An inscription on a sidewalk in Battery Park City reads, “A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: New York is a beautiful catastrophe.” The inscription functions like a caption under a painting or at the foot of a monument: upon reading it, you are forced to look up at the work of art in front of your eyes, and then back again at the text, comparing the words to the object. Except in this case, the work is not in front of you but all around you. You are standing inside it and have been moving through it. You have probably been waking up, renting apartments, reading books, and having children in it. You are part of the catastrophe.

The words in the inscription belong to Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, Le Corbusier, who visited New York for the first time in 1935. The Museum of Modern Art had invited him to give a series of talks and lectures promoting his ideas on European modernism. As he recounts, he arrived in Manhattan at two o’clock, and, at four o’clock, he was taken to the museum, where journalists were waiting to record his first impressions of the city. Apparently, he refused to have his picture taken and, instead, tried to sell the reporters copies of a studio portrait he had with him, for five dollars apiece. He did not do too well with the press.

The next morning, the New York Herald Tribune published, in large print, next to his caricatured photograph, “Finds American Skyscrapers ‘Much Too Small’ … Thinks They Should Be Huge and a Lot Further Apart.” Upon his return to France, two months later, Le Corbusier wrote a little book about the United States, full of admiration and ressentiment, titled “When the Cathedrals Were White.” The section dedicated to Manhattan abounds with lapidary observations on the inappropriate size of skyscrapers—he thought these were far too stocky, and despised their adherence to a setback style or ziggurat approach, instead of the more audacious pure verticality of the Cartesian skyscraper that he advanced.

In “When the Cathedrals Were White,” these lines immediately precede the sentence now engraved on the pavement: “The window behind which a man stands is a poem of intimacy, of the free consideration of things. A million windows in the blue sky.” Perhaps these words, too, should be engraved into the façade of a building or under a windowsill, or etched into a glass pane. They would remind us, once in a while, to consider ourselves as observers behind a window, or would prompt us to read the city from the inside out, and not, as we so commonly do here, from the streets into other lives, from the outside in. Le Corbusier thought that a building’s interior should always dictate its exterior. Architects and planners, he said, should draw from the inside to the outside. The Corbusierian method of drawing could also be applied to the way we read the city—from the inside out.

On my way down from Harlem, where I live, to Poets House, in Battery Park City, where I was a writer-in-residence for a while and where I still often read and work, I ride my bicycle next to the river, passing by all the West Side buildings, some far too big and certainly not far enough apart. The city is constructed against a sort of horror vacui, forever piling up on itself, but the path down by the river is one lengthy, properly empty space. It functions like a long window, from where the city can be read with the same foreigner’s distance with which we travel through a book.

The ride from Harlem to Battery Park City is long and often strenuous, especially if you’re cycling into the wind. In certain stretches, the pavement is still scarred from last year’s winter storms, full of cracks, out of which sprout toupees of awkward grass and shrubs. There’s a lot of loose gravel, and constellations of potholes and puddles around which seagulls and light-brown ducks the size of Labradors splash and let out cries. Sometimes, in the later hours of the afternoon, you have to swerve to avoid the sudden beauty of the sky reflected in one of those puddles—the sky trapped like a Narcissus in its reduction to these little pools, where edgy feathered bipeds take turns at splashing.

During my residency at Poets House, I set myself the simple task of documenting people reading. I wrote notes about their reading habits, sometimes exchanged a few words with them, and took portraits of many readers with a Polaroid camera. I was interested in capturing the way that people are simultaneously inside and outside when they are reading a book—inside the space the book opens before them, and outside it, occupying a physical place. I wanted to register how a body can be present in a site, while the eyes, the mind, are utterly elsewhere—an almost ghostly mode of being. I like the resemblance between Polaroids and windows: the way you almost have to peek into the images enclosed within their window-like frames. Not free from a degree of nostalgia, I thought that Polaroids were the best tribute to library readers. I perhaps attributed to these Polaroid portraits the characteristics that Rosalind Krauss assigns to Man Ray’s Rayographs: “The image created in this way is of the ghostly traces of departed objects; they look like footprints in sand, or marks that have been left in dust.”

Certain types of Polaroids have to be shielded from the light as soon as they are spat out by the camera; otherwise they burn. I often use books to store developing Polaroids, and I prefer volumes of “collected” anything—poems, letters, essays, stories—because they are usually hardback and lofty: perfect depositories for bits and snippets. Before taking portraits at Poets House, I would walk down the library aisles, looking for volumes of collected poems, and stack them on a long rectangular table. I guess there was an adequate, if involuntary, circularity in the whole process, at the end of which the pictures of people reading ended up inside these towers of books.

“If we could only be inside our bodies, instead of outside, we would never be cold,” my daughter said to me the other day. We were walking to her kindergarten; it was the first cold morning of the season. I giggled with her, and inquired further: “So you think we’re outside our bodies?” Her five-year-old line of reasoning had something to do with skin, and veins, and bones, but quickly diverted into bugs, and rocks, and whales. By the time we reached the school gates, she had lapsed back into a meditative silence, and before we kissed goodbye she said, “Well, maybe we are sometimes inside and sometimes outside our body.”

Later that day, looking for something warm and comfortable to put on for one of my long rides down to Battery Park City, I found a pair of pants that I hadn’t worn in many years; pants that belonged to another body. They were black dance pants—the loose sort that were in fashion about a decade ago, when I first arrived in New York. I’d come to study contemporary dance, but in the mornings worked in the United Nations. That first sojourn in the city would only last for six months. There would be a second, yearlong stay; and then a third one, which was meant to be the shortest but has prolonged itself indefinitely.