My office is just a couple of blocks away from the UN. So I get to see, from time to time, colorful spectacles.
Colorful, I say (I wanted to say wonderful, but often the spectacles are protests against horrors) because in the years since Giuliani (or “since 9/11”) the city has seemed grayer to me than I ever imagined it to be before, except around the UN where people often wear the colors of another idea of life.
Some wear those colors with a special determination, a conviction, and an urgency to convince. However unclear, to me at least, what it could be that anyone could possibly convince me of. And yet, in every one of those moments in which I’ve made eye contact—or my camera did, looking at all the pictures again a few months later—I do feel a certain conviction.
And only then, months later, do I actually say to myself what might seem most obvious: why are the boats moving backwards?
* * *
May 14, 2014: New York, New York.
