This wasn’t an Eden: The head of the “occupation” was a born-again ex-con whom many in the city believed was still running a violent gang. Terraces lacked railings and occasionally children fell to their death. But the squatters found ways to make a home out of the uninhabitable, pooling meager funds to appoint guards at entrances and carrying buckets of water up 28 flights of unlit stairs. Mini bodegas sprang up, along with a beauty salon, an ad hoc video-game arcade and an unlicensed dentist’s office. Then, in 2014, the residents were evicted by the government; the tower stands empty once more. You can see something of the lives once led there in the 2012 book “Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities” and an accompanying 2013 documentary film by the architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, of the Caracas-based Urban-Think Tank, and the photographer Iwan Baan.

Now, on some level, all of this is distraction from the task at hand. There’s no getting around it: Writing is a white-knuckle business. In the 2009 novel “The Anthologist,” Nicholson Baker describes how the clearing of space around a poem exacts a promise of a high-wire act, and I sometimes think of it when staring down an empty page, because the (intentional) portentousness makes me laugh and take myself ever so slightly less seriously: