JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN

Sketches from an NYC park

‘Back then, pretending to read seemed less effortful than actually reading’

Wednesday. 11:30 a.m. I’m in Madison Square Park, waiting for an artist named Jason Polan. I’m to interview him about his latest project: an attempt to draw every person in New York City. Jason likes sitting in the park, sketching people, and I want to talk to him while watching him work.

11:40 a.m. I wait on a park bench while reading Albert Camus’ The Stranger. It was assigned to me in high school but I’m not sure I ever actually read it. . And with either, one could affect a soulful look when a book title came up and say, while gazing into the middle distance, “an absolute favourite of mine.”

And so I pretended. So well in fact that now I’m uncertain if I ever really did read The Stranger. I mean, it wasn’t until my early thirties that I could admit to myself I’d not read more than a couple pages of Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy (I saw the movie which, I rationalized, was close enough), and I’d not so much as skimmed a single page of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée (I believed myself an expert on nausea and in no need of an additional 200 pages on the subject. All I needed was to think about underdone veal).

12 p.m. When Jason arrives, I put the book aside. He pulls out his pad and shows me some of the candid sketches he’s drawn around the city: James Franco at the museum, Tracy Morgan sitting on a park bench at night. Jason even captured the policemen who stopped to pet Morgan’s dogs.

“I don’t think the cops even knew who he was,” he says.

But the vast majority of people he draws are everyday folk, like the woman feeding her baby in a stroller who sits on the grass beside us. Or the man talking into his phone on the opposite bench.

Before we part, Jason draws me. Visitors to New York count, he says.

“How far along are you in your project,” I ask. “Halfway? Three quarters?” Jason laughs. “About a fraction of a per cent,” he says. Camus’s other famous work, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” comes to mind. Even though Sisyphus must push his rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again, over and over, Camus imagines that Sisyphus must be happy because “the struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart.” Watching Jason draw, it appears as though he is enjoying his absurd struggle, too, and I feel good that I’ve at least helped him get a little closer to his goal, even if his goal is illusory.

1:25 p.m. I remain in the park, continuing toward my less illusory goal of finishing the book. As I read, I find myself recalling certain lines in their entirety: “Paths traced in summer skies could lead as easily to prison as to the sleep of the innocent.”

It occurs to me, with some delight, that I must have indeed read the book!

1:30 p.m. It occurs to me, with some revulsion, that I may have read that line on a takeout bag of Chipotle’s.

3:15 p.m. I finish the book feeling as though I’ve repaid a debt. Now when The Stranger is mentioned, I will have earned the right to my affectations.

“Ah, L’Étranger,” I will say in accented French. “To be fully enjoyed it must be read twice.”