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Pearl Street
Downtown Manhattan

I work near Wall Street. These are some of the buildings you'll find there. They date from the 1880s. I wonder how many people think of them as they walk by. Most of the ground floors have long been converted into stores. Many times I've eaten pizza in one of them, and each time as I order my slice, I take a few moments and think about the building itself.

We walk about them, ghosts. Only they are permanent.

They aren't too old. Less than a hundred years, but from a different time altogether.

Its not the nostalgia for the past that I want to write about. Its the permanence of thing.

Buildings stay on well after those who toiled on them are gone. Each brick laid passed through the hands of people who once were.

All that remain now are the bricks while the memories of the bricklayers are gone. Each one of us plants bricks as we work. We lay down the foundations of things which have some sort of permanence. Through our actions or our genes, we continue the cycle. And yet we ourselves are ephemeral. To say that we live on through our works is false. We don't live on. Our works do. Immortality isn't achieved through children or art. Our prodigy live on but we don't. We, each one of us, is a bricklayer, forgotten in time, only contributing to other things which have permanence.

Last summer I was visiting my sister in Miami. She had a fashion magazine in which they chronicled the success of a current pop star. In it they talked about the house which this star was having built. It was a new house, but one in which the star was having modeled so that it looked "old." She wanted a new house with new materials which looked old and weather-beaten. I think she missed the point of age.

Old buildings are beautiful. No one would argue that. But I believe that part of their beauty lies in what has gone on around them. Its their connection with the past that enhances their beauty. It adds a flavor to their structure, much like a spice adds to a meal. Take it away and it loses much of what made it special.

I collect things, not so much for what they are but so much more so for what and where they were.

But this isn't where I want to take this. No. There are other things I need to say.

When you walk about lower Manhattan, you'll run into buildings (such as the ones above) with stars on their outer walls. These buildings fascinate me, for the stars on their walls hold them up, and the memories of those who placed them there live on in the walls. Who were they, I ask.

There are places inside each building and land throughout the world where a person one stood or touched and no one has touched it since. In '92 I was in a mountain-town in the Dominican Republic where it was said that Columbus and his men had been. And as I looked around I wondered if out there, in the trees, were there not places once touched and not touched since. I wondered if something lay out there for 500 years, untouched, waiting for me to come by, and by touching it, I would feel connected to that time in the past.

There is no magic in my life. I know that there are no real connections other than the ones in my dreams. But the knowledge that there - against my skin - is an object that has transcended time, that it was once there and is now here makes it feel as if I too have somehow transcended time and am now a part of that past also.

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Chapter Four