Sunlight and Shadow First

I started reading In Sunglight and In Shadow by Mark Helprin and boy this is a doozey in terms of thick, thoughtful, emotional writing. The first few are indicative of the whole.

IF YOU WERE a spirit, and could fly and alight as you wished, and time did not bind you, and patience and love were all you knew, then you might rise to enter an open window high above the park, in the New York of almost a lifetime ago, early in November of 1947.

Helprin, Mark - In Sunlight and In Shadow

That's from the prologue, the first few of chapter 1 are even more considerable.

IF A NEW YORK DOORMAN is not contemplative by nature, he becomes so as he stands all day dressed like an Albanian general and doing mostly nothing. What little contact he has with the residents and visitors who pass by is so fleeting it emphasizes the silence and inactivity that is his portion and that he must learn to love. There is an echo to people’s passing, a wake in the air that says more about them than can be said in speech, a fragile signal that doormen learn to read as if everyone who disappears into the turbulence of the city is on a journey to the land of the dead.

Helprin, Mark - In Sunlight and In Shadow