If anyone were to ask me today to provide a physical model of my vanishing and yet inviolable world, I would, embarrassingly enough, be able to furnish an immediate and unequivocal answer: de Chirico’s watchtowers and/or smokestacks—dreary and majestic—his trains emitting white puffs of steam from behind long and impenetrable walls, his ridiculous reclining statues with dislocated breasts and awkward shadows… My atopic sense of place, and perhaps of time as well, finds a palpable expression precisely there, that is, nowhere. But de Chirico’s nowhere is as tangible and concrete as any old here or there, and maybe even more so. It remains squarely somewhere. Thus I felt at home this weekend in New York, at a retrospective exhibition of this unfortunate compatriot of mine. The unexpected and fleeting sensation of warmth associated with rediscovery and homecoming hopefully justifies the urgency with which I have embarked to record it. For any vacillation on this score might indeed reduce me to permanent homelessness.