If New York is beautiful for me, it's because it's a masochistic experience of domination, this walking on the street. If New York is beautiful, these windows and cars and grids, and especially this sensation of walking on the street, at night, looking up -- if this is so, it's perhaps because the grid of the city replicates itself in from the unit of the window, these rectilinear panes on buildings on blocks.

On the street you look up; rectangles are distorted into parallelograms of light, floating in space. Whatever beauty these polygons hold is due to this vertical distance, light formed, and shaped by the architectural semi-opening, me being here, light being there. Private illumination longed for from the public. As you walk you experience the spatial and social stratifications of height, privacy, comfort; replicated thousandfold over the space of the city this experience expands into a pyre, mausoleum, underground network of mausoleums and crypts. You could be there but you aren't. Thus: anything could be there; infinite possibilities both heart-wrenching and tantalizing.

When you go home, you sit in your room and turn on the light, generate your own pane of light. Oblivious of the outside (after all, that's why you went home), the dregs of light you throw out the window fall six stories to hit someone else's eyes, burden someone else's gaze.