All the Beauty in the World

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.

We walked through the next several galleries without stopping. If I had been alone, I would have paused to pour over the Mérode Altarpiece and study the Bury St. Edmunds cross.

“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

This is an essential aspect of a work of art: you can’t empty it of its contents and patly move on. It seems to scorn a world where knowing a few bullet points about a subject is counted the least bit impressive.

Steps away from me, a visitor holds a camera to his eye to take a photograph of a photograph of Georgia’s unblinking face. In the moment it feels like a surreal thing to witness, but again I understand why it’s happening. Behind that apparatus, the gentleman feels that he has a surer grip on reality, as it can be difficult to fully experience what

Monet, I realize, has painted that aspect of the world that can’t be domesticated by vision—what Emerson called the “flash and sparkle” of it, in this case a million dappled reflections rocking and melting in the waves. It is a kind of beauty that the old masters seldom could fit into their symbolic schemes, a beauty more chaotic and aflame than ou

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

Georgia O’Keeffe here, as a work of art, has virtues the rest of us appear to lack. She is still. She is permanent. There’s a frame around her, putting space between her sacred beauty (an older meaning of the word sacred is “set apart”) and the profane, mundane world. I think that sometimes we need permission to stop and adore, and a work of art gr

a bare concrete corridor where signs warn: Yield to Art in Transit.