On my way there, I had taken a circuitous route through Morningside Park, getting somewhat confused in its winding paths, which I had forgotten were so drastically vertical. In his 2009 psychogeographic work Twenty Minutes in Manhattan, the late architect and critic Michael Sorkin describes how he and his neighbors “refuse perfect knowledge” of the irregular, un-gridded portion of the West Village where they live. They protect a private forgetfulness “in order to retain the possibility of getting a little bit lost” within their own stomping grounds—one of life’s greatest minor pleasures. The stairways of Morningside Park were not my stomping grounds, yet there I stomped, uphill, resisting the urge to fully enmesh myself with the virtual topography of my phone, refusing perfect knowledge. When I had finally situated myself on Amsterdam Avenue, on the border of Columbia University’s campus, I was hot, kind of turned around, and longing for a cheese sandwich, a prandial quirk acquired from many childhood readings of adventure stories where the characters always seem t…