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Reflecting The City
Glimpses Into The Other Side
3 min readJan 5, 2022
“Ah come on, these streams of light are not so subtle. All along the ditch, signs of life in sinking puddles!”
— Sarah Harmer
“I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed down and said, ‘Look.’ I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, ‘Look again,’ which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I can’t explain it. He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to see. And once you’ve had that experience, you see differently.” — James Baldwin
