Let me tell you something that happened to me here in the city a few years ago, so that I don’t end up talking about religion the entire time, as if such a topic could be of interest to anyone for very long. I was walking across the park one evening, in winter, and didn’t see a single person. Which didn’t indicate to me for certain that no one else was nearby, in the park, in the vicinity that I was in, but did seem to suggest that, if someone was nearby, our paths hadn’t crossed, and we’d never come into sight of one another. Which I found both strange and beguiling. Because outside the park were the usual number of people, and I started seeing them again as soon as I exited out a gate on the other side, even if there was something quiet and muffled and serene about the movements of everyone and everything in the landscape, because of the late hour and the snow that had been falling.