous or involuntary behavior are sure to elicit stares, caustic remarks, and even an occasional shove or kick in the shins. I was not so far gone that I received any treatment of that sort, but I saw it happen to others, and I knew that a day might eventually come when I wouldn't be able to control myself anymore. By contrast, life in Central Park allowed for a much broader range of variables. No one thought twice if you stretched out on the grass and went to sleep in the middle of the day. No one blinked¹³ if you sat under a tree and did nothing, if you played your clarinet, if you howled¹⁴ at the top of your lungs.