A decidedly spiritual young woman once told me that, if you see the sunrise on a given day, you own that day. I have no idea what she could possibly have meant. Furthermore, I am hardly ever up with the sun. But I thought of her words recently, when I saw it rise, like an angry, ancient god, just beyond the Harlem River. And the circumstances of my seeing it would cause me to believe, only four hours later, that I had come to own the island of Manhattan. I will explain.

It was on one of the hottest days of the year that I got up at 5:25 a.m., was out the door of my Upper East Side apartment by 5:50, and by 6:13 had been dropped off in a taxi at 223rd Street in the Bronx, just on the other side of the bridge that connects Manhattan to the Bronx. From there I walked south all the way to the Staten Island Ferry.

Several days prior to my trip, I had begun planning it as eagerly as an explorer preparing to bushwack his way through the heart of Amazonia. I had decided to walk the entire 13-mile length of the island along Broadway. There was something orderly and practical about this decision, but there was also a poetic suggestiveness to it. Broadway is the grandest and also the oldest avenue in the city, having been cut centuries before the Lenape sold the island to the Dutch. Also, it is the only one that runs the entire length of the Manhattan and that consistently discloses something of interest to the pedestrian.

As I began to walk, it quickly became clear how odd the city seems during a summer’s dawn. The new day does not creep in upon us as in other seasons. Suddenly it is there, in all its plenitude, an accomplished fact. Because the world was now flooded with almost as much light as at noon, it was somewhat disconcerting to see the streets empty and still, except for a few dogwalkers and workers who moved about as though still in their dreams.

Crossing the bridge into Manhattan, I looked out into a cove of the Hudson where a single kayaker plied his way. It was astonishing how closely this scene resembled any of a thousand prospects immortalized in the landscape paintings of such 19th-century masters as Kensett or Cropsey.

The topmost parts of Broadway are green and largely residential places like Inwood Park and Washington Heights. I blush to admit that, although I have lived on the island my entire life, there were parts of it that I was now seeing for the first time. The very process of Manhattan’s development is still visible in the lay of its northern tip. The progress of the city from south to north was such that even today, the top third of the island – the point at which it narrows above 133rd Street – has a far higher proportion of parkland than do the lower two-thirds of the island. It also has far humbler building stock, for the most part made up of four-story town houses and row houses.

About an hour after I started, I arrived at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center on 166th Street and Audubon Terrace at 155th, where for the first time I experienced anything like recognition. But it was only when I reached Harlem at 125th Street and then passed the campuses of Columbia and Barnard that I finally felt I was on native ground. Here in the part of Broadway once known as “The Boulevard,” you saw the dreams of the city planners finally made flesh in the green medians of the avenue itself, and in the beaux-arts palaces that adorned it on either side.

Half an hour after that, I arrived at the Mc-Donald’s at 96th and Broadway, at almost the exact midpoint of the island. I had been planning this stop for weeks. Indeed, one of the things that animated me during the first half of the journey was the knowledge that I had a date with a sausage McMuffin and an order of pancakes saturated in maple syrup. By 8:45, heavily sated, I was ready to embark on the second half of the journey.

From here on in, everything was intimately familiar to me. Countless times have I walked down Upper Broadway to Columbus Circle, from Columbus Circle to Times Square, and from Times Square to Union Square. Countless times have I seen the two-sided Broadway of the Upper West Side narrow into a single lane flanked by the skyscrapers of Midtown, or seen the loft spaces of the garment district and SoHo yield to the high-rises of the financial district. But there was this crucial difference this time: I had always experienced these stretches as though in isolation, rather than as part of a seamless continuum. Indeed, the condition in which most of us experience Manhattan, even if we have lived here our entire lives, recalls the blind men and the elephant. We experience it as a multitude of disassembled parts rather than as a single, continuous, and indivisible whole.

This was the most valuable intuition that I took away from my trek. It enabled me to feel in my bones what previously had felt like only a mental construct: how the whole island fits together. Manhattan is long enough to contain immense variety, but also smaller than it seems: Its genius, like the genius of Central Park, is to conjure among its inhabitants an illusion of immensity through relentless episodic variation. But to take it in all at once, to consume its hugeness in great gulps, is to understand it very differently, to feel that you have finally tamed that apparent immensity, to possess it intellectually for the first time. And this is the sense in which I can now say that I feel as if I own Manhattan, whereas previously I knew it only darkly and imperfectly. Everything, surely, is as it was, but the angle from which I view it has slightly shifted and in that shift is a great and valuable difference.

At 10:45, having made only one more stop at Waverly Place to buy a pint of fresh-squeezed orange juice that I drank as I walked, I arrived at the new Staten Island Ferry Terminal. There I sat for a few minutes in the blissful, air-conditioned vastness before taking the no. 4 train uptown to my apartment.

On the whole, walking the length of Manhattan was so pleasurable that I now intend to make the trek once a year, around the summer solstice. My only regret is that the next journey is nearly a year away.