“This is our first post, the C post,” Aada announces. “Until ten o’clock we will stand here. Then we will stand there. At eleven we will stand on our A post down there. We will wander a bit, we will pace, but this, my friend, is where we are. Then we will get coffee. I suppose that this is your home section, the old master paintings?” I tell her ye

And, indeed, the atmosphere in the galleries was intensely familiar, though for reasons that had nothing to do with plaid skirts or severe nuns. It was the atmosphere of all those months at Tom’s bedside, one of speechless mystery, beauty, and pain.

This was a sacred space, and it came with its own sacred version of time. Djet it was called, the time of the gods and the time of the dead, the time that governs what is complete, unchanging, perfect, and everlasting. Unlike either the circle or the arrow, djet stands apart from nature and her ever-fluctuating processes. It is the time of austerel

“You know,” he tells me, “it really isn’t a bad job. Your feet hurt, but nothing else does.”

When in June of 2008, Tom died, I applied for the most straightforward job I could think of in the most beautiful place I knew. This time, I arrive at the Met with no thought of moving forward. My heart is full, my heart is breaking, and I badly want to stand still awhile.

As a watchman I can use this picture in something like the way it was intended to be used, and for that I am grateful. An artist in the fourteenth century wouldn’t have dreamed that one day there would be art connoisseurs and textbooks dedicated to something called art history. In Bernardo Daddi’s mind the painting must have been a kind of machine

I especially like it when baffled people ask me questions. I like baffled people. I think they are right to stagger around the Met discombobulated, and more educated people are wrong when they take what they see in stride. Baffled people are surprised by things that are, in fact, surprising—that a Picasso is right there for them to breathe on, that

When I spotted her, she was framed by a work more brutal and beautiful and even more truthful than the one I had found. It was painted by a master called Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, a Florentine working in the fourteenth century. Against a featureless gold background, it depicted a young man who was very beautiful but bluntly dead, supported bodily b

The glory of so-called unskilled jobs is that people with a fantastic range of skills and backgrounds work them. White-collar jobs cluster people of similar educations and interests so that most of your coworkers will have somewhat similar talents and minds. A security job doesn’t have this problem.