If you take the F train from the leafy parts of Brooklyn to Manhattan, there are perhaps fifteen or so thrilling minutes when the train runs on elevated tracks, and the city is ranged before you on the other side of the river: gleaming, silver, the buildings tall and close-set. Then you dip down into the tunnel, into black, and when you emerge from the train onto the street, the buildings aren’t silver but brown and red and white and many other colors, and they are lower and less compressed and dirtier than they looked from the windows of the train. You can see people going in and out of them. You can see what sorts of businesses are there. You can see the way the light changes as it touches the various surfaces: stone, wood, brick, glass. I work at the New York Public Library. I am in charge of something: I am turning all the records of the dead in New York City into a vast, illustrated digital archive. Every morning, I walk between the stone lions at the library entrance, ascend the marble staircase, and turn to my chosen labor.
