In Los Angeles, there is more room to spread out. Aside from the strange liminal anomaly of downtown, Los Angeles is not a vertical city; it is a city of boulevards and interchanges, of 30-foot palm trees and drive-through liquor stores. The quality of life is better. You can have fresh avocados every morning; the weather is like free Xanax; you can take meetings in the morning and be chased by a bobcat in the afternoon. Given such a bounty of natural riches, do Angelenos even need spaces of retreat? Or was the entire city its own surreal sanctuary?

Our family stayed at an Airbnb in Echo Park in a little 1920s bungalow nestled behind our hosts’ home. Echo Park is a fairly unique locale in Los Angeles in that you can walk most places. I even saw other people walking on the sidewalk. We made the secret walker sign to one another. As I walked, I noticed the self-contained worlds of people’s forecourts: a petite bench beneath a prolific grapefruit tree, a strange flock of robot sculptures, what looked like the world’s tiniest vineyard. I walked up the hill to Elysian Park and discovered secret, unnamed streets not on any map. Our Airbnb hosts had placed a couple of chairs and a table in the middle of a little dead end to nowhere.

Where is your retreat? What do you do to escape from it all?

My friend Rains took me to the many stunning gardens of The Huntington in San Marino, where we wandered for hours getting our shinrin-yoku on. Through the Children’s Garden, the alien-like Desert Garden, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, the Japanese Garden. Each a complete universe unto itself. The Japanese Garden features the Zen Court and breathtaking bonsai collection. The miniature trees were like perfect haikus: the bald cypress, the Catlin elm, the Foemina juniper. I left transformed, though I’m not sure if afterward the world seemed smaller or I just seemed bigger.

My friend Dehn recommended that I go downtown to visit the Last Bookstore. Downtown Los Angeles, or “DTLA,” as it is now referred to in real estate literature, is an uncanny place. Walking around, I was constantly plagued by a feeling of déjà vu, perhaps because, as Thom Anderson points out in his documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” this downtown has stood in for so many other downtowns on the silver screen that it has become a kind of everyplace.

To get downtown, I did what one normally does in a city: I took the subway. It was, at least when I rode it, practically empty. There was a slight sense of metaphysical unease in the train car, as if everyone was looking around and wondering: Why aren’t you in a car? And what about you?